Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope your Advent went well and that you had a beautiful Christmas with the people you love. We had two days with nice weather, good food and lots of family, as well as a beautiful midnight Mass. But this post isn't about Christmas. It's about a story that I've been wanting to tell but just haven't had the time. It's an intercessory story related to our move.
You see, in our history of moving we've never had an easy time. More often than not, the first house we would set out to buy would become encased in some sort of turmoil or other and we would end up buying a completely different house. This happened to us three times. The last time we moved, we did so because we had lost everything and were moving into a rental. Needless to say, God had mercy on us and there was no extra drama.
This time, however, we were buying again, and although we did not have a house to sell, I fully expected the experience to be like it had been in the past. I expected to find a house, fall in love with it, have something happen with the deal, lose the house and then find an even better one. After all, that's how it had been before.
But God had other plans. Let me backtrack a bit. For the past year +, I had been praying, along with many others, for Courtney Lenaburg and her family. In fact, it was just one year ago that she died. When she did, I cried along with everyone else. After her passing, I had read stories of her intercession, one in particular about a family who wanted to move but needed a miracle with their septic field. Through Courtney's intercession, that miracle occurred.
That got me thinking that maybe I should call upon Courtney to intercede for us in this move since I really didn't want to have to go through what we've been through in the past.
Can I tell you something? St. Courtney came through with flying colors. We began our search and had looked at a few houses when something (or someone :) nudged me back to the computer to look at the 90+ listings again. There I found it, the house we had overlooked the first time through. We went to see it and we loved it. We brought our kids (who, being older now, had some very definite opinions about what they were looking for). They loved it, too. We put in an offer and at first it didn't seem like we were going to come to terms with the seller, but I called on Courtney even more and before we knew it, the sellers came down in price and then started offering us their furniture...at no extra charge! We closed in 30 days! 30 days, people! With not one hitch.
Many times when miraculous things happen like this, I often find that God sends me a confirmation that what I am seeing is real. The moment this time was when we were at the closing (which only lasted about an hour) and our realtor said, "I don't think I've ever been at a closing that got funded that fast." From past experience, I know that that was God's way of telling me that I've witnessed something grand.
We moved into a great neighborhood. Having not had neighbors for 12 years, and having 7 children and 5 cars, we were a bit leery of what having neighbors might mean. Our neighbors are wonderful. Even funnier is the fact that in our small subdivision of about 33 homes, 95% of the people are Catholic. God has chosen a wonderful spot to reintroduce us into communal living.
I write this to let you know, in case you don't already, that there are many saints up there in heaven just waiting for us to call upon them for their help. There is no other explanation in my mind (based on our past experiences with moving) for how smoothly everything went other than her intercession. Miss Courtney is up there calling for miracles and how happy I am that we have been on the receiving end of her powerful intercession. Thank you, Mary and Jerry, for raising and caring for such an extraordinary young lady! I've been recommending her to others in need, so I think she'll be pretty busy up in heaven for quite some time.
St. Courtney, pray for us.
God Bless!
It has now been over two months since I've been here to my good ole blog. It has been a crazy time of moving our family of nine from our rental house on five acres to our own home in a neighborhood. In what became a rather fast-paced event, we began looking for a home, found one and then moved 30 days later. Since I really can't do-it-all, some - no A LOT - of things had to go and anything social media like was at the top of the list.
We're moved now and all settled in so I'm back to share again. I mean really, I had just decided that turning 50 warranted more blogging and look what happens? Sheesh. I'm still 50, though, so I guess it is better late than never.
There's so much to talk about that's happened over the past two months, if I can just remember it all! Like I said, we were down to a bare bones lifestyle for awhile so I thought I'd share how we handled the whole "move your family in 30 days" thing. And just to be clear, when our offer got accepted, we had not packed ONE box. Not even one! Also, we did all the packing and moving ourselves. Here's how it went down.
1. I knew that we needed to keep schooling as long as possible. With two high-schoolers and two grade-schoolers, I did not want to take off too much time. The high-schoolers kept to their schedule pretty well, it was the two younger ones that needed a revamp since much of what they did required me. Right off the bat we put our non-essential subjects on hold until the second semester. That included geography (which was taking up a lot of time), map skills and Latin. That right there made a huge difference.
2. My three college aged girls all have classes and jobs, so I knew they wouldn't be much help. When they were home and free (about 20 minutes over 30 days :), they were required to help out as much as possible, which they did.
3. My other four kids were an immense help, especially the two in high school! We got into a great rhythm of doing our school work in the morning and then packing and moving things in the afternoon. Because of their hard work, we only ended up taking two weeks off of school!
4. I made a firm decision to add nothing new to our schedule. We kept up with what we were already involved in but we rarely did any other activities or events beyond that. Saying NO was not fun, but crucial.
5. Once we got in the new house I spent the first week working like a mad woman to get it into a state of readiness. I knew that that was all the time I had, so we worked morning till night that first week so that everything was put away and in order. I knew that I wouldn't be able to function for very long with everyone wondering where things were.
So that is how we survived our 30 day moving adventure. Being organized was crucial. Also, the fact that I have decluttered on an ongoing basis made things a lot easier. That's not to say that we still didn't get rid of a lot of stuff! There were MANY bags of garbage as well as multiple trips to the local Goodwill. Hopefully everything that made the cut into the new house is stuff that we need and use and not much that is superfluous!
It's good to be back here and, God willing, I hope to continue on a much more regular basis. I say that, but we'll see what The Plan really is :)
God Bless!
