Monday, November 8, 2010

Iowa Bound

Well, by now I'm sure you have all heard the news: we're moving back to Iowa!
Jon was offered a great job in Muscatine with Central State Bank. It will be a great career move for him as well as the rest of us - we should be able to settle in and finally get roots really put down in Muscatine. Jon starts work on November 29th, so we'll be moving him over Thanksgiving weekend. Thursday we'll get to have lunch with Jon's family and dinner with my family before driving Jon over to Muscatine on Friday. We'll all go so we can show the girls the town and where Jon will be working and living (temporarily) until we get our house sold in Grand Forks and one bought in Muscatine.
It will be great to only be 4 hours from grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. Another bonus? With Megan, Greg & Oz in Des Moines we have a handy dandy half-way meeting point. Looks like it will be the Culver's turn to host a family weekend get together this summer! :) (you said you were up for it sometime, Meg!)
I plan on keeping daycare open until Christmas break: December 22nd will be my last day of daycare. I will also be closed on Thursday, December 16th to attend Bria's school music program. At least 2 of the afterschool families have already made new daycare arrangements and will be all settled in their new spots before Thanksgiving. It's never easy to drop this kind of news on all the families who have been counting on me to watch their kids. Thankfully I was able to give everyone almost 6 weeks notice before I have to actually be done. The only way that timeline will change is if God steps in and sells our house very quickly.
The girls are looking forward to living closer to family. Obviously they both have some mixed emotions about the whole thing, but overall they are good with this move. We are praying that we can get moved before school starts back up after Christmas break. We fully aknowledge that would be a very big "God thing", but He has worked out the timing of all the other details to get us to this point and we are trusting Him to work out the best timing on the sale of our house as well. In our limited perspective, it seems like it would be easiest for the girls and us to be moved by the end of the year, but we are trusting God to work out the details in the best timeline for all of us. We sure will be missing Jon around here, but as I keep saying, hopefully we won't all be apart too long.
So, if anyone out there in the Grand Forks area knows of anyone looking to move close to Kelly Elementary/Schroder Middle School, we know of a great house for sale that goes on the market today!
So, between now and whenever we move, it will probably be a little crazy around here with open houses, house showings, moving Jon, doing daycare and managing all the other normal things at the same time. But, we've done it before and survived, so we should be even better prepared for it this time!