WHAT YEAR IS IT?!

    Yes, I'm still alive.  Yes, we moved, again.  Yes, I am still awesome.  Yeah, I didn't know that was possible either.

    So the move thing.  For Rittman Relo number 8 (Exton, West Chester, West Chester, West Chester, Gilbertsville, Lake in the Hills, Las Vegas & Irvine) we dropped everything we owned (literally gave away all of my furniture except my kitchen table, my dining room table, chairs and buffet, one desk, Charlotte's crib and a glider) and moved from our 3400 square foot home in Vegas to a 1380 square foot home in Irvine, California.  Our kids all share a room (no I'm not crazy) and we are paying $1000 a month more for it.

     We've also never been happier.

     There were a million different reasons for this move.  First and foremost, it gave us opportunities to give our children an education we never though possible.  Julia had been struggling in school and the tutor we hired told us she was brilliant (we knew this) and bored, so her grades were suffering and she was getting into trouble.  She's been in her new school for two weeks now and her math skills are already blowing me away and she loves school again.  

      We had planned on moving anyways.  After a lot of prayer and consideration, Mike left his job at Siemens Medical and went to work for a competing company.  The day he turned in his notice was surreal; he's been with the company since August of 2004 and to walk away like that took courage and for that I'm proud of him.

     I love my new little house.  We are renting right now, which is nice to not have to worry.  We have a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, three bedrooms, a closet under the stairs that the kids have taken over and a tiny little yard with a lime tree for the dog.  Julia's school is across the street and each day I walk her to school and then skip across the street back home.  

   You guys, I live by the ocean.  I am 15 minutes from the ocean and I cry each time I see it.  Disneyland is twenty minutes away.  We will be getting passes as soon as we can.  Even if I didn't have kids, I'd still get passes because, hey, Disneyland.  

     I have so much to say about things.  I have so many stories to tell now and I feel so much lighter than I used to.  Things have changed.  I've gone through a lot of changes myself (no not THOSE kind of changes) and am excited to see who we start to become.  This move will be one step away from our final permanent move.  Our next one will hopefully be our last until Mike and I are empty nesters and preparing to go on a mission.

     Until that point, I'm going to make a once a week post my goal.  Things are kind of chaos right now still (I don't have a couch, I'm sitting on the floor with my desktop computer) and I do have some confessions to make regarding what's been going on in our home.  I've been struggling between weighing the balance of my child's privacy and the fact that I feel that I should be open about my struggles with what's been going on since I've been feeling so very alone through it all.  I'll touch on that next week.

     Anyways, I'm back, I'm planning on writing again and I'm a *shudder* Californian now.