Anderson Updates

Quick check in on the status of the Anderson family.

-Simon turned 1 years (year?) old.
-Dan interviewed for graduate school
-Stephanie sprained her ankle walking across the kitchen floor

Ok let's get into this. Every once in awhile we decide to make a u-turn in life. We are at a u-turn moment right now. Dan has been planning to go to graduate school for many years. He went through nursing school so he could become a psychiatric nurse practitioner. He has been working (killing it is more accurate) as a nurse for almost a year. He gets recognition a lot because he is really good at what he does.

He has been gearing up for graduate school since he graduated last May. He was so excited to get an interview. After the interview, both of us had quite the shock. We both felt really stressed and unsettled about him going. WHAT THE?

During his interview, he was told that most students have a difficult time keeping their full time jobs and they need to drop to part time. He really felt confident he could keep working and go to school but the more we talked about things, we came to the conclusion that we feel our family will be happier if he can at least have the option to work part time rather than enter a stressful program with the pressure to work full time, do a doctorate program full time, and be elder's quorum president, and try to squeeze in family time.

We aren't strangers to stress, but as we find our own path, we try to avoid it more and more when possible. We talked about the pros and cons of waiting and ultimately decided to wait for a couple more years. During that time, we will pay off a significant amount of debt and then he can easily bump down to part time at work when he needs to and start school when the timing is a little better.

I would love to have another baby sooner than later so for the next 6 months I really need to find the fire within to work on my own health and stress is the biggest obstacle for me when it comes to losing weight. We decided it would be better to focus as a family on saving money, paying off debt, getting healthy, and ENJOYING this season of life rather than racing as fast as we can toward more stress. We have some great goals and have a lot of fun things planned for this summer and the fall and our little house just keeps coming together a little bit at a time.

I'm really excited to enjoy another couple of years as a family and even though we are putting off school for awhile, we feel richly blessed and feel that we have everything we need right now. We have really learned how to be content and be happy with what we have. I think a big lure for school right away was the salary of a DNP, but honestly most of the time people double their income, their lifestyle increases too and once we realized how happy we are where we are at, we became OK with waiting a little longer.

I look forward to focusing more on motherhood, being a wife, family history (trying to find the REAL parents of a 4th generation grandfather....) and strengthening my own faith. These are things that bring true joy. I deleted my facebook account today so that I wouldn't be as distracted, so for now I will try to post a little more on our blog.