Still here, believe it or not!

Yes, I am still here…never meant to be gone for SO long, but this move has been a tough one. I have spent my life moving all over the world, and yet this move really threw me for a loop. It wasn’t the weather (although various people from a DMV clerk to a Target associate have actually shrieked at me and called me ‘insane” for moving from Hawaii to the Midwest, and “in winter, of all times”!). We were just displaced for a long time, and had lots of things go wrong. I will not bore you with the details, but the good thing is that, after three months of being in limbo, we have settled in a nice home, in a nice neighborhood, and just spent three weeks with visiting family over the holidays. So, thankfully, life is on the right track again!

I am still unpacking boxes and hanging pictures, but the important areas are finished– including a dedicated school room upstairs (hooray!) and a dedicated play room right off the kitchen and living area, which has already seen many, many hours of play.

As to school, let’s just say, we have been un-schooling it for the past three months, for the most part. Rylan reads anything I put in front of him, so he has been feeding his mind non-stop, but the more formal learning activities have been far and few between…until this week! We are finally getting back into our school routine, with great excitement! And this time around I have a 6 year old and a 3 year old (when last I posted I was teaching a 5 and 2 year old!), which means I now have a proud, little preschooler in my midst! :)

So, I am back and it feels good, and I am looking forward to this new year. Hope you have all had a blessed start to 2011!

{our world now}

I am still here…sort of

I did not mean to disappear for such a long period of time. It is not because of a lack of things to share, I even have a bunch of half finished draft posts on various things we were doing in school before our life got turned upside down about two weeks ago! My husband was offered a promotion, and so we are moving AGAIN! We are trading our snorkel gear for snow boots and moving to the Midwest! Don’t get me started on how much we are going to miss the great weather and natural beauty of Hawaii, but in every other way this move will be better for us. For starters there are the grandparents, aunties, uncles, and cousins that my boys will have all around them…and that is no small thing for us, since it has been 14 years since I lived near any of my family and my boys have never experienced it. I am so happy that they will be able to benefit from developing those relationships. And then there is a wonderful Baha’i community, all the homeschooling resources and options, museums, zoos…and I could go on and on about all the positives of this move, but I won’t. For starters I have so much to do, and then there is the nasty cold the kids and I have. Second bad one in the last two months, total bummer. As if we want to spend our last days in Hawaii sick at home, right?

So, I am here, and I will be stopping in to share things when I am able. It may not be every week day…at least not for a while. But I will do my best.

{image from my husband’s recent raft trip around part of our island}