A Crazy Day

To start this off, when Grace was born four years ago I took two weeks off from work and we didn't leave the house for two weeks. We were so overwhelmed it was unbelievable.

With Ella I am still taking about two weeks off, but because she was born a bit early I had a couple things I had to do this weekend and we have a four year old. So it's definitely not the same.
1. On Thursday, the day we came home from the hospital, I coached Grace's first soccer game.
2. On Saturday I left for an hour to go to go to a wedding rehearsal.

Then the crazy day came on Sunday.
1. I preached in Elevation. OK this is a huge deal for me because usually I completely obsess about preaching in there. I usually prep for hours and try to have it finished by Wednesday so I can practice it out loud and then make refinements that day. Then I practice it once on Thursday, Friday, and again early Sunday morning. That wasn't going to happen this week so I studied ahead of time, wrote the whole talk on Monday morning, and turned in all my PowerPoint and Bulletin information by Monday afternoon. Then I didn't think about the talk until Friday. I looked at it on Friday and sent a couple PowerPoint edits in to Nicole and Trevor (they make everything look good). Then I practiced it once on Saturday and about half of it on Sunday morning. Then I preached the sermon while having "newborn exhaustion" from lack of sleep and it was OK. I don't think it was great. I was a bit slow in my mind. There was a cool live art piece being made on stage too. It was awesome, but it's always weird when everyone is looking at the art and not at you. The service ended up being really great even if I wasn't great. That's my prayer every week. It goes like this, "Lord, if I suck today may it bring you glory and if I'm awesome today may it bring you glory." I seriously pray that every time I preach.
2. I went home and crashed for a couple hours.
3. I performed the wedding ceremony for Brock Buoniconti and Deanna Herring. It went really well. I thought there was a good blend of humor, fun, and a sense of sacredness to it. So I got home from that at about 8:00pm and hung out with Bea and Ella while Gracie was sleeping.

So it was definitely a different sort of first few days after Ella was born compared to Gracie. But now I am really off for the rest of this whole week. 7 days of no responsibilities and just being together as a family. I love it.