New Living Situation

We survived our first move!  On May 17th we moved from our 1 bedroom apartment in Fort Wayne to.........my in-laws' basement.  Not quite as exciting as you hoped, huh? ;)  You might be thinking "why in the world did you do that??"  Well, it all started about 6 months ago when my father-in-law started a new project for his job that requires him to travel to the Dominican Republic quite often.  He has taken on the role of completely restructuring a children's home down there that the organization he works for has recently acquired.  This past December he started traveling to the DR every 2 weeks (2 weeks here, 2 weeks there, and so on).  My mother-in-law would comment how they might end up moving down there and she wondered what we thought about living in their house while they're gone.  I didn't think it would really happen so I didn't put a whole lot of thought into it.

Then in April, Jeff felt moved to ask Tina to really pray about moving down there so they wouldn't have to keep enduring the back and forth traveling and separation each month.  Our lease was up at the end of May and the whole moving into their house was becoming very real, very fast!  The decision to move was made and we agreed to take care of their home for little over a year while they live in the DR.  

The only tricky part was that our lease ended in May and they weren't planning on moving until August.  So, we are now all (6 people!) sharing this house together until Jeff, Tina, Josiah, and Olivia move after school starts.  Olivia will come back to continue school after Christmas and then it will be just us three.  You can be sure a vacation to the DR is in our near future :D  When and where we'll move when they come home is unknown but I know God has it all worked out ;)  He's obviously had all of this figured out all along and has definitely been giving me abundant strength and grace to deal with the challenges of moving and sharing living space with your family.

Challenges have been testing my resolve since day 1, but the biggest challenge that I didn't always handle with grace stared about 4 days after we came back from Phoenix.  Due to a fluke mistake with the replacing of a covering over the window well to our bedroom, a LOT of rain water filled up the window well and came into our room.  At first I thought it only needed towels and fans to dry it up (I've never dealt with flooded basements before) but after a couple days it REALLY started to smell and we realized that more drastic measures needed to be taken.  

Before I knew it, the walls were gone and the carpet was torn up and Zach and I had lost our bedroom.  With no other space for us to really move into or sleep, we ended up moving everything out into the open part of the basement and set up our tent in the backyard and slept out there for 10 days.  Zach was excited for adventure and sleeping in the great outdoors...I didn't always share his enthusiasm :/.  

We survived though and last week were able to move all of our stuff back in after the walls were dried, painted, and new carpet was put in.  The room looks 100 times better than it did before and even though I complained to Zach a lot about all the work and feeling so overwhelmed, the unexpected remodel was worth it ;)  Zach did a majority of the work himself and was really thankful for the opportunity to learn about room remodeling (he's so much more positive than I).  

 I couldn't get a very good picture of the whole room and the light on the ceiling just burned out this morning so it's dark :/

 Zach brought me flowers last weekend and they still look so nice, really cheer the place up :)

Book change:  I'm putting One Thousand Gifts on hold because I have a book for a bible study I just started reading and 3 for work but I'm loving what we're reading for Bible Study

Love Does by Bob Goff!  It's hilarious and very inspiring.  I could read it in a day if I took more time to read but I highly recommend it so far.

My baby blanket for Noah James Swails is almost done (pics coming soon) and I just ordered new yarn to make one for a little girl.  I might sell it online or give it to the next friend that has a baby, or hang on to it for myself whenever the day comes :)