Three months later...

Does anyone still read this, or am I just trying to hear myself talk? It has been three months since we last posted anything, and I thought, with all the recent changes, what better time to restart this. So what have we been up to since late June? Well…

… we live in Seattle and are expecting our fourth very soon!

Maybe you should have some filler, if you’re at all interested that is. Let’s see, I guess I should go back to where things started getting interesting, in early July. On July 5, because of a work slow down, I (Chris) was forced to go back to southern WA to provide for the family. As the time came for me to leave, that afternoon in fact, Mataya (and the rest of us) had a sort of melt down. For six years, since I was hired by the railroad, I have spent most of my railroad time away, mostly in southern WA. Well that reality finally caught up to us, as it typically does to Shawna and me when I leave, but the difference between this time and previous times was that we saw the genuine pain in Matty’s eyes as I was getting ready to leave. I was planning on leaving in the middle of the night, after the kids went to bed. That night, Matty couldn’t, wouldn’t is more like an appropriate word, go to sleep. We kept her in our bed where she stayed up crying and told me that she wouldn’t go to sleep because that meant that I was leaving. That hit Shawna and I like a ton of bricks, there was so much hurt there. We stayed up well past 1am at a loss of what to do. For so long we have talked about moving close to a terminal where I can work year round. But it always ended there, at talk. We tried to put the talk into action several years ago, but fell short after tried very little (we put our house on the market for five months before pulling it and deciding to deal with the situation). So this was the time, time to put family first, and stop worrying about possessions like the house.

The next few weeks flew by as we prepared for the upcoming move. We first had to decide where, we chose Seattle. Next was when, we decided to immediately. Finally was how, and we decided to just go for it. The last week of August found us with the house completely boxed up, everything in the garage waiting for the moving truck, and us happily on our way to Seattle, as a family, together. We found a place within a week, came back to Klamath a week later, and moved in to the new house in mid August. What about our things and the house in Klamath Falls? We rented a U-Haul, loaded our stuff, and some good friends of ours who wanted to rent our house, moved their stuff in. It was truly incredible how things fell into place with such an ease that stress was very minimal.

So here we are, 15 miles south of Seattle in Tacoma/Federal Way. We are in a nice house owned by an Air Force pilot who was relocated to another area. Our time has been spent on relearning the area. Shawna and I lived up here while I was on active duty over six years ago and left just after Matty was born. We have been integrating well and like it here. We found a great church, enrolled the kids in Awana, started this year’s home-school curriculum, and are expecting number four in a few weeks! We have decided to home-birth, if it so works out, and found an awesome midwife. Shawna has been incredible through all of this radical change, and knows nothing of complaining (which at over 8 months pregnant is expected but is non-existent). The kids and I are truly blessed to have her run our home. I may lead it, but she makes it function.

Of course, with how quickly and easily everything fell into place, there have been struggles. Our struggles with saying goodbye to our friends and family and the life we have grown accustomed to have of course left us with feelings of sadness. But through all the myriad of emotions these past few months, we are discovering something else. We came here wanting to be close to each other and to avoid long separation, but what we are finding is even more than that, something more exhilarating, something more special, and it took us the huge culture shock of moving to open our eyes to it.