Blowin' the Dust Off....

Whew...almost went an entire year without a posting.  Shame on me!  And what a year it has been.

After so much uncertainty and having to exercise tremendous faith (soooo not easy), we finally got the answer to the questions that have invaded our lives....where are we going to wind up?  What's going to happen in the next few years?  What does the Lord have in store for us?

What He had in store was certainly nothing I saw coming!  We were presented with a few different scenarios, a few I was absolutely CERTAIN held the answers only to find that no, that's not the fork we're to take...and finally ended up with a wonderful opportunity to live in Texas.

We had both looked at the job posting and considered it then thought....nah.  Well, maybe, but well, nah.  Then during a conversation with Lonny one day he remarked, off handedly, that he had put in for the job in Houston.  We thought nothing would ever come of it.  He had been called for a second interview for a job in Washington D.C. as well as Orange County, my home stomping grounds.  We had already lost what we thought was our dream opportunity to move to Sacramento (they interviewed Lonny, he felt he nailed it, we felt so certain that was were we were going then they casually drop the "Well, we don't actually have funding for this position, so we don't know when we will be able to fill it...."  - as of this writing, they still haven't) so we were trying to remain cautiously optimistic.  Then lo and behold, the call came from Texas for an interview.  Right away, in the back of my mind, I started thinking..hmm...something about this feels right.  And no one was more surprised than me.

I will spare you a long drawn out rest of the story (ha! when have I ever) but the short of it is that in June, we (don't you love how I say "we" but really, it was entirely a team decision) accepted the position in Houston and 6 weeks later we were on the road.  We have been here a month now, still settling in.  Everything sort of fell into place.  Lonny received a "Welcome to the Court, we are excited to meet you, I am a BYU Grad" type of email from one of his fellow law clerks.  As it turns out he and his wife have been amazing friends to us.  Because of a contact we were given by them for a real estate agent, we were able to rent a house that we love, sight unseen, which I would NEVER do (again, exercising faith) and we have landed in their ward (our new friends' AND the agent) so we already knew a few people when we arrived.  Lonny's colleague also is in the Bishopric here in our ward and when we arrived, there were 35 people here to help us move in.

We love the area we are in.  We are really "into the woods" and there are critters to get used to and the heat and humidity here are cray cray (we were warned August is the worst month to be here so it can only go up from here!).  We live right around the corner from a nature preserve, there is everything we could want (except a Café Rio, but we are in the heart of Mexican Restaurant Central, I think we'll survive) and so far we have been very happy.  I am in love with how much closer we are becoming as a family.  I also have the opportunity (or should I say challenge?) of staying home full time, at least for now.

It is a huge relief to have these questions answered.  Of course, more answers lead to more questions....

In any case, I am excited to have landed and am going to work diligently to blog our journey here in this life again.  Don't really know if anyone is that interested in reading it, but it is good for my soul so here it is, warts and all.  I have some camera related issues, always it seems...there is a lesson somewhere that I am not learning....but will post some pictures soon.  The kids have sure grown from my last post!!!  More to come....the journey never really ends even if the blog post did for a while.