What a Long, Strange Year It's Been

It's been almost a year since I last posted.  Just 2 months shy of the anniversary of the tornado that hit our neighborhood.  The intervening months have been doozies! 

After the tornado, we really couldn't focus much on the damage because we were thinking about our Virginia house.  A week or two after the tornado we had an offer on that house, and so we had to focus on getting everything out of there (garage mainly) and finishing up the items the buyers wanted from the inspection.  We ended up closing on that house on July 17, 2019, which was our 26th wedding anniversary. That was fitting because on our 25th anniversary, the moving van came and picked up all our stuff to move to Ohio, so it literally took us a year to finish up with that house!  We were relieved to be done with it!

The summer was spent dealing with contractors but not getting anything fixed on our little house. We ended up having the tarps replaced because they were wearing out!  All the contractors were just so busy.  Bob spent many long hours on the phone and emailing with USAA as well as various companies. Very frustrating!

We started looking at bigger houses here, but nothing really jumped out. Eventually it was the end of August, and all our activities were starting to gear up again. Interest rates were low, so Bob said if we were going to move, we really should do it then.  The thought of another school year crammed into the tri-level pretty much sent me through the roof, so I went through all the houses for sale with 5 bedrooms or more again with a fine tooth comb. We found one that Jonathan and I had driven by, but that we had never looked at. It had 5 full baths and 1 half bath. Most of the houses we were seeing had 3 "kid" bedrooms upstairs, but only 1 bathroom for those rooms. We were planning on having 8 kids in those 3 rooms, and that's just not an ideal number for one bathroom, especially when 3 of them are teen/preteen girls. So this particular house had potential. We called our patient realtor and went through it. The house looked like it would work well!  So we went under contract with that house the beginning of September and closed the beginning of October, but we couldn't move in until November. The people we bought it from, a retired AF couple, travel all over the place all the time, and they were going on a cruise to Greece in October and needed the rest of the month to finish getting all their stuff out. 

So we moved in Nov. 9. We were so thankful that Nathan, his fiancee Elena, and Luke were all able to come home for the weekend to help out. Nathan's summer working for the moving company paid off in spades!  He loaded the 26 foot truck like a tetris game, wasting no space. It was amazing!  People from our Bible study also provided much muscle power and help. We could not have done it without everyone's help!

But it turns out that November is a TERRIBLE time to move!  We were deep in the throes of all our classes and extracurricular activities, including having 5 kids do winter swim.  Nothing stopped just because we moved!  And then it was time for the holidays.  We sort of got things into a reasonable state so kids could come home for Thanksgiving and Christmas . . . and that's where everything stayed because we couldn't do any more. 

We did have a lovely and refreshing week in VA over New Year's, and while we were there, a friend from way back texted.  Dawn and I had been in the same moms' walking group in Colorado when we were pregnant with our first babies!  They live in Ohio now, and they were looking for a house to rent while they sold their current house and had a one-story one built in a neighboring school district. Well, we definitely had a house that was empty (sort of). It still had all the junk that we didn't want to throw away but obviously wasn't crucial for living, as well as most of our garage stuff.  At least we had *finally* gotten a new roof (begun the day before we moved out!), new gutters, fascia, soffits, and 2 new windows. We still hadn't replaced the fence, shed, or deck rails, but our friends said they didn't care about that. So we hustled to clean out that house, as well as change ceiling fans that didn't work and some other little things, and they moved in the end of January. What a God thing!  We were thinking it would at least be March before we got the house ready to rent out, but more likely, since we were so busy driving around everywhere all the time, we would have just continued to put it off, lol. We definitely needed the motivation!

So here we are now in March, and we are undergoing a pandemic from the corona virus!  Everything has been shut down that we normally do during the week, except for our usual online classes, Anna's algebra class (small group of homeschool kids that meets at the teacher's house), and Anna's weekly PT appointments she's been going to since the end of November for hip problems she was having!  Our schedule has completely cleared!  Bob is still going to work, but the rest of us are here at the house 24/7. The one thing I have thought over and over again is "Thank God this didn't happen last year, when we were all crammed into the little tri-level!"  In the new house, there is a nice sun room that we use as a playroom so the Little People and Matchbox cars are not in the way all the time. There's a full basement with a separate room for the Legos and Lincoln logs--we can just close the door on the mess!  The kids can watch videos downstairs and we don't even hear them on the main level!  The desktop computer where the girls do on-line classes is in a study with a door we can close so they can concentrate and not have the teachers ask them to quiet the background noise!  This much bigger house is such a blessing during this time of "social distancing".

We also have room to store extra food!  I've been watching the whole coronavirus thing since someone started a thread on the Well Trained Mind forums about it back on Jan. 24.  I even got out a book called The Great Influenza, about the 1918 Spanish Influenza, so I could brush up on my virology as well as just get a historical sense for how epidemics spread.  It was very interesting!  When I finished the book mid-February I had a much greater sense of the devastation and loss of life in that pandemic.  Absolutely mind-boggling.  I was left wondering if we as a nation had learned anything from the public health decisions that were made back then and led directly to such high death tolls (continuing to move troops around, and not canceling huge parades as well as smaller gatherings like church and school). With that in mind, I started gradually stocking our pantry back up again. With 2 moves in a little over a year, I was letting things get way lower than I usually do. I was very thankful that I was ahead of the game and missed what seems like absolute mayhem in the grocery stores as apparently every other person in the world starts stocking up!  And I am glad that it seems like we *did* learn lessons, and that's why everything has been shut down. We are praying for a vaccine or effective treatment to come quickly though.

Now we're just enjoying the time at home.  Since I'm not driving people all over the place, we're able to spend more relaxed time doing school with the littles. Since I'm here, I can more easily direct them to all the fascinating things people are posting online, like Mo Willems' doodling lessons and the Cincinnati Zoo daily animal podcasts. We've played more games the past week than we have the past year!  We finished one 1000 piece puzzle, and we've started another one. I feel like I'm slowly relaxing.  It feels like when the older boys were young. Our big weekly outing was TNT on Tuesdays, but otherwise, we pretty much stayed home and played and did school.  I miss those days!  Things definitely change when you start having kids in junior high and high school. 

I will say though, that I am hopeful that things settle down now . . . we're waiting to see how the isolation phase is going to affect graduations, commissioning, Nathan and Elena's wedding, etc. It's crazy that we're even wondering about these things!  I am thankful now more than ever that we trust a sovereign God who holds all these things in his loving hands.