(Most pictures in this post are from Sunday afternoon Carter Blood Care’s appreciation event for blood donors. Josh is the blood donor – the rest of us (our family and the Rodriguezes) were able to benefit from Josh’s donation. It was a great event – with food, face painting, rock climbing, bounce houses, playgrounds, pictures, food, and lots more.)

If you’ve been wondering about the question in the post’s title (whether you’re a close friend/family member or just acquaintance) and can’t remember the exact the date we’ve said . . . it’s because we haven’t. When people ask about Josh’s Ph.D completion date, we really can’t give an absolute answer because we don’t really know. We have goals and hopes, but many different components play into Josh’s progress.

1.)    The nature of Josh’s research. Josh’s research is focusing on sentence structure in the Jarai language. How does he get his data for analysis? By spending time elicitating data from Jarai speakers. There are two main consultants: Hendy (who lives about 25 minutes from our home) and Lap (who lives 6 hours from our home and communicates with Josh via Skype). This type of data gathering is slow. Hendy can only meet with Josh once a week for a maximum of 3 hours and often has to cancel. Lap meets with Josh twice a week for about 2 hours a session. Gathering data from live speakers complicates research. It’s not like many seminary dissertations where all the resources are already in print in English and/or Greek and Hebrew. It’s not like Josh can lock himself away and work until he’s read everything out there. He’s dependent on the data he gets from his consultants and is at the “mercy” of their schedules. Also, it sometimes feels like the data is “changing.” In March Josh presented a paper on a particular function word in Jarai. He made specific conclusions about the word. Since then he’s been preparing the paper to submit for publication. As he gathers more data, sometimes he’ll come back from a session with information that confirms his theory and other times his entire session has contradicted his theory. This makes for very slow progress.

2.)    Other Department Expectations. Besides finishing his degree, the linguistic department also expects Josh to participate in and present papers at conferences. Josh has presented 10 talks, 2 of which were poster sessions. These take time to prepare, time to present, and are not always directly related to his dissertation research.

3.)    Other Work Responsibilities. Of course, Josh also has to work for money. Over the past 5 years, he’s done web work, worked for adoption agencies, and worked for the Linguistics Department as a teacher, lab monitor, web designer/manager, and research assistant. (The man in the picture – Nathan – is one of Josh’s former students and now fellow Ph.D. student and co-worker. Nathan joined us for dinner on Monday night and as soon as he walked in Becca said “would you like to read me a book, please?”)

4.)    Wife: Stay-at-Home-Mom.  Though Josh tells me that having a wife has made him more productive in his responsibilities, having a wife is also another aspect of dissertation completion scheduling. Josh is very careful to spend time with me and does not allow his other responsibilities to diminish our relationship. He’s also allowed me to be a stay-at-home-mom. Before Becca, I had a good salary as an elementary school music teacher. Now Josh lets (and wants) me stay at home, which means he has to work for money. When I do work (12 music lessons a week), Josh has to stay home and watch Becca for 9 of those lessons – more time. He has to come home early on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so I can go teach lessons.

5.)    Children. I am very blessed to have a husband who has allowed us to grow our family (i.e. with children) before he completes his Ph.D.  Let’s face it – children take time. Having a preemie took a lot of extra time.  Josh doesn’t want to be an absent father – the Daddy who always had to work on his research. Josh is very good about spending time with Becca . . . but it does take time. I’m particularly grateful that Josh didn’t want to wait to have Becca or Little Brother until after his degree.

There are a few of the reasons it’s hard to pin down the exact date of Josh’s completion. The major reason is the first, but all the rest contribute to dissertation progress. The current goal for completion is Spring 2013, but we’ll see what the Lord has in store for us in the next year. We are confidant Josh will reach the top in good time (like he did climbing the rock wall on Sunday afternoon).

Little Brother is now over 34 weeks! We have less than 6 weeks left (sounds soon!). I came down with a nasty cold last weekend and have decided that it should be against the law for mommies of toddlers and pregnant women to get sick. I told Becca I was sick and she said: “but you’re still happy.” I told her I was happy that she is my little girl.