A Very Busy Month!

Wow! It's been a really long time since I blogged, but I guess I have a good excuse! A lot has happened in the last month, so I thought I'd share a picture story with you. WARNING: this post is a LOOONNNGG one!!! :-)
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There was a happy family of 5 who lived in a great state. They loved their place, their town and church. They thought they would be able to spend many years there and never have to move for a LONG time, but that family's pastor moved away and the church shut down...

...so they went to another church temporarily......and watched services online for a while. That family soon sold their house... ...bought another in a far away state that was 800 miles away......packed up their belongings and moved so that they would have a wonderful church to attend... ...and have lots of caring people and friends around.

Moving isn't a very simple thing to do! There is waiting for your house to sell as well as all the inspections, etc. that go with it; going and looking at a lot of houses to find the best one for your family for the best price...
(Our new house, yard, and street)

...packing & sorting & having a garage sale......living in a bare house for several days... ...figuring out how you're going to get everything moved; loading the truck & trailer (Trint & I loaded it ALL--except a little help from Christopher! We got the truck on Thursday at 9 AM and had it loaded by 4 PM on Friday.); ...saying goodbyes to those who you loved and were close to... ...traveling together--without falling asleep at the wheel! (The normally 12 hour drive took us about 22 hours with all of our stops & naps.)... ...unloading the truck and trailer (we had about 6 helpers to unload--took less than 2 hours!) (This was that Wednesday night that the truck was unloaded.)......arranging your whole house and unpacking boxes (these pictures were taken on that Fri & Sat--quite a drastic change!)......making sure you have all the utilities on and working; setting up the Christmas tree, of course!... cleaning and scrubbing; getting your new state driver's licenses & vehicle tags; and on and on the list goes!!!! That's not even including the regular stuff such as keeping your family fed and happy--which in this case includes a 5 yr old, 2.5 yr old, 3 month old baby, and a 1 yr old dog!


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We encountered some problems along the way, but the Lord helped us through the tough times.


The day before the moving truck came, the washer stopped and was stinking and so we tried to look it over ourselves, but to no avail. We called a repairman and paid him $50 to come check it and find everything working and nothing wrong! Grrr! It has worked fine since. While we were messing with the washer, Blake hit his head on the corner of the desk and gave him a black eye. When the moving truck came, it hit our cable line that was strung across the road so we had to rig it up so we would have phone and internet till they would fix it! Then when our buyers were doing a final walk-through, we found out we were supposed to leave our refrigerator, but it was already gone on the truck! We had left another older refrigerator that worked, but the buyer wasn't happy with that so we ended up buying a brand new fridge for them.



When we got to our new house, a cabinet fell on Christopher when he opened it and immediately caused a HUGE bump on his forehead. Trint and our pastor & his wife took him to the ER where they did a cat scan. Thank the Lord, everything was fine--no broken skull, etc.! The next few days his eyes swelled and then turned green, but he is doing fine and the swelling and green are almost completely gone!


Since our new yard is not fenced in, we kept our dog tied up and in a small kennel. She was used to running around our 1.5 acres at our previous house and didn't like being "couped up". After a week at our new house, I was going out of her kennel when she darted through my legs and ran away! Trint followed her for a while, but lost her and she never returned. Maybe in the future we will have to look into getting some other type of pet that doesn't require a fenced-in yard or is used to be penned up.
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We also had some good and fun times mixed in with all the work and hassle of the move.

We had to be out of our old house for 24 hours while the water well was being chlorinized, so we spent the day going to the library (where the boys got in on a kid's reading and fun time), took Christopher to the dentist and played at the park, and then spent a night in a room at our church...



...drove through the parks and town that were lit up with Christmas lights, & played at Wal-Mart....

(The swing set is the one in our new yard that the previous owners left!)

Here is a picture of Lilly learning hand-eye coordination! She loved trying to push the cars around!
Another thing we did last month was try to make Krispy Kreme filled donuts! They turned out pretty good for the first try! We made cheesecake filled donuts and when we ran out of the cheesecake filling, we put jelly in a few.

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Now we are enjoying our friends and new church family. We've had several friends over already! We also went to a friend's house for Thanksgiving.

We hope we don't have to make that kind of move again...at least for a LONG LLLLLOOOOOOONNNGGGG time!!! :-)

I still have plenty more cleaning to do, a couple more rooms to organize, and then decorating of the whole house. I'm also still working on getting some business things taken care of and switched over to our new state.