Brightwood Lights

Caleb graduated from Goizueta Business School at Emory University this week! He completed the One-Year Accelerated Masters in Business Administration, with a concentration in Real Estate and Finance.

He’s not the type to brag, so I will do so for him. Caleb has won award upon award during his one year at Emory, including being named to the Dean’s List, being named a Dean’s Scholar, being inducted into the Beta Gamma Sigma business honors society, and being voted as the one-year student who best exemplifies integrity by his peers. I’m proud of him for all that he has achieved, but the peer “integrity” award is especially sweet. I know that I am married to a man who embodies hard work, honesty, and humility, but it’s flattering to know that his friends and classmates see those same traits in him, too.

He also entered two Real Estate “case competitions” (yes, nerdy- don’t worry– I’ve teased him plenty). One was a competition among Emory students, and Caleb’s team won. The second was a state-wide competition, with teams from Georgia Tech, UGA, Georgia State, and Emory. Again, Caleb’s team won.

Besides accumulating these academic accolades, Caleb has managed to spend plenty of quality time with his kids, build lifelong friendships with his classmates, be a devoted husband, exercise (relatively) consistently, and network with just about every living GBS alum in the entire world.

The future for us is still up in the air. We are in the process of making some tough decisions, trying to balance career and family considerations as we try to discern what next steps will be most honoring to God. We’ll be sure to report back once those decisions are made!

Somehow, I seem to have a knack for getting myself us into these situations in which we are baking random items late into the night.

Take Good Friday, for example. At about 10:15 PM, we had gotten the kids to bed, had run a last minute errand, and were close to getting to bed. I had a running date with a friend scheduled for 7:30 AM, and our family was planning on going to the church Easter egg hunt at 11:00 AM. Before finishing cleaning up the kitchen and living room, I decided to look up directions to the egg hunt. While verifying the address of the hunt on the church website, I noticed that we were supposed to “bring a picnic dish to share.” Shoot. We had NOT, in fact, prepared a dish.

Thinking quickly, I assessed our kitchen inventory and decided to get rid of a few of the bananas sitting in our fruit bowl. So, at about 10:35 PM, I asked Caleb if he’d like to make some banana bread with me. Of course he didn’t, but being the kind soul that he is, he agreed to help anyway. Around 10:45, we discovered that we were nearly out of flour, so he ran to the grocery store (which closes at 11:00) to save the dough day. By the time we popped the pans into the oven around 11:20 and saw that they needed to bake for “50-60 minutes,” the ridiculousness of staying up so late for some banana bread had us both laughing hard.

However. . . I don’t seem to learn from these lessons! Tonight I again found myself in a too-bizarre-to-explain-why scenario of making angel food cake and whipped cream while my three hungry children circled around me. Caleb is out of town, so the appeal of emergency baking is even less (if that is possible!). . . and yet it happened anyway. The baking did not last late into the night, but the clean up (and, admittedly, the blogging about it) has kept me past my bedtime once again.

Anyway, the next time you have the urge for a midnight snack, come on over. You never quite know what we might be pulling out of the oven!