Beauty For Ashes

James came in while I was laying down recovering from a little stomach virus (more about that later) this afternoon to tell me some great news. He had received an official e-mail from the testing agency letting him know that he PASSED!!! We are thrilled and very proud of him! That was a super hard test. The practice test asked questions like, "What is the second interval in the overtone series?" Umm...yeah. So glad it wasn't me taking that test! I did help James look up a lot of terminology and learned a lot that way, but there is no way I could have passed it. He also had to listen to different recordings or look at different musical scores and name the probable composer, different types of chords, etc. Hard, hard, hard! The fact that he could pass this stuff, let alone enjoys studying for it, just goes to show he is definitely in the right field!

The last two years have held all sorts of struggles, pain, and refining by fire as James and I have embarked upon the path of figuring out what career he needed to pursue. He joined the Marines after high school as a drummer in the Marine band in order to pay for college. After four years in the Marines, he attended a Christian college and majored in Christian counseling. He had prayed and felt the Lord leading him in that direction. However, after he graduated, he realized that wasn't the career field he wanted to pursue. He tried starting his own life coaching business, but that didn't end up working out. So, eventually, we started looking at the music field. James is a VERY accomplished drummer and has a huge passion for all things music. It has taken quite a while and lots of frustration for all the pieces to even begin falling in place.

Isaiah 61 says:
The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me....
to provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the LORD
for the display of his splendor." (Isaiah 61:1,3 NIV)

God really has been taking our ashes, our dead works and ways of thinking, and trading them for the beauty of His plan through this whole ordeal. Passing this test is the last thing James needed to be able to do before applying for assistant band director and/or percussion instructor positions. (Apparently North Texas band is VERY different than the West Texas bands I grew up with...many of the schools here have their own full time percussion instructor, not just an assistant band director who oversees percussion along with another section or two.) Now we are just praying for a job for him - preferably a percussion instructor position in the area - and would appreciate your prayers as well.

On a totally different topic, we have found a lady who watches children at her house that isn't too far away. She will be watching Ian for us one day a week on our day off so that we can actually get some of the projects done that have been sitting for months (like our horrendously disheveled room!). We really like the lady and all the children she watches are two and under, so they are very close to Ian's age. Ian went for the first time this past Monday and came down with a stomach virus that one of the one year old twins had the week before. Wednesday morning he woke up at 4:30, having turned 180 in his crib. He was kicking the headboard of his crib - it was kind of funny at the time...I hadn't ever seen him do that before.

(This is actually a re-enactment and he wasn't quite in the kicking mood that he had been in before.)

An hour later he started throwing up - poor baby! He kept going back to sleep, so as soon as I heard him cry, I would run in there because I knew he was sick. I'd pick him up, let him throw up on me (I tried to get it on a towel, but he kept turning his head), clean him up, put him back to bed, clean me up, and go back to bed myself. I never understood letting your child throw up on you before this!! Fortunately, it was mostly milky/watery and very much the normal spit up consistency that he has blurped on me countless times over the last nine months. About nine I called the doctor's office and they told me to try and give him an ounce of Pedialyte every hour. He didn't keep that down the first time, so the second hour we tried just half an ounce. Success! He actually did pretty good, all things considered. He'd be up for about forty-five minutes and then go back to bed for forty-five minutes throughout the day. Fortunately, the virus was short lived and he was feeling well enough to go with Daddy to take his test and visit with Gramma K.

I got the virus on Friday morning. Not fun! BUT - I am making progress. I didn't freak out over throwing up or have horrible flashbacks to the pregnancy. And it was over within a matter of hours and I could keep ginger ale and crackers down. I'm sharing all these fun gory details just to show how awesome God is. His timing really is impeccable. If Ian or I had been sick on Thursday, we would not have been able to go with James to the test. Some of the information I quizzed James on during the car ride ended up being on the test and he got those answers right because of us being along. Ian didn't nurse a second time during the night due to being sick, which got us on a good schedule for working on him sleeping through the night the rest of this week. I was sick on both my and James' day off, so neither of us lost hours at work. I also lost a pound, which I am working hard to keep off! I'll take any jump start on my new back-to-pre-pregnancy weight loss plan that I can get. So yes, in the midst of all the yuckiness, there is the ever present blessing of beauty for ashes.