It's been a while!

Hello sweet friends!
I suppose when I started a blog, fully intending to faithfully update friends and family regularly, I seriously underestimated how stinking fast life can be sometimes!  So stinking fast.

My blog has officially missed...ummm...a year?  So really quick - we've had a great year!  Josh rocked the medical school thing.  He went to a lot of classes, took a number of exams, read countless amounts of books and papers...I'm sure he could tell you better, but I think he learned a lot!  He has now started his 'clerkships,' which basically means that rather than sitting in class now, he is in the hospital every day getting to scrub in on, observe, and assist with a lot of cool things.  It has been really awesome to watch him blossom into these clinical duties.  You wouldn't believe how excited he is about learning some of this stuff.  I'm still working for one of Vanderbilt's childcare centers. I go in phases, working mostly with infants, then mostly with toddlers, then dabbling with preschool.  I truly am all over the place at the center, but I absolutely love the kids and the families and am honored to get to be such a big part of these kids' lives.  Here are some highlights from the last year!

One of our favorite things about living in Nashville is getting to host some amazing visitors.  Here is Josh with our favorite Little Man.  He spent a few days with us in May and we can't wait for him to come back!

After Josh successfully passed (nailed) his last class for the first year of medical school, we treated ourselves to an amazing week in the Bahamas courtesy of Carnival.  It was a much needed week of rest and ocean air!

Another visitor from another favorite man!  Daddy and Mimi came to see us (me) for his birthday in September!  I got to take him to see Vanderbilt football play Ole Miss.  At least he got to see one good team play. 

Vanderbilt football has become one of Josh and I's favorite pastimes.  We went to every home game last season, and we even got to drive to Birmingham to see them win their bowl game last January.  Anchor Down!

But the real reason I've made my way back to my blog is because I have a couple of announcements to share with you.  (Don't get too excited, we are not pregnant.  While Josh has had the honor of delivering a number of babies in the last two months...we don't have one one the way!)

First, I wanted to share with you a huge accomplishment of Josh's!  As many of you know, Josh has spent countless hours over the last five or six years in science research.  The goal in almost any kind of science research is to make some kind of progress worthy of publishing in a scientific journal.  Ideally, you'll do research worthy of publishing in a prominent scientific journal.  Hooray for Josh, a paper has been published in Nature Communication from his research at the University of North Carolina!  The paper describes the research they did on a cancer cell marker that possibly enables resistance to current cancer therapies.  For those if you interested in science, or wanting to see if you even understand the words, here is his paper!  You can also access the paper online.

And second, we've also decided to go ahead and start a masters program for myself.  Tomorrow I start a two year Masters of Science in Early Childhood Education: Administration, Management, and Leadership.  In an attempt to make this as noninvasive on our time, marriage, and medical school commitments, I've chosen an entirely online program through Walden University.  The hope is this will give me something to do while Josh studies, but still enable me to work full time and take care of all the wifely duties I've already adopted.  The core of my classes will focus on early childhood development and learning, with my specialization looking at things like budgeting and leading a team.  Sounds useful, right?  I'm actually really excited to start the program and hoping to learn some things that will be useful now, but also learn things that will help me in the future as I make my way back into children's ministry.

Needless to say, if the blog falls off again after today, you know why!

Thanks for reading!