The pregnancy insomnia is real. All of my friends keep telling me that this is preparing me to be up all night with my baby, but I truly wouldn’t mind sleeping all night until he arrives! I meant to sit down and journal yesterday, but I got carried away with to do lists. Since I can’t sleep, I figured that this was the easiest way to journal in the dark. So many things are happening all at once that I feel bound to forget some of them if I don’t write them down.

For months, we have been looking at September and October on our calendars and shaking our heads. We saw the immense number of things all crashing into one another and I truly didn’t know how things would come together or what this season would look like. It was a bit intimidating and exhilarating all at once.

In 2016, we decided to stay in East Lansing when Xavier got accepted to a PhD program at MSU. We knew we would be here for the five years of his program, so we bought a house and settled in. It is truly hard to put into words just how special and insane these last five years have been. How many moments of joy and pain have been shared in this little house on Magnolia Ave. Xavier wrote and edited all summer and defended his PhD a few days before his birthday last month. I spent the summer making list after list after list of things that needed to get done before we could sell our house. Thanks to our amazing family and friends, we finished up house projects and put our house up for sale right at the end of September. (For those asking, I truly can’t remember the title of Xav’s dissertation or thesis… it is like 20 words long. I know his program was in Computational Math, but you should ask him for more details if you’re interested. All I know is that he is crazy smart).

I’ve said it before, but it is worth saying again… selling and attempting to buy a house while 9 months pregnant is a bad idea. The emotional roller-coaster and drama is a bit much. Thankfully, we have the sweetest realtor ever who is helping us on both sides of the process and has been SO gracious throughout all of the ups and downs. If you’re looking for an awesome human to be your realtor, contact Jessica Smeak! We are planning to wait for a few weeks after baby boy arrives to move, but our basement is quickly filling up with packed boxes as my nesting gets wildly out of control and we might have to move before then just so we can start using our stuff again hahaha.

Professor X, aka Dr. Brumwell, (aka Xav, since he doesn’t care about titles), started his job in Ann Arbor yesterday and wow… I am so proud of him. We started dating at the end of his freshman year at MSU and I was thinking the other day about how, up until this point, I’ve only ever known him as a student. Moving on from that phase of life seems unreal and yet, it is the culmination of what he has been working towards for almost a decade! We walked around campus on Sunday and I thought about all the memories we have at MSU… our first walk together when we were “just friends”, our first date, getting engaged, family bike rides, long runs, football, basketball and volleyball games, early morning drop offs and late night pick ups, Fresh Thyme dates and playing tennis. Sometimes you are in the middle of a season and it feels like it will last forever, and then one day, just like that, it ends.

We are still waiting for a lot of conclusions and there are still so many waves of life crashing together. We haven’t found our next house or closed on our current house yet and the timing of how our family will change is still a mystery as we wait for baby boy’s arrival and girly’s return to her home. There are moments, usually in the middle of the night, that I get overwhelmed by the chaos and feel the changes so deeply. But when I stop and think about how faithful God has been throughout it all and how momentary life is, everything starts to regain perspective.

To all of our friends who have helped and are helping us with all these processes, THANK YOU!! We are so blessed and thankful for our community. Moving towards Ann Arbor will be an adjustment, but wow am I grateful that we get to stay in Michigan <3

Next step, meeting baby boy!