Monday, November 21, 2016

It's been awhile

Hello Thanksgiving--

It's been a strange fall. At the beginning of August, we were planning to move the kids and me to my grandparents. Matt was going to work at a hospital in Bloomington and we would look for a place to live.

At the beginning of August, we got word that my grandma had been diagnosed with Alzheimers.

Our plans changed then-- because we didn't want to add our chaos to my grandparent's suddenly much more stressful life. My grandma is still in the early stages, so it's not like we were going into an impossible situation. But knowing that this is a difficult thing for them to deal with even without the stress of our family, we chose not to add our family to the mix.

Instead, we delayed our move, put our house on the market mid-August and then moved in mid-September to my in-law's house in Ohio.

We prayed and waited and prayed and waited. The kids are going to school here. Matt found a job in a hospital north of Columbus. He started work at the beginning of October, staying with his brothers while I stayed in southern Ohio with the kids.

Right after Halloween, we got and accepted an offer on the house. We will close on it at the beginning of December. Just last week we found a rental in the city where Matt is working. The rental has enough bedrooms for us, but it's small. The yard is really small. However, it's only 4 blocks from a park and a big cemetery. It's close enough to the hospital that Matt can walk to work. I can see the school yard from the house. It will be available mid-December, which is good because Matt starts night shifts on Dec 1.

I feel like our life is moving forward. It's slow progress. I was hoping we'd find a house to buy, a farm. But we didn't and while we could have stayed at my in-laws, it's hard on everyone (most especially Matt who commutes an hour each way to work).  When we found the rental we were the second in line. While we weren't thrille about the size, we have been praying to know and accept Heavenly Father's will. We asked Him to be the ones to get the house if we were supposed to be there. And the next day we got word that the first applicants had backed out and the house was ours if we wanted it. So we felt that was an answer to prayer.

In the meantime, the next month looks busy. The kids and I will finish out school here before Christmas, then we'll move. Every time Matt goes up for work, he will take another trailer load of stuff. We will be in our place a few days before Christmas.

I still feel angry sometimes. Depressed, sometimes. But I'm okay. I'm grateful for a place to live. I'm grateful I experience fall again. I know Heavenly Father has blessed our family with the sale of our house and also the stability of our health while we've been switching insurances and doctors. Matt's new job has great insurance and that is a huge blessing. We are being blessed, even if the blessings we want now aren't coming exactly now. Patience is a virtue that I don't have, but I'm working on it.

Monday, August 1, 2016

Making choices

All summer long Matt and I have been trying to plan out what will happen next. He will not return to Georgia Southern to try a third time. There are many questions but the two most pressing ones were:

1. How are we going to afford a mortgage payment, insurance, monthly bills, and significant loan payments?

2. How are we going to get out of debt as quickly as possible?


After a few months of trying to crunch numbers and determine if we could actually live with the new, large expense of loan repayment, we sat down in mid-July and realized that we couldn't. Matt's job is a good job and he makes a good living-- but it comes at the expense of our family time. Matt works Tues-Sat, is on call most nights, and answers phone calls and emails from patients constantly. He drives 100-150 miles a day visiting patients and even if he is home by 3pm, he is charting and filling out paperwork almost all evening. Even if he has a hospital job, he would have to work a lot to make ends meet. He'd have to work so much that he'd see us just a day a week.

So we had to make the hard call that we couldn't live on his salary with all of our bills. We have decided to sell the house and move. We will be moving mid-to-late September to Indiana to live with my grandparents. We will put our house on the market before we move and put our things in storage. Hopefully our house sells quickly, but if not, my grandparents have offered their house as long as necessary.

It is a very difficult thing to ask your grandparents if you can live with them because you don't have enough money to live on your own. There were so many tears as we pondered and prayed, and even during the phone call where I asked. There have been tears since.

I don't know what Heavenly Father has in store for us, but our hearts are struggling still. 

My girls






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