Karen and Darren Visit!

Having Karen and Darren come to visit was probably one of the most fun weekends Nick and I have had since we moved. The weather was great and it was the first true fall weather we had down here. By that I mean it was the first day where it was enjoyable to be outside and you could actually breath air and not water!

On Friday, we went to one of our favorite restaurants on Lake Norman called The Rusty Rudder. Think great, fried everything with ridiculously sugary drinks on the water. The view is amazing and the only thing more fun that the place itself is the people watching you experience. We had entirely too much food and the table was just as full as we were ;)

Saturday morning Karen tried barre for the first time with me at my favorite barre studio in Meyers Park. Of course, we had to pop over to the little boutiques across the street afterwards. We ended up finding the most amazing make up and beauty store, Woo!, that I can actually be in because it's completely unscented. This is a major win for someone who cannot be by the make up counters in the mall without getting an instant migraine. I went back a few days later for a makeup consultation thanks to a wonderful surprise by Karen.

The afternoon was spent relaxing, chatting, and of course, more shopping with Karen! We then came home to get ourselves together for our amazing dinner at Fork! restaurant. Fork! is built into an old house. The house blends in so well with the rest of the street that if you didn't know what you were looking for, you would probably pass it before you saw the actual sign for the restaurant. Now, we've had some great food since we moved down here, but Fork! is by far my favorite spot so far. It's amazing New York/DC standard food with the Charlotte price tag. Again, great drinks, entirely too much food, and even the table felt full by the end of the meal.

Of course, all weekends with family and friends visiting includes food and good times, but Karen and Darren's visit was especially exciting because they were the first family members to come visit who had never been to Charlotte before. It was so great to show them around and show them our new place and neighborhood. Even better was when they loved it as much as we do. It's a great feeling! As we continue to get visitors, I'm looking forward to seeing their reactions to our new digs and hopefully for a quick return to visit again.

Best,

Becky

Twenty Days

It's been twenty days since my last post. TWENTY. That's a long time for someone who made it a goal to write 2-3 times a week when I started this. However, when I started this, I had not yet started school and did not have any kind of realistic expectations about how my life would be in the first month of school

It is now October. For first year teachers, well, teachers in general, this means that we are moving out of the crazy period that is the beginning of the year. Now, this doesn't mean I have made it "out of the woods" yet, but it does mean that I am about two weeks away from the end of the first quarter. With that comes parent-teacher conferences (yikes!) and first quarter grades. 

There is a lot that has happened in the last twenty days. For one, Nick and I went back to DC for our engagement photos (to be shared later!) Aunt Karen and Uncle Darren came to Charlotte, and Lisa and Brooke paid us a visit as well! It was a fun twenty days, but within that was a lot of stress and struggle.

After one particularly long day at school, I was trying to relax with a bath when I had this huge panic that on top of all of the other things in life I felt behind on, I had not posted on the blog in over a week. A WEEK. How would all of my readers (ok, seriously, it's just my family and closest friends) ever know what was going on in my life? How would I look back this time next year and remember what was going on? It sounds just as ridiculous as it was. I was sending myself into a tizzy over something that was really not a big deal.

That was one of the many times that I had to put on the brakes in the last two weeks. With the first month of school being, well, the first month of school, and being a first year teacher, I had a lot of "breaking point" moments. I am not a crier at all, but there was a lot of crying in the last twenty days. There was a lot of doubting if what I was doing was the right thing. A lot of doubting that I was a good teacher. A lot of doubting that I was making the right choices for my students, myself, and for me and Nick.

Then I realized I was doing just fine. It was only in the past week, but I really stopped and realized that I am doing the best I can, my kids are learning, Nick and I are happy, and that I am truly inhibiting myself in my excess worry. We're talking a lot of lost sleep, wasted hours worrying, and manic mornings and days that turned into exhaustion in the afternoon. Is it worth all of the stress over the things I can't control. Definitely not. Am I still constantly learning and focusing on what I can control? Absolutely. 

There was a lot that happened in the last twenty days. A lot of it was great, most of it was clouded by unnecessary stress. No one actually cares that I didn't post in the last twenty days. At least not the people who actually read this blog ;) In the next twenty, there will be a lot less stress and a lot more deliberate focus on what is happening now. Stay with me, the posts will come more consistently again soon.

Best,

Becky