For those of you who follow our life happenings through this medium (insert blanket apology for my relative infrequency of posts to such effect) I figured I'd send a quick update about my latest personal endeavor. I've decided that while I'm taking a time out from my full-time career to be with Drew, I will go back to school and get my doctorate (much to the smug satisfaction of my sister who apparently never believed that I would seriously not want one as I claimed in my adolescence).

In early September I'm starting a program at Pepperdine University to get my Educational Doctorate in Organizational Leadership. The program is sort of a hybridized business degree/research thesis. It will put me first through two years of courses that focus on leadership and management as well as MBA-style business theory and then I will work on my dissertation which will probably be another two years(-ish). The idea is to provide an opportunity to pursue personal interests in the fields of education/non-profit business while also helping me develop a skill set that would enable me to increase my managerial capabilities and develop my as yet relatively non-existent understanding of the business and policy side of such things.(Or at least this is what I have interpreted that I would like it to do for me.) If you want to check out more specifics on the program you can click here to go to the school's website.

If you weren't quite sure you interpreted correctly, this DOES in fact mean that both Andy and I will be overlapping in grad school for the next year and a half or so. (Please cross any spare digits you might have on our behalf.) We're both very excited and fortunately Drew didn't get a vote, so there's no dissent amongst the ranks quite yet... hopefully it will stay that way.

And since I got around to typing something, the quick and dirty Drew update: he is continuing to shock us with his language development and is pluralizing nouns consistently and conjugating verbs in the present tense (-ing). He repeats anything and everything you say (so watch out!) and has begun to string words together into coherent mini-sentences (ice. more. peeeeeeeese.)

He's also running all over the place and climbing like a fearless little lemur. The other day I left him alone in the dining room to go to the bathroom for approximately 38 seconds, and came back to find him standing up in the middle of the dining room table. Apparently this didn't teach me my lesson so the next day I let him climb onto the piano bench to play some music while I was looking up directions on the computer. With my back turned I noticed that the music had gotten substantially louder- I turned around to find that this was because he was standing up on the keyboard stomping around with his feet. He was quite pleased with himself. Needless to say I had a slightly different response.