Settled

I do apologize to my blogging friends who are not also my Facebook friends--in all the press and pressure of the last couple weeks, I didn't even post a short update! But it has been less than a week since we heard, on the same day that we closed on our old house, that our offer was accepted! We will close July 11 on the house that I mentioned in my last post. It's weird--I still wonder what we are doing buying this house--but the experience has been like getting caught up in a river current carrying us inexorably in this direction, and along with that current of events has come a peace and reassurance that God is the one moving us along. The house doesn't seem like a final destination--it's more like getting started on the right road. I'm just eager to see where it leads!

So that's settled. We have a place to live, in just another month or so.

We are also getting settled into our generous friends' home. Papa Rooster and I have our own bedroom in the basement, and B23 and B15 are sharing a bedroom upstairs. Chicklet and B9 sleep on a huge couch in the basement family room, inches away from a wonderful Lego storage area and a Wii. (We've never had one, so this is like the best vacation condo ever to them.) We have our own full bathroom down in the basement, and I should mention that this basement has 9-foot ceilings and windows everywhere, so we couldn't be more comfortable. Two other generous families are hosting Blondechick21 and B19, separately, and they are happy and comfortable as well.

Now if I could just find everything! During that last week in our old house, it was so crazy. I kept having to drop everything to drive to a theater in Milwaukee an hour away for the show Chicklet was in and I was helping to direct. (If I had guessed that we would sell our house so quickly, I would never have agreed to be on the directing team--but it was a great experience, despite the awful timing!) At the end, others packed up all the stuff that you leave till last because you use it all the time, so of course that's the stuff I've been struggling to find. We were running out of boxes, too, so it got packed in laundry baskets, trash cans, duffel bags, etc. along with all the stuff no one knew what to do with. We weren't allowed to put household chemicals or food in storage, so we have all the household cleaners and toiletries from 5 bathrooms, plus the kitchen and laundry room, and boxes and garbage bags of pantry items to sort through as well--all in the garage and storage room at the house where we are staying.

Unpacking and repacking--that's my plan for this afternoon! And just in time, I hope, because the lady of the house is coming home from the hospital in the next 24 hours or so! She had to have a sudden abdominal surgery that has kept her there for nearly a week now. The one silver lining of the trial--which thankfully she can't really appreciate--was that she wasn't here for the worst of the invasion of her home.

So many people at our church, and neighbors and other friends too, have been so much help to us in the last month. People lent us boxes and brought us meals. They packed box after box. One woman--new to our church--cleaned all five bathrooms, God bless her!! Friends took our two youngest kids. They moved our furniture and many, many boxes into storage. On moving day, Blondechick put out the word to her classmates at the School of Worship, and a half dozen international students showed up to do much of the heavy lifting in exchange for pizza and Coke! They had such great attitudes and servants' hearts, and it seemed like God's timing because they were all killing time between graduation and their flights back to Switzerland and Germany. They didn't have jobs or school like the other young people that would have liked to help us out but couldn't on a Tuesday--we'll hit them up again in another month when we have to move it all one more time, but hey, it will be a fresh team! And there were those that spent the better part of a week helping us already...and will do it all again in a month, we know. We had friends still at the house with us at 1 a.m. when we carried out the last box. We are truly blessed...and so, so thankful.

But we are DONE. And as settled as we can be, for a few weeks--or nearly so!