The Great Northern Adventure
Whew. What a crazy, wild ride it's been the past three weeks! Thank you for bearing with me, dear Reader, and not giving up on me. At least, I hope you haven't given up on me!This post is just a little catch-up on our adventure the past few weeks as we've moved our family across the country from the realm of Southern Hospitality to the Great Northern Tundra... or something like that. Next week we have some fun things going on over here, so make sure you check back for those. Included will be a survey about Black Friday preferences, and I'm also participating in a Grateful for Books Blogging Tour, and I'll let you know a bit more about where I'm at with Yorien's Hand (not as far as I'd hoped to be... but don't despair just yet!)(If you're a good enough detective to have found my personal blog, this is just mostly a repeat of what I've been posting over there this week, but with less pictures)For now, let me just sort of give you a glimpse into our version of crazy:I want to start back at the beginning a bit, and just... take a minute to praise the Lord that He is in control of all the details instead of me.
As soon as we knew that an offer from Cray might be imminent, and that we would most likely be accepting it, I started praying about the timing of things. A friend of Derek's had already accepted a position with them and was starting in early October. The speed of that worried me. We had a wedding in Illinois to attend on Oct. 24, Fall Festival at our church on Oct. 31, Leiana had dance classes at New Life Camp through the middle of November... and there was LAMBS which had just started up, a Christmas vacation planned out to Washington at the end of December... in my own head, it seemed like a great idea for this job to be a "start at the beginning of the new year" sort of thing.
However, instead of praying for that, I remember standing in my kitchen, getting off the phone with Derek, and earnestly praying, "Lord, please time this all out perfectly, in YOUR timing... and help me be okay with whatever it is."
Can I just even. How can I express the perfection with which this has all worked out?
It was NOT my timing. Not even close. November 2nd was practically the exact opposite of how I wanted things to time out.
However, as we started thinking about it, we realized a few things. 1. Derek had 9 days of vacation still owed to him by Lenovo... so he could make his last day "technically" November 2nd, while being DONE on Oct. 20... which was also Leiana's birthday, and the day that the packers were coming to pack up our house.
2. We could make it to the wedding without being rushed AND have an entire week in Wisconsin as a family before Derek had to start his new job.
Yes, we were going to miss a few things I hadn't wanted to miss out on... but in the long run, we decided that ten years from now, a fall festival wasn't going to matter as much as being a family throughout the transition.
So... October 10, we had our birthday/fall festival/farewell party. Which I posted about earlier, but just to reiterate, it was awesome and fun and so many people showed up and we felt very loved.October 21st, the loaders put the boxes on the truck and drove away with all our worldly possessions and we said goodbye to our home.
We also got to go to the AWANA ice cream social spectacular sundae night for our last night there.
Thursday morning, October 22nd, we got in the car around 6am and drove to Ohio... where we got to spend the night with Derek's cousin and his family. Their kids and ours get along very well, and we just love them tons. That was the longest leg of the journey, and we ended up hanging out with them until almost noon on Friday because the kids were having so much fun.Friday, Oct. 23rd found us driving the remaining 5 hours to Illinois where practically my entire family on my mom's side gathered at the Hampton in Illinois for the wedding. We totally took over the place, and it was so. much. fun!The wedding itself was beautiful and fun. The kiddos enjoyed getting dressed up, though Brant was done with it once the music part was over.Afterwards, we grabbed an opportunity to get a family picture and let the kiddos run around in the church yard (I apologize for the blurriness of any pictures... but keep in mind that my children had been cooped up in a car for 2 days and a hotel room for 2 days... none of them were interested in standing still for adorable perfectly posed pictures... so I got adorable blurry, motion-filled pictures instead)
