Life is returning to normal

Apparently I didn't take any pictures this week, but there is this one, single one. I made bagel bread and some fresh wheat bread yesterday. First time in a few months that I've baked bread. This signals that I'm getting into my groove again. Life is normalizing and I'm slowly checking off the hundred things you have to do when you move, so that is good. There's still more to do, but life is coming back together, and that's good. 

Happy birthday to us!

Spencer and I celebrated our birthdays yesterday and it was lovely. We had a party for him with our cousins on Saturday and yesterday we went to a really cool park and did a fun hike, played with some friends, and a great new friend of mine brought us dinner. Bill and I were chatting and this is the third fourth time since we got married that a major life event happened just weeks or days near my birthday, and it definitely makes it hard to do some huge celebration, but we did the best we could. Twice we've moved across the country right before it, once Spencer was born on my birthday, and once I had a kidney stone the week of my anniversary and birthday. It just seems to be the season for big things in our family.

We've had a great week. We've already made good new friends. People are so nice.

 A friend gave Chloe and Genevieve some dressups, including this UW outfit. Chloe loves it, the traitor. Ha!

 We had a Monster's University themed party and did a mini Scare Games. It was entertaining.

 A baby in a bucket!

 We went to this cool park yesterday at a nearby state park that is just like our park back in Pendleton, SC. It was awesome.

 And then we hiked down to Lake Washington, and it was a great hike and beautiful views. My kids so wanted to get in the water and i was like dude, it's 40 degrees! They didn't care, lol.

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We made it

It's been another ten days and everything has fallen into place so beautifully. Last I wrote we were hanging out in Utah with family, enjoying that but also itching to find a house and get the ball rolling to get on to Seattle. Well, we did it! I felt so blessed through the whole process, so I want to write some of the things that went so right for us through this process.

This was perhaps the worst time of year to move as far as getting a house goes. Businesses were closed for the holidays, there weren't but a handful of decent houses to rent even being advertised. We scoured Zillow and Realtor.com for days looking for something and were so disappointed with the options. They all included a super long commute in to downtown Seattle for Bill, or they were really old and not well kept up, or just way too expensive for our current budget. I found a couple options and sent my wonderful brother and sister-in-law over to check them out, and lo and behold, the very next morning the house we ultimately got popped up on the market. It's only nine miles from Bill's work, six miles from our family, seven miles from the temple, just across Lake Washington from downtown Seattle, with good schools. We put an application in sight unseen so we could get the ball rolling and make sure we grabbed it, as we were concernd there would be competition. The application process dragged on for like five days since it was over New Years, and we just worried the entire time. But then suddenly on January 2nd I got an email that our application had been approved and it was like the heavens had opened for us. It was glorious. We left the very next day and drove up to Yakima, only to be stopped the next morning by Snoqualmie Pass being closed by weather and accidents. But we found an alternative route and made it here later that day. We're all moved in now, the kids are in school, Bill is at work, our house is mostly unpacked, and I'm still just marveling at how it all worked out.

Not a month ago we were more stressed than I've ever been. Bill was interviewing for jobs, which was going great. He was getting multiple offers. That is a huge blessing. He interviews well and everyone loved him. But then we got the offers and they were just not very good. We couldn't afford to live on them and they were in the southeast, super far away from our family. Then this Seattle option came through and it felt like such a wildcard. My friend from grad school hooked us up with a friend of his that worked up here to get Bill an interview at MKA. No one even knew each other, but that's networking for you. It was awesome. We got the offer, it all worked out, and we moved. It was a total rush.

So blessing #1. There wasn't an ounce of bad weather the entire three days we travelled from South Carolina to Utah. It snowed six inches the next afternoon in Herriman and was snowy our entire time there.

Blessing #2: it snowed and my kids got to play in it all they wanted. We haven't had any real snow beyond an inch or two in all the years in South Carolina

Blessing #3: We got some temporary financial help to get us through the expenses of moving from both sides of our family. We just have wonderful family members and organizations and they have helped make this doable.

Blessing #4: We got to see tons of family in Utah at Christmas. It's also been years for that and it was good for my soul.

Blessing #5: We just happened to be in Utah the very week my good friend from South Carolina's daughter got married and we were able to attend her reception and see some dear friends again before we moved so far away from them.

Blessing #6: This one wasn't quite how I had hoped, but I got to see my best friend from childhood for just a minute that same night as the reception. We ended up being just a mile from her house. I would have loved to spend hours together, but we'll do that some other time. It was so good to see her and her husband and their newest baby for just a minute.

Blessing #7: Our kids were total troopers on the drive. We blazed through 2,100 miles in three days. Then again we did 750 miles in one day going up to Seattle from Utah. Our kids rocked it.

Blessing #8: We stopped in Yakima even though it was only 135 miles from our destination. If we had been up in the pass that night I'm sure we would have been one of the multiple accidents we discovered the next day.

Blessing #9: We went over White Pass instead and it wasn't a bit snowy, just wet. It took longer, but we made it completely safe and it wasn't scary at all.

Blessing #10: We gave our new ward a whopping 12 hours' notice that we needed help moving in and 20 fine folks showed up at our door. The move in took no time at all.

Blessing #11: It was completely dry when we moved everything in, so my carpets didn't get pounded with dirt. Compare that to when we moved out, where it rained solid for two days.

Blessing #12: We also got a ton of help from friends to move us out of South Carolina, and as a result were able to get on the road the Friday night before Christmas so that we made it to Utah at 10:45PM on Christmas Eve.

Blessing #13: We live a block away from the bus stop that Bill hops on to go downtown and it only takes him 30 minutes to ride in each morning.

Blessing #14: We have a great ward and a great new school.

Blessing #15: My brother and sister-in-law let us crash at their house the night we arrived with no advance warning because we got there too late to get our house keys. Bless them and we are so excited to live nearby and spend oodles of time together.

Blessing #16: My 2006 van trekked all the way across the country with not a single problem. It's running strong still.

There were other things too, but the best way I can describe it is everything was darker than it had ever been a month ago regarding our future and now the door has swung so wide open that it hit us on the way around just to make sure we took this road. I don't really know why Kirland is where we needed to be, but I do feel like we got helped to get here in innumerable ways and I'm really grateful for how it turned out. It's been nigh unto miraculous how well things have worked out, and it's just so good to settle in and start this newest life phase.