Updates

So I don't think I've ever gone this long without posting.  We've had a lot of upheaval over the past few months, and I've either been too busy or too tired to blog, or not sure how to put into words everything that has been going on.

In October my husband lost his job of 10 years when a new CEO decided to "clean house".  I was not entirely surprised.  I'd been having impressions for months that my husband needed to get out of there and seek for a new opportunity that would make him happier.  I'd also had a rather strange premonition just six weeks or so before unemployment hit that I was in a tiny boat in the middle of a vast ocean, and a massive black storm was approaching, but somehow I knew that God would calm and guide me through that storm, and that everything would be alright.  It was one of those things that I tried to toss out of my mind, hoping it was just a weird moment and didn't really mean anything, but the feelings that came with it told me otherwise.  Once he actually lost his job, I felt very calm and peaceful and also had feelings that everything would be OK, this was just what needed to happen in order for a better opportunity to be made available.  My husband was so busy and stressed and overworked, I don't think he would have found the time and energy for job searching had he still been working.  However, another mini-miracle--just a few weeks before he lost his job, an opening became available with another organization in our city.  Even though it was a situation where he would have been walking into a huge mess, and even as he told me, "I don't know why I'm applying for this, I honestly don't know if I'd even take it if it were offered," he decided to apply.  Although he didn't get that job, it meant that when he did become unemployed, his resume was current and ready to go.  He'd had to go into his own file at work to get some of the information to update that resume.  If he'd already been gone, we would not have had access to that information, and it would have been a frustrating and drawn-out effort to get it.

I felt so strangely peaceful the whole time we were unemployed.  It should have been devastating.  All my life this was one trial I thought would be just so horribly hard, that I could never survive.  Although I had moments of fear and doubt, overall I was amazed to see how everything came together and how we were taken care of financially and emotionally.  Christmas time was an amazing time as we had so many offers of help and anonymous knocks on the door leaving behind money, food, and gifts for our family.

Just before Christmas, my husband had an interview in a town not too far from us for a job he really, really wanted.  It seemed like the perfect job for us for many reasons.  He even went as far as asking family and friends to pray for him to do well in the interview.  Well, he didn't get that job, which was as disappointing start to our Christmas week.  However, the very day of that interview, he was contacted about interviewing for a job in a small town in Pennsylvania, a job he didn't even remember applying for (he sent out about 150 resumes over the course of four months), in a town he had no clue where it was.  We had to look it up on google after the phone call!

One phone and one skype interview later, we were invited to fly to Pennsylvania for a site-visit.  Initially I was not at all excited about this.  After the near-to-our-home interview, I was all psyched up about the benefits of staying in our state and living near our families.  I had never wanted to go to a small town anywhere, and now it was a small town 2500 miles from home.  But after the two interviews, I began to get more excited about the possibilities it might bring.  I have always wanted to live "back East", and this location was close to so many places to visit.  So with high hopes and much excitement, we boarded a plane for Pennsylvania in early January.   The interviews went well, and my husband was excited about the job itself.  But it was so far from home!  Flying all day to get there and then all day to get back brought home just how far away it really was, and we (mostly I) started to get really scared and anxious.  My feelings were so complicated that I did not even want to get an answer from God about this one.  I delegated all the decision-making to my husband because I just did not even want to think about it.  He felt strongly that it was right and had had several confirmations along the way.  Once he/we made the decision, I felt peaceful and have felt that way ever since.  One interesting this is that prior to this job coming into the picture, my husband had been having several contacts and phone interviews most every week.  Since he got the first contact about this job, there have been no other contacts whatsoever.  Not one single phone interview since before Christmas.  Nothing, period.  As he described it, things were "eerily silent" on the job front.  It was almost like God's way of shining neon lights around the Pennsylvania job, saying "This is it.  This is THE option you are supposed to pursue.  There is nothing else that you should look at."

So now we are in the midst of preparing for a cross-country move.  My husband left almost two weeks ago and started this past week.  He drove a U-haul with quite a bit of our stuff in it to put in storage, and we put more stuff in storage here in our current town.  I have been painting the house and making other arrangements for repairs and updates so it can hopefully be on the market soon.  Getting a house ready to sell, especially one you've lived in for 10 years, is a huge undertaking, and it's even more of a huge undertaking when you are attempting to homeschool several children at the same time.  We've had to take time off from schooling to focus on house preparation.  It's been a major disruption to our year, which is hard to accept for a "planner" mom like me who likes structure and order and everything going just the way I imagined it would.   Even having a surprise new baby in the middle of our first homeschool year was not as disruptive as this move has been.  We are back in school now, and that has also been hard, because when I'm schooling, it's pretty much all I can do on a given day.  So not much house prep has taken place the past week.

I am planning to stay here in Utah until about the end of May.  We are moving from a state with almost no regulations for homeschoolers to a state that is one of the top three in the nation for strict and plentiful homeschool requirements.  I knew that by the time we actually got to PA, it would probably be at least mid April if not later, and it is not worth jumping through all their hoops for 4-6 weeks of school.

I am excited about all the cool places to visit in the East.  We will be four hours from Washington, DC, four hours from Philadelphia, four hours from New York City, two hours from Pittsburgh, 1.5 hours from the Great Lakes (Lake Erie), 4-5 hours from Buffalo and Niagara Falls, I'm guessing eight or so hours from Boston... the list goes on and on.  Travel is going to be a high priority.  Ironically, last summer when we went on our Pacific Northwest vacation and saw the Oregon Coast and Pacific Ocean, I said emphatically that in two years' time I wanted to plan another trip to see the Atlantic Ocean, specifically to go to Boston, Cape Cod, and the coast of Maine.  At the time it seemed like a pipe dream, too far away to ever be practical.  But here we are, only a year later, and it's now a very realistic probability that we could go to those very places rather easily next summer!

I am sad about leaving my awesome extended family and my wonderful Waldorf homeschooling group.  I have made some great friends there whom I will miss greatly.  I am sad about leaving our church congregation where we have worshiped among friends for the past 10 years.  Last Sunday I was released as the president of the Primary (our church's organization for children, which I headed up for the past 2.5 years), and I've been feeling quite blue about that all week.  I had three talented women helping me who have become dear friends, and I will miss them terribly as well.

I am terribly behind on posting what we've been doing in school, so sometime soon there will have to be a post on Dallin's winter botany block (we are waiting for the dang sweet potato we "planted" in water to sprout, it's been 2.5 months, do you think it's time to give up hope?) and Sariah's last language arts block of fairy tales.  Right now Dallin is learning about Egypt and Sariah is focusing on math.  These current blocks have been barely thrown together as I am so busy and overwhelmed that outside prep has been almost nil.   But I know that this too shall pass.

Anyway, that's the gist of my life the past few months!