Living a beautifully blessed life: Valentine's Day and Our Baby Bucket List :)

I love making plans. Some people would over analyze that and tell me I need to be content in my current circumstances and enjoy where I am at. When it comes down to it though, I do, but also realize that enjoying every moment to the fullest often requires planning.

So, I came across a link to this blog post on a friend's facebook page a few weeks ago and was fascinated. Right now, the idea of becoming a parent pretty much scares the bejjeezes out of me. However, the more I thought and prayed about it, found that that is because I don't want to spend our "fun, care free" days before kids in PT school and now with DJ studying/working like crazy. I concluded that unless we intentionally have a list of things we would like to complete before kiddos came, those things probably wouldn't get done.

I know the Lord has a lot of work to do in both of our hearts to prepare us for that new chapter, but as of right now, we both have a little less than two years left in school. Ideally we would finish that up, I would work for about a year, make a dent in our student loans, and then we could re-evaluate things from there.

As a slight disclaimer, we are both well aware that the Lord's plans may be VERY different from ours and from experience have seen that they are probably SO much better than we could even imagine right now. Sooo our "plans" are very tentative and we are both very willing and available to let the Lord use us differently. When I dream about our life 5 years from now, this is how I picture it, and really just wanted to blog about it because I suspect that 5 years from now we will look back and laugh at my excited, yet simplistic ramblings :)

So, the week or so before Valentine's Day I asked DJ if he would be open to talking about this on our special Chipotle dinner date on the 14th. I honestly expected him to freak out and give me more push back than he did, but he was just as excited as I was, which made this a really fun time and memory.

Of course, I brought him some of my ideas, he evaluated them all, from his financially motivated standpoint of course, and we settled on some of the best ones that we agreed could somehow or another fit into our simple little budget and coincide with our goal of eliminating/significantly reducing our student loan debt.

Sooooo, without further ado, here is what we settled on:

**Since then "Get a king size bed" has been added because, to quote my husband "I know you're going to bring home another puppy one of these days" ...oh, he knows me too well!

Okay, I know, this list is slightly me centered, but most of it applies to both of us :)

I know this whole post seems kind of sad, like we are looking at life with kids as the end. We see it as anything but that. If anything, we are looking at this list as a fun way to prepare out hearts for this next chapter that we hope will come.

While we are serious about the list and hope to accomplish most of it, it has become a joke around our apartment "just add it to the list" :P Overall, we had fun thinking about it and both were encouraged and drawn closer to each other realizing we were both on the same page.

I hope everyone had a Happy Valentine's Day!