December, 2010
A visit to my in-laws home in Lincoln, Nebraska had come to a end. Tom and I woke and begrudgingly rose at 7:30am, stumbled to the bathroom for quick showers, packed up the car, buckled two restless and grumpy children into their carseats, and drove south.
After a long and exhausting day in the car, the four of us stopped for the night at a Country Inn & Suites in Norman, Oklahoma. We treated the kids to a quick swim in the pool and a dip in the hot tub, fed them a hodgepodge dinner in our hotel room, and tucked them into bed.
Once the kids finally drifted off to dreamland, Tom and I watched football on television, reminisced about the year we would soon leave, and worried about about the year on whose door we were knocking.
On that day, almost exactly one year ago, we had just bid farewell to our lives in Michigan and were midway through moving more than 1,000 miles away to Texas. We were less than excited about leaving our families and friends, nervous about Tom's new job, and scared we might not fit in in our new city and state, which we knew would be dramatically different - demographically, culturally, politically, religiously, climatologically - than the cities we'd previously called home.
The following morning we finished the drive to Texas, hoping and praying we weren't making the biggest mistake of our lives.
Fast forward to this morning...
December, 2011
A visit to my in-laws home in Lincoln, Nebraska came to a end. Tom and I woke and begrudgingly rose at 7:30am, stumbled to the bathroom for quick showers, packed up the car, buckled two restless and grumpy children into their carseats, and drove south.
After a long and exhausting day in the car, the four of us stopped for the night at a Country Inn & Suites in Norman, Oklahoma. We treated the kids to a quick swim in the pool and a dip in the hot tub, fed them a hodgepodge dinner in our hotel room, and tucked them into bed.
Once the kids finally drifted off to dreamland, Tom and I watched football on television, reminisced about the year we would soon leave, and worried about about the year on whose door we were knocking.
Today, almost exactly one year after we bid farewell to our lives in Michigan and moved more than 1,000 miles to Texas, we consider ourselves lucky. We still miss our families and friends, but Tom has settled into his new job and all four of us have found a way to fit in. And as it turns out, "different" doesn't necessarily translate to "bad" or "worse" or "less desirable" as I feared it would.
Tomorrow morning we will finish the drive to Texas, headed home.
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