The middle/end of the Summer of 2014

 

The pictures taken after leaving Utah got noticeably fewer, but our momentum hadn't stopped.  Shad had left for Montgomery after the family reunions to come and get started on working.  I stayed with the kids, mostly enjoying more time spent with family and partly waiting for household furniture to arrive from Alaska.  You can move a woman from Alaska to Alabama in July, you can move her 7 months pregnant, but you can't ask her to do and be without furniture for a whole month.  So I waited for the furniture to arrive or be close to arriving.  

The blessing of living in the lower 48 is to have friends in driving distance.  The Newcomers are only 8 hours away now and they drove to Alabama to help us unpack all of our household goods.  Thank Heaven for Rebecca.  She kept me working to get this house unpacked and in workable condition.  It was so good to have the company and extra hands.  The kids didn't even get in the way. They were so happy to have playmates everywhere they turned that we never heard someone say they were bored and they never watched TV or played video games while they were here.  Randy also treated them to a matinee at the movie theaters.  I love being near family (because that's what they are, family)

She even got a beautiful picture of my two girls.

After they left, we started getting settled in this house.  One afternoon I took Ella school shopping and Shad stayed to unpack a few more boxes.  He also decorated a bit, he found a place for his sheep horns.  It wasn't quite what I envisioned for this space, but I haven't moved them.  That makes me a good wife.

Shad purchased tickets to Mary Poppins at the Alabama Shakespearean Festival for the girls.  It was a lovely and wonderful evening.

It was a lot of work....

 I flew down to Montgomery to find a rental house for our family.  I needed something to  move into when we got there and not be homeless until something became available.  I talked Rebecca and Randy into Rebecca meet me there, so she could help me.  Yes, I could do it on my own, but I didn't want to.  And it turned out she was a lot of help.  We of course played too, too much work isn't a good thing for anybody.

 Rebecca always finds letters that correspond with someone.  Heere is a broken street blockade that makes a perfect A.

 We had no idea that the pizza was going to be this big.  I think that would have fed my family and then some.

 The cheesecake factory after a long hard day of shopping at the swanky Summit in Birmingham.

 We even shop for others, here we found a J for Mary who has named all her kids with names starting with J and has one more on the way.

Oh, and yes we found a house to rent too.  I think it's a cute little Americana type house that is a lot bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside.  It is on the end of a cul-de-sac so I can watch my kids ride their bikes up and down the street.