Life on Center: May 2015

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Some Days in May

What happened to May? I knew it had been a while since my last post, but I just realized this morning that there are less than 4 days until June! Apparently lots happened in May, because I'm sitting in Wisconsin, in my parents' sun-drenched house on Lac LaBelle...with my dog...and all of our stuff. Well, most of our stuff is actually on a truck somewhere in the middle of the country.

Around the time Peter was born (February 12), Nate applied to a job at Trek Bicycle in Waterloo, Wisconsin. It's not that we were unhappy in California or he was unhappy at Apple, but our hearts belong in Wisconsin, closer to family. As you can probably imagine, this was a big decision, and before Nate had any job offers, it was easy to daydream about the move: about buying a house for less than a bazillion dollars, about dropping our kids off at Belle Mere's or Oma's for a spontaneous date night, about weekends on the lake...

So we prayed for guidance through opened and/or closed doors. He opened lots of doors and lined up lots of interviews. Back in mid-April, Nate flew to Madison and interviewed with four different companies in three days. I was amazed by his preparation (i.e. shoes shined, new non-pleated suits and a haircut) and his endurance and he was thankful for my ability to handle Louisa, Cora and Peter alone in California for 4 days. Nate called me right after his interview with Trek and I think we both knew at that point that if they wanted him, we wanted them. He'll start June 15, working on integrating electronics into bikes, which will tap directly into his 3 years of experience at Apple.

We've both felt fairly calm throughout the transition thus far. I think partly because any time we wonder whether or not we made the right decision, we remind each other how often we've prayed that God's will be done. The other reason for the calm during the storm of moving is that Trek hired a moving company to pack and ship our belongings, including our cars. Amazing! So we only worked for about 12 hours organizing, donating, and packing clothes for the short-term before a great packing team came in and started boxing up our lives. As our days in California whittled down, I gave away plants, frozen and refrigerated food, propane tanks, and cans of paint. The hardest thing to leave behind was my thriving orchid, but giving it to my MOPS mentor mom, Becky, made it a little bit easier.

My view while feeding Peter on the last day in our house

Peter's bed on the bathroom floor

My lunch on the last day

The timing of everything was/is beautiful. Long before we knew we were moving, we had bought plane tickets to attend Georgia's vet school graduation in Madison. We considered canceling that trip, but instead decided that it would work great to fly home, leave the girls with Belle, Papa and Oma for the week, and fly back to Campbell for Nate to finish up at work and for Peter and I to oversee the movers and to tie up any loose ends with our rental house. Leaving the girls in Wisconsin also gave us the chance to do a Farewell California Tour, which included visits with friends, a final meal at Apple, a night in Sonoma, a night in San Francisco, a scenic drive through the Marin Headlands (with a stop at Cowgirl Creamery!) and a cable car ride up and over the hills of the city. The cheese and coastal part of this trip was inspired by a post Nate's cousin emailed me a few months ago. The blog post is worth a visit for the author's beautiful photography.