Hello again, long lost blog. I promise to work harder at keeping you updated, especially now that I have marital and new city adventures to share.

With that out of the way…here goes the most succinct update I can come up with!!

Married in December…fab! Everything was perfect. St. Lucia honeymoon…hello paradise. Spoiled rotten, confused as to why I have to now pay for things and do boring things like go through drive thrus. Christmas in Memphis with R’s family…after the Christmas Eve service that I cried through, and the first 30 minutes of Christmas morning that I cried through, it was great! Moved to Northern VA (NOVA to the locals, apparently)…a long drive…a long first 2 weeks…fun but not easy. New jobs, new locations, new potential friends…new everything.

Which comes to the title of my post…”it takes work”. Moving has taken a lot of work. Not just physical work like packing or unpacking or getting a new apartment set up, but a lot of emotional work. We moved 850 (I like to round up to 1000 for emphasis’ sake) miles away from our friends and R’s family. (we were VERY lucky to be moving about 20 minutes from my parents). But I miss my friends. I miss driving a mile down the road to see my best friend and hug her kids. I miss lunches with friends and coffees with friends and making a quick run to my favorite local coffee shop or cheap mexican restaurant. It’s taking a lot of work to figure out ways to get around up here, to find new hangouts, to make new friends, to work 2 people on a one-car schedule. But R and I are working hard on those things. We’ve found a church, we’ve found a grocery store, we are figuring out public transportation, and we’re on the search for a cheap mexican restaurant.

I also had a big realization today…so many people told us “marriage is great, but it takes work”, and I wondered all along, What kind of work? Like do we have to constantly communicate about our marriage? Do we have to work by letting other people help and influence us? What does “it takes work” actually mean? And today, as I rode the metro home from downtown DC, I had an epiphany. It means doing things like sticking around for an extra hour and a half to have drinks with your husband before he has a business dinner, even if it means you have to go to the grocery store at 8pm. It means R has to ride the bus even if it’s inconvenient sometimes so that I don’t have to get out in the cold in my pajamas after that late night grocery store trip and 9pm microwave burrito. It means making the time to sit at the dinner table and pray before our meal every night. It means going the extra mile and cooking his favorite meal every now and then even when I’m exhausted from keeping someone else’s house and kids all day. And it means that on those nights, even when he’s exhausted from working all day too, that he might load the dishwasher.

Life takes work. It’s fun a lot of the time, but you have to work to get there. And as I drive the 40 minutes it takes to commute to work tomorrow and R rides the hour long public transportation it takes to commute to his work, I know we will both be spending time thanking God for this journey He has set us on, and we will be praying that He continues to give us the strength, stamina, energy, and positivity that it takes to get through the especially trying days of transition that we are dealing with right now.

On that serious note, I will also be working harder to keep the blog updated! Now I’m going to go back to my news show about the State Dinner that happened 20 minutes away from me at the White House tonight and try to stop wondering why I didn’t know about it beforehand so that I could stalk all the celebrities that were there. So lame. I will work harder at that next time!