Here We Are

A lot has changed in the last few months.  On my last post, we had accepted an offer on our house.  Then we started looking for a house to rent in Riverside. Three weeks later, the offer on our house fell through.  That was extremely discouraging to us.  However, God knows what is best for us.  Another offer came through and it was an even better offer.  It turned out, we didn't have to do a short sell after all, saving a big credit hit.  The house closed on June 22nd.

When we got the second offer, we once again started looking for a house to rent.  However, we decided to look in Menifee, instead of in Riverside.  Menifee is south of Riverside, and a city of 80,000 people instead of 300,000.   At first, I wasn't sure about moving further south, but I like the feel of the small town.  I also like that there is a lot of nature around us, albeit, much different nature than in Portland.

James and I looked at a LOT of houses in Menifee.  It was helpful when James' parents were able to watch Gibson and Tabitha one day while we had appointments to look at six houses.  And we finally found a house to rent.  We moved out of our temporary apartment on June 9th and then spent that night at my parent's house in Orange County.  The next day we went to Knott's Berry Farm for James' work party - pictures of that to come.  Early Monday morning, James flew up to Portland to oversee the packing of our household while the kids and I stayed at my parents' house.

When James flew back, we spent the next four nights "camping out" in our new house.  The kids slept on "nests" made out of blankets and James and I slept on inflatable mattresses.  I was soooo glad to see the moving truck park in front of our house on Monday, June 18th.  The first thing they pulled out of the truck was the kids frog-shaped sand box.  The kids were jumping up and down screeching, "They brought our sand box!!!  Thank you thank you thank you!"  Tabi came running in to where I was feeding Zeke, "Mom!  They brought our sand box from out old house!  I'm going to tell him thank you!"  She ran up to the lead mover and said, "Thank you for bringing me my sand box!"  He got quite a kick out of that.  Then I took the kids to Target for four hours to keep them out of the way of the movers.  That was an interesting experience, to say the least.

James' parents and sister came out on Tuesday to help us unpack.  They blasted through a bunch of boxes.  I was very thankful for the help!  Now, two weeks later, we only have a few more boxes to unpack.  I'm finally starting to feel like I'm coming out of the chaos and into an organized home.

One thing about living with very little material goods is that you learn that you can do without a lot of the stuff you've collected.  There are about six large boxes "yard sale" stuff in our living room, and I'm sure that I'll find more as I purge our stuff.  I've always heard the phrase, "If you don't love it, or use it, get rid of it."  So, that is exactly what I'm doing.  I've decided to use the things that I love (no sense in keeping them if I'm not going to actually put them to use, like my china), and get rid of the things I don't love, and especially the things I don't use.  Evidently, we've got a lot of stuff we don't love or use.

We've invited our families to celebrate Independence Day with us at our new house.  While it won't be totally set up, I'm excited to host most of our family at our house for the first time in nine years!

Now that things are slowing down, I'm able to go through our pictures and will start posting soon.  I'm going to date the posts when the pictures were actually taken, so I'll link to them so they don't get lost in the dredges of the blog, because I'll be posting current pics as well.