Tuesday, February 19, 2008

better response than I ever imagined

After reading Randy's books about Heaven I have realized that Heaven is going to be so much better than I can imagine. God sometimes answers prayers like that, blessing you with an answer that is so much better than you ever even considered asking. That is what has happened to us with Ainsley's attitude about moving.
Yes, if you didn't know we are moving. Hopefully on Saturday. One might wonder why we are leaving our cute little house in a neighborhood that I love to move to...well...a 70's ranch. Not really my dream house. The thing is, eventually Damascus will get a plan for the city and let development happen, and eventually the housing market will recover and that development will happen. At that time they will build a new High School and there is a good chance Andrew will want to move to the new school. One of the bonuses of having a teacher parent is having the teacher parent be able to teach in the same school as the kids. In light of that we have always planned on moving to Damascus so our kids could go to school there. Because the building stuff hasn't happened as fast as we thought it would (thanks Damascus City Council and Economy) we are left with the choice of either waiting to move until they have built cute new little houses in new little neighborhoods, and move our kids when they are older in school. Or move now, into something we can find, and move them before they are really established in a school.
Based on how well Ainsley HAS NOT DONE with transitions in the past, we figured we better just bite the bullet and get it over with. So we have been looking for awhile and found a remodeled ranch house, that is a good deal, and has a huge greenway with a playground behind it. It is actually a little bigger than our house now, but only has a 2 car garage instead of 3. It is in great condition, just pretty ugly, but I figure with practice I can learn to drive up to it with my eyes closed. The inside is cute. Our plan is to live in this house and enjoy the outside space when the kids are little, then when the housing market improves and Damascus figures out where they are going to let people build houses we will sell the new house, and our old house which we are keeping as a rental, and buy something else. Then again, who knows what God has planned. Maybe I'll be living in my 70's house until I'm in my 70's.
But back to the answer to prayer. As I mentioned, Ainsley and change don't usually go well. So we were really stressed about what it would look like to move to a new house and also move to a new school. We planned on letting her finish the year at Kelly Creek and have her move at the beginning of second grade. We seriously were just praying, "please don't let this be an absolute nightmare that she needs therapy over." When I first told her about the house her response was, "I hate that house, it's not fancy." Give her points for being observant. But then I remined her that it has 3 full bathrooms, so the boys will share one, mom and dad share one, and she gets her own. Total transformation. She was exstatic. She somehow knew without us telling her that she would have to switch schools, and her concern was that the only time someone moved out of her room this year she was gone with pink eye that day so she, "doesn't know if everyone will just line up at the door to give me hugs goodbye or what." She is also worried that her friends are not going to know what to do at recess without her telling them. No lack of self-esteem. So we never even brought up the possiblity of staying throgh the end of the year. she is so excited to go to a new school! We have visited Deep Creek and she loves it and can't wait to go. We are just astonished.
So anyway- her is my public prayer of thanksgiving to God for blessing us with what has so far been so easy when we thought it would be so hard. I'm not naieve enough to think that there won't be some bumps in the road as we make the transition. But I'm really just going to enjoy this for now and praise God for it. Here is my cute house I'm leaving, and letting a renter live in (there is something to pray about.) Pitures of the new house to come!

2 comments:

Ally said...

What a hard decision to make, the move, the school transitions, all of it. And what a blessing that Ainsley has accepted it better than you'd expected. I'm going now to read the next two entries to get the update...

Dianna said...

Wow Tiff - we had no idea that you guys were moving. Looking forward to seeing pictures of the new house. I hope everyone adjusts well. I guess that's the reason for the new phone number. Good luck with this one.

Di