Saying Goodbye :(

It seems like I just had to say goodbye to my friends from Utah and now I had to say goodbye to my friends in Illinois. I can truly say that I made some genuine friends here and it will be hard without them. Although, with technology of facebook and whatnot, I feel like I can still keep in touch and continue to see what everyone is doing. I recently heard a quote that said, 'I have friends, they're in my computer.' Boy am I grateful for that! Can you imagine living 30 years ago when in order to keep in contact with people you'd have to either send an actual letter or reach them on their landline? Good grief. If that were the case these days, it would be very interesting to see who I'd really stay in contact with. Thankfully that's not the case.

Goodbye. Goodbye being a concept that Charlee and Van don't quite grasp yet. They don't know what's going on other than- we're moving closer to the mountains to live by Grandma and our cousins. I sometimes wish I could be young again and have the lack of understanding to comprehend situations like this. In the following months to come, Charlee and Van would continue to ask if they could play with their Monticello friends. Van would ask when we were going to go back to our home in Monticello and so forth. Honestly, I think this was harder for me to hear these statements than it was for them. It's amazing how resilient kids are with change. I think the older you get the harder change is for people. In fact I know that's true!

Anyway, that being said, we as a family dealt with a lot of change in a very short period of time. In December we put our home up for sale. I was not too optimistic about our home selling. Odds were against us in the fact that we were 1. Listing our home in the dead of winter. 2. It being in a small town where homes were not selling fast. 3. Not exactly being in the best price range. However, while at work one night at Kirby I was talking to my friend Julie Wilson who recommended that I bury St. Joseph in my yard. She, being a devout Catholic was sure that in doing so he would help us sell our home quickly. I of course was more than skeptical, but being barely awake and delirious at two in the morning I half heartedly ordered a St. Joseph statue off of Amazon for a mere $6. When it arrived at my home I kept it on the counter until the day we moved. We buried it our front yard minutes before we drove away from Monticello forever. When our home sold in 2 MONTHS, we of course recognized this as a blessing from Heavenly Father (and St. Joseph).

Being that we were unsure of how fast our home would sell, we devised a plan that would end up being very memorable. Joel stayed in my Grandma Betty and Grandpa Don's RV at the Winnemucca RV park for $400 a month while I stayed with the kids at Sandy's house. This was WAY harder for Joel than it was for me. He had no heat in the trailer and had to buy a propane space heater. He ate nothing but quesadillas, cereal and coke for three months and he peed in red solo cups. Yeah you heard me- he PEED IN RED SOLO CUPS. Because the bathroom in the RV was not functioning and going to the public RV outhouse was not always optimal in below freezing weather, Joel would pee in cups and then dump it outside on the rocks in the morning. All the while I was sleeping indoors and eating home cooked meals. Anyway, the kids and I stayed with Sandy up until I had Frankie (story to be told later). Then we moved to Winnemucca that same week and were finally together as a family again under the same roof. Whew! I'm spent! Sorry for the novel. If you've made it this far in my ramblings give yourself a pat on the back. You deserve it.