It was hard to go through all we've gone through and to stay upbeat and positive on here. Which isn't to say good things didn't happen, because they did, but they happened with the shadow of all the other stuff going on over them.
So what happened?
Life got crazy right after W's 3rd birthday. Just before his birthday we realized that we couldn't hold onto the brand new house we just bought less than 6 months prior. We did what so many others out there have done, we got in over our heads. Thanks to our current (almost gone, yay!) President and his war on affordable energy the little town in Wyoming where we lived began to suffer. Our town is a town based on energy: coal and oil. And both flat-lined. Hard. Right after W's birthday. My husband worked for a company that serviced the machinery for the coal mines and oil fields. Coal and oil cutbacks meant suddenly our family income went from $22/hr and 60+ hours a week (that over time was time and a half btw) to a flat 40 a week.
We had no choice. Half way through July 2015 we put our house up for sale. But, everyone in our town was in the same boat. 35-40K people felt the strain of one persons misinformed vendetta against affordable energy. Which mean our house sat and sat and sat, and I took a job as special education teacher's assistant to make ends meet and to try to keep paying our mortgage, and still the house sat on the market. D's 8th birthday and J's 31st came and went. So did mine, and then we rolled into 2016. B's 10th birthday came in March and P's 6th came in May. Then we were faced with something else, a few medical bills and the end of the school year. How could we possibly make it with me at home for the summer, unable to afford daycare for 4 children while I worked?
Daycare is crazy ya'll. Straight up CRAZY! I was paying $480 a month for W and $125 for the girls to go to a before school program since I started school before them. And now? Now we pay $660 a month for W and $360 a month for an after school program for the girls. Also, we make less here than we did before. Super duper.
Back to the house though. We had to make a really tough choice. Keep holding on when we couldn't afford to (aka take out a loan we couldn't afford to make it through the summer) or let it go back to the back in a deed in lieu of foreclosure process. We chose the latter. We started the papers in May. Celebrated W's 4th birthday in July. We are just finishing the process now in December. It's a very long slow process.
Then another opportunity presented itself and another decision. A big one. A good friend of mine from high school came to visit from North Dakota. I lamented to her our issues with the slow local economy, the house, etc. She told me about the booming economy in ND. The Jobs! The Housing! The Cost of Living! So I applied for a job at the school district there, and after one phone interview they offered me the job. So, we debated. We were loosing the house, the economy was failing. There was talk of lay-off with J's company. We decided to jump.
We waited until after the county fair (post coming soon for that one!) and we packed up our chickens, dogs and a u-haul and head northeast.
Our first weeks here were awful (another post lol). And life settled down, but was it all that we were told? No. There are jobs aplenty for sure, but the pay is less and we now have to pay a state income tax, which is something new for us. Prices in general are higher here. Lots of housing options, but very few accept pets, and even fewer accept large dogs. We pay a premium for our 3 bedroom townhouse because it was literally one of the only places that would take 2 dogs over 30 pounds. Seriously. And yes you read that right. 3 bedrooms. For 6 people ya'll. The 3 girls share one and Weston gets his own, and we have our bedroom. 6 people are sharing a little less than 1200 sq. feet of house with no yard. But we do have a garage, which is handy. We keep the chickens at my friends family farmhouse 30 minutes south of town, which works as that's where J found work.
We know we will be moving back as soon at the opportunity presents itself, most certainly after the school year ends in May.
What did 2016 teach us? How to rely on each other when life falls apart. How to admit defeat. That sometimes the grass isn't as green as the cows on the other side tell you. It taught me that I need to finish my education for our big-ish family of 6 to be able to live. How to live with far less than we ever thought we could. How to budget more than we thought possible. But by far the biggest thing 2016 taught us is about family. I never thought I could miss my family like I do. My heart hurts every time I think of those we left behind us. How little time my kids have left with their great-grandparents. How much we've missed of our newest niece's first year. And so much more. We need our families to be closer than they are right now.
That's what we learned from the year that took so much from us. We hope 2017 will give us enough time to get it back.
Welcome 2017
