Sunday, January 18, 2009

A Celebration Dinner

We went out to dinner as a family on Saturday night to celebrate the new job. I was only joking about the good news/bad news thing. We will all miss being together so much and it has been a great year, but we are so happy and grateful that Rich has a new job!!! So we decided to celebrate!
The waitress took this picture. You might notice that my teenagers don't look all that excited to have our family picture taken in IHOP. They might have refused to be in the picture except we had her take it before we had eaten so they didn't really have much choice.
I snuck in a few more pictures--Katie and Anna eating ice; Dad, Anna and Katie; Daniel looking clever--notice all the little children were gone by this point on a bathroom run! The waitress did comment on how well-behaved our children were, but that was also before we had eaten.

So Rich and I were talking the other night about the many blessings that have come this past year because of or related to Rich's job loss. There have been more than I can list here (and probably more than you want to read!) We thought of three more.

1) We learned about not counseling the Lord. Last summer I spent my time declaring that we needed this job or that and announcing that things had to happen this way or that. I would have been pretty discouraged if I would have known ahead of time it would be almost a year before Rich got a job. And yet things have turned out absolutely better than we could have planned. The Lord knew better than we did what was best, and we are now better at saying "Thy will be done."

2) We reigned in our spending. Our life is simpler, we are happy with less, and we have been more accountable this year than ever about our money.

3) We experienced the impatient child syndrome. The impatient child tugs on the mom's shirt saying, "I want this, I want this, I want this, now!" The mom says, "I'm getting there. Please wait." The child is unhappy and frustrated until he gets distracted by something or decides to wait patiently. Suddenly he is more cheerful and when the mom gets to what he wanted, he is happily playing someplace else. Time passes a lot faster when we are happily, patiently waiting for the Father to answer our prayers. Easy to say, much harder to do, but very much a true principle.

6 comments:

Rich said...

Looks like Khristine failed to mention that was our 2nd night at IHOP in as many as nights. We ended up there for our Friday night date because the line at Olive Gardens was too long and IHOP's was well...not! Anyway we thought we would just do a democratic vote on where we went. Since the only place that was nominated by the kids was IHOP, the vote was a little anti-climatic. But we did have a different waitress, so no pride was lost ;-).

Allyson White said...

The interior decor of IHOP actually looks pretty nice in the pictures. I'm sure they appreciated the repeat customers. Now that you mention it, our family hasn't been in awhile (sans Andrew) and it sounds like a fun idea--I'm now craving pancakes!

Our Family said...

It's the new IHOP by Costco, so don't go to the old one because I am not sure about the decor over there. We are doing our best to help the economy!

Jeanette said...

Congratulations on Rich's new job! Woo hoo!! Looks like a fun way to celebrate.

Amy Beatty said...

Wow, what a party. I read in my Readers Digest- that a rich man is a man that can live without. You just have to love our fathers plan for us. It is always better than our own. It is hard though, I think being a mom or just a woman( I hate that word, I still feel like a girl)gives us this planning bug. All last year we were planning our moved back to CA and were so set and happy about it, but could not find a job or house. Low and behold we get a job in Uath, before the job offer it would of seemed like a nightmare to stay here. But, oh boy- we feel so blessed that we didn't call the shots on this one. I am so happy that everything is working out so well for you guys! Lot of love xoxox

Our Family said...

Wow, Amy! So that is the story about Matt's job? I wondered how you ended up in Utah. I wish we could see you more, but I am so glad you have such a good job there!