SEPTEMBER we received confirmation that YWAM wouldn't be bringing us on the team this year. The next day Luke went out with a his resumes and had an instant interview with one of the best restaurants in Eau Claire. He was hired there very shortly after. He tried to get hired at a coffee shop as well but those all fell through so once again he walked into a fine dining place in Eau Claire and came out with a job. As August had wrapped up we were still living with Luke's sister Lani but once we found we were going to be in Eau Claire for awhile we moved in with Luke's Mom and Step-Dad, bringing Barley to my Mom's house, for the foreseeable future. We didn't have the income steady yet to rent our own place. We applied for health care and began to have prenatal care at a local health clinic. It was a quick transition from traveling and music and missionary bases to early work mornings and living with family but we were grateful for the grace period while we got our feet under us -- as they say.
OCTOBER was the first time that Luke and I celebrated my birthday together. We spent the day at a friends' wedding and actually played the worship set for their ceremony which was a beautiful experience. We spent the night at a dear friend's house -- the same brother in the Lord who preached the Gospel at our wedding -- and the next morning we cleaned out our storage unit in Minneapolis, with our brother's from the Spanish congregation at our church in Eau Claire, and unloaded it into a closet it my mother-in-love's house. For the whole month it was pretty much the hiddenness of working and living and growing a child. We got to see Baby O's sweet little body for the first time at the end of the month. It confirmed the sense we had had even before we got pregnant, that the first babe would be a girl.
NOVEMBER held some surprises. Friends from church who were living in Israel at the time needed someone to rent their house in Eau Claire and contacted us about it. We jumped on it, moving in with Barley and all our belongings as soon as we could. Only a few days after one of my best friends came to visit us for a weekend -- it would be the last time I saw her before she left on the World Race. She showered me with treats and quality time and heart-to-hearts as only she can. The sweetness continued when my childhood best friend came to visit another night, just because, and we went out for coffee and chatted about babies late into the night. Luke was working early mornings and late nights and I so enjoyed having company not only to fill the silence but also to help me stay awake while waiting for Luke to get off of work. We had only lived at our friends' house for a week or two before we learned that they were possibly going to be coming home much sooner than expected. We kept ourselves from unpacking once more, but not from hosting. We had Thanksgiving dinner at our place and hosted our friends' Dad, who was staying at the house with us while we were there, one of his sons, and he and Luke went downtown to invite the homeless to dinner as well but all declined the offer.
DECEMBER we found out that our friends were for sure coming home early. We quickly put our bags together, pushed our boxes together in a corner of their basement and went back to Lani's house. Waiting for confirmation on a house that we had applied to rent we didn't expect to be there more than a few days but it fell through, as several had before it. Out of the blue my Dad approached us about a vacant unit in one of the rental's he managed and we worked out the details to move in before January 1st. Meanwhile we had reapplied for health care for the third time and I was becoming unsure that we would even have it before the baby came. Luke kept faith though and we continued with the paperwork. We celebrated Christmas with all sides of our family and surprised them all with Baby O's gender and name: Naomi Caitlin -- meaning "pleasant purity". We moved all of our belongings, one last time, into the apartment in the final days of December and, for the first time since we moved out of our apartment in Milwaukee at the end of May, had our own place.
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