Thursday Ramblings

*GREAT NEWS: Brandon got an A in his Civil Procedure class!! This was his hardest class yet and his professor told him it would probably be the hardest class he would ever take in law school. He came home from the final and said that he honestly expected to get a C, maybe a B if he was lucky. But yesterday afternoon, he came up to me with the strangest look on his face and said he had gotten his first grade back. I could tell from the look that it was either going to be really good or really bad so I waited in suspense until he told me it was an A and that he was "floored." I have only seen him this shocked once or twice in his entire life- he actually had to sit down and then kept shaking his head saying "I honestly can't believe it. It must be a mistake." Then he said it was a bigger shock to him than when the doctor first told us we were expecting twins! Well, I guess all that studying paid off! I am SO proud of him! And it gets even better! He consistently scored well above the average on all of his papers in his Legal Writing class and even got the highest grade several times! So we were expecting him to get an A in that class as long as his final paper was good and guess what... he got it! So far those are the only 2 grades he's gotten back, but what a great end to his first and hardest year of law school!

*More great news: We were approved for in-state tuition! We had to wait until this past March to apply for it because we had to live in Virginia for over a year to qualify for it. But his first application was denied and we were so worried that we would have to pay for out-of-state tuition which would double the cost! That would have meant double the student loans and double the debt he'd graduate with. But the Lord was so good to us and the board granted Brandon in-state tuition after we appealed! What a relief!

*Brandon's summer schedule has been wonderful so far! Between his internship and his part-time job, he's working full-time during the day but only has class 2 nights a week. And they've been cancelled all last week so he was here every night!! I almost forgot what it was like having him around so much, but I'm loving it! Another plus is that he takes the bus to his internship so I get the car 2 days a week and he leaves his computer here too so I can skype with my family during the day! So I will get to see lots of Violet during the coming weeks! Lucky me!

*We got free Chick-Fil-A for dinner last night! They are having a promotion this week and giving away free spicy chicken sandwiches to anybody who signs up online. So for about $5 for two fries and a diet soda, we fed our family dinner and I didn't have to cook or clean anything! What a treat!

*It has been incredibly hot and humid this week, well above average for this time of year so we've been staying indoors as much as possible. But our pool opened this week and I picked up our passes yesterday so we should be able to stay cool by swimming this summer. The boys are just getting old enough for me to walk with them to the pool (which is just across the parking lot, but since they don't like to hold hands and aren't very good at going up and down stairs and have a tendency to try to escape , it hasn't always been possible to cross the parking lot by ourselves). I haven't attempted walking to the pool yet, but we did walk out of the building to the car for the first time ever yesterday! Usually I have to load them and all the gear into the stroller and try to maneuver the double stroller through 4 very heavy, automatically-closing doors. It's a 10-15 minute process to get from our apartment to the car and I often get stuck in the door frame because the stroller is too wide. Not fun. Not fun at all. So I've been anxiously looking forward to the day when they could finally (safely) walk with me out to the car. And yesterday's experiment went pretty well, just one incident of Cullen plopping himself down in protest but we were nearly on the sidewalk by that point and no cars were around so I just let go of Jack for a second and picked Cullen up and carried him the rest of the way. Oh to be free from that dreaded double stroller! It's so close I can taste it!

*My Wednesday morning small group has started up again which is a huge blessing to me! I love having at least one morning out with adults to look forward to each week. It's so encouraging to hear from other wives and moms who have similar struggles and situations as me. We're going to be reading through Instruments in the Redeemers Hands by Paul Tripp and I'm really looking forward to it. And we have a couple new members joining so we're going to be starting up a childcare rotation. This is going to be wonderful because this past year, we have had 6 children under the age of 3 running around during our study. As you can imagine, this can be pretty distracting so I'm really looking forward to a peaceful fellowship time.

The boys are starting to wake up from their nap, so that's all for now. I will try to post some new pictures of them later though!