A long over-due exhale

I feel like I have been holding my breath for a month. 

Maybe two. 

So I appreciate being here today more than ever.  It's a different Easter Sunday for me, but Bird and I are soaking up the 60 degrees-with-a-breeze and doing our best to acknowledge (read: bark at) the birds who are making great effort to tell us that they were here first.  But don't for one second think it's all relaxation bliss here at the lake with a 9 week old puppy.  So far, she has sat in an ant bed, swallowed chewed up pine cones, dug through a pile of pine needles, chewed on a lizard, run from a barking pitt bull next door only to knock over my coffee and break her grandma's mug causing me to curse on Easter Sunday. 

Exhale.

Devin Michael and I have had our share of crazy in the past, oh, month or so.  We paced around for weeks, the way Bird does when she just can't stand to be inside anymore, trying to figure out where we would live when our lease was over at the end of March. 

A small, meant-to-be temporary apartment (so temporary that I resisted decorating for as long as I could), gave us 3 crazy, blessed, and really really fun years, but it was time to move on.  We needed space to stretch our legs at the same time without poking each others eye out.  If you ever want to test your marriage, try to cook a meal together in a 3x3 kitchen.  We needed a better patio for my beloved tomato plant to have a decent chance this year (priorities).  We needed a bigger room as our bicycle collection grew.  And we waited...and waited...and prayed...and prayed for the right place to show up.

And a week before we would be pushed out of our home, we still had nowhere new to land.  When you're right there in that moment where you resort to figuring out how to fit your things into a grocery cart and thinking you might be shaving for the last time in a long time, you know God is testing you.  And, sigh, He does have perfect timing, doesn't He?  The perfect place arrived just in time, and in His true form, God over-delivered.  It's more than we could have ever wanted, and we are so thankful.

So thankful that we decided to make moving day as hard as possible by picking up our puppy in the same weekend.  But if I'm being honest here, I know that God sent her to us- the last of her litter, exactly what we had wanted, but she lived 10 hours from us.  Only by His perfect timing were the breeders heading to Waco for the weekend (3 hours from us) where they offered to meet us. 

And then there were 3.