It's March? Already? Are you sure?

Has anyone seen February? It seemed to disappear for me and I can't find it anywhere! It turns out that I only had ONE blog post in the month of February and I looked back at my archives and it turns out that's the least in a month, ever! No wonder people have been checking in to see if I'm still alive and well!

Well, yes. I am alive and doing quite well! I'm not on my own computer at the moment, so you won't get any pictures with this post, but I can still share a little bit about my last month.

I'm here in Appleton, and getting settled into life around here. Brent and I are figuring out our "normal routine" and then find that it changes often! :) Isn't that true for most people?

I've been off of orientation at work for about a week and it's going well so far. I like my unit, the patients we have here, and the people I work with. I think it will be a good fit. I get to work with both adult and pediatric patients, so I'm thankful that I didn't have to give up either population. I'm working 11pm-7am three shifts a week. I don't have my work days all in a row, so that means my sleep/schedule is a bit messed up because I go back and forth a lot either sleeping at night or during the day. But, the bonus is that I get to have my evenings free to hang out with Brent, so that's obviously a huge blessing!

February was filled with a lot of appointments -for something really fun! I'm going to wait with posting any more about it until things are more finalized, but hopefully you'll get to read about it soon!

February was also filled with lots of wedding planning, as you might imagine. This has been a little stressful at times, but overall I'm still enjoying it. I will admit, though, I can understand why people elope! :) I think things are going much better for me now that we have most of the main stuff taken care of -which mostly involved making sure that the people we wanted for stuff were free on our date and now reserved for us. Then, I can take each item individually and work on making specific decisions as they come up.

The other harder part of wedding planning has been that I've been basically doing it all alone here in Appleton. Don't get me wrong, Brent's been great and super helpful, but as one friend put it, I've been doing it without "feminine input". That's so true! He'll listen to anything I want to talk about, but I'm not sure he has a strong opinion about this shade of red or that one.... :)

Just this week I've been having a couple of separate email conversations with friends about different topics, and at the bottoms of those emails I wrote "I wish I were having this conversation with you while sitting around my dining room table!" It's so true! I am a person who thinks best while processing aloud, and at this point a lot of our wedding planning is happening by email.

I think I'll really like it here in Appleton, and feel like I'm starting to find my niche. In February we were invited over to one of Brent's co-workers home and I really enjoy him, his wife and their kids. I'm looking forward to more time spent together. I also got together with one of Brent's friends that I had been Facebook friends with and it turns out we have a lot in common, and a lot of fun together! We've also been spending time with Brent's family, and his friends around here. Two of his groomsmen are friends from here and I really enjoy both of them and look forward to times we can get together with them. Slowly but surely the friendships are coming!

It was really hard for a while, to be in a new town, with a new job, a new apartment, a new church, and even a relatively new relationship, and not have really anything familiar like my family, my friends, or my church family around. But, after I realized that those are all the major stressors in life and I was experiencing them all at once, I was able to let go of a lot of that stress and just understand that that's the way it is for now. I can do a pretty good job of making myself feel a certain way! And the truth is, I know that things like friendships take time, and I can see down the road to when I will have close friends around here, so I can just spend this time enjoying life in the process.

So, that got to be a super long post. Sorry about that! For those of you who stuck with it, thanks! :) I guess the length is to make up for the lack of posts in February!

After Brent's done with school on Friday we're heading to the Twin Cities for the weekend for David's SECOND birthday party. He'll be TWO already... Can you believe it? Watch for some fun pictures from our time there!