I don't have much to write about this morning! We're still in quarantine. The days still move forward, just at a much slower pace.
Im sitting in my kitchen, typing this at my kitchen table that's beed turned into a desk. Caleb uses this table for his school work and I use it for my journaling, scripture reading and writing. It's a big table, a strong and sturdy table and now, every day, half of it is covered with papers, binders, markers and all sorts of school and journaling things. Austin has taken over the study for his schoolwork and Jaren has transferred the bedroom into a work office. That's where he spends most of his days, back there in our bedroom. Now that he's back there he opens up the blinds in our bedroom, something I had never done before, and it makes our room so much happier feeling with all the light shining through the window. Our backyard is so beautiful!
When we were trying to decide if we wanted this lot or not, I really did but Jaren didn't. He thought it was too big and didn't want to take care of the lawn. I promised him that I would take care of the lawn (and for the most part, like 95% of the time, I have stuck to that) and I am so glad that we did! I didn't know it was possible to love a home and a yard as much as I love ours.
And since I'm not sure what to write about today, I'll take a minute and share the story about how we ended up in Sunnyvale. Looking back, it was pretty obvious that this is where God wanted us to be!
We had lived in Wylie for about 5 years, and we had loved our time there, but Jaren's commute was really long, and Austin was getting ready to start kindergarten. We were realizing that with the time Austin had to go to bed and Jaren's commute, Jaren wasn't seeing much of Austin and we wanted to change that. So changing Jaren's commute was the whole reason we even started thinking about a move. But we liked our house and our neighborhood and we were torn. So we fasted and prayed about weather or not we should move. I remember the Sunday we both got our answer.
It was the Sunday right around Christmas, and church was only sacrament meeting. This particular Sunday the members of the bishopric spoke and one of them spoke about the traditions he and his family did every Christmas. The spirit was so strong and I knew in that moment that the house we were living in was not the same one God wanted us to create our own family traditions in. I knew that moving wasn't just a good idea for Jaren's commute, but something that God wanted us to do. Later that night, as we stood in our closet getting ready for bed, Jaren asked me what I thought of sacrament meeting. I told him what I had felt and he said he had gotten the same impression, during the same talk!
So the house went on the market and we started looking for a home. Jaren grew up in Coppell and that's where we had decided to move. It was close to downtown and would cut his commute in half, it had good schools and the city is beautiful. I was excited to be moving there. We searched for house after house after house and we could not find anything that seemed to work for us. They were either too much money, or too old. And not that old is a problem, they just would have needed a ton of work put back into them and that was not something we could afford. We looked at buying a lot and having a home built, we found one home we loved, gosh it was beautiful, but it was on a really busy street, and I just couldn't get over that. Had I said yes, we probably would have bought that house. We did find one we really liked, but by the time we got serious about it, it was gone. As hard as we tried, we could not find a single house in Coppell that was working out for us.
Jaren said casually one day, why don't we go look in Sunnyvale? I was less than thrilled. We had first looked at Sunnyvale five years earlier when we first bought a house and I was not impressed with the city. Nobody lived there! There was only one run down, tiny school and the neighborhoods had been plotted but nothing had been done about building homes. Driving through Sunnyvale five years earlier felt eerie and creepy and I had zero interest in ever going back. But he kept pushing and I finally thought, what the heck, it's not going to hurt to look once.
So we drove out, and this city that once felt like a ghost town, just a short five years earlier, had blossomed! The tiny run down school was no longer the only one. They had a beautiful new high school and middle school, and the new elementary school was in the process of being built. The neighborhoods that had previously just been curb sides and street lights now had homes in them. People were out walking trails and they had a cute little pond with a fishing dock. Right across from the model home was a big neighborhood pool and a park. Hold on, this city wasn't looking so bad after all!
Then we walked into the model home and everything about this place felt like home. After months of searching in Coppell just to be left empty handed and frustrated, this felt like a breath of fresh air. We gathered paperwork and floor plans and spent some time studying them after we left that day, but at that point, it was pretty much a done deal. I'm not sure why God wanted us here instead of Coppell, but I am so glad He did. I am so grateful He led us here.
Now I sit at my kitchen table/desk and listen to the birds chirp and watch the sun rise each morning as I write in my journal and almost every single day I am thankful! Thankful for this life of mine and all of the beautiful things in this world, and that through my little piece of land, I get to experience some of them every day. It may not be the mountains, or at the side of an ocean, but it's beautiful, and it's ours! And Jaren and I have worked hard to make this place our home and it sure does feel like it! Most of all, I'm thankful for a God who knows us, loves us and so clearly has a hand in our lives!
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