We're home!!!

So, we're here. I am so thankful that Jeremy had some vacation days where he could stay home and help me pack a few days before the big move. I tried to pack as much as I could the month before we left but as we found out there's a lot of stuff you need until the last minute. I'm also soooo thankful for Jeremy's dad who always volunteers to help whenever we need it. He was a lifesaver! The trip up went very well. I was wondering how it'd be to travel with a dog but Paisley did great. We made it in on Saturday and we actually (with a lot of help) got the whole truck unloaded and Jakob spent the night with his Grandma so he could go to church with her on Sunday and me and Jeremy started trying to get things unpacked. By Monday afternoon the whole house was unpacked. My mom came over Monday and helped me unpack the kitchen which seemed like it took the longest and I had the least patience for, but maybe that's just because it was the last room full of boxes and I was really over unpacking. I took Jeremy to the airport Tuesday morning @ 4 a.m. to put him on a plane back to south florida. I miss him so much already. I find myself wanting to call him 20 times a day and tell him something Jakob did or said or some great idea I had but I have to file those thoughts away and tell him at night when he calls. When he calls Jakob says "hi daddy" then he'll say "love you, bye" he's not much of a conversationalist right now, but I know he loves his daddy :) 

We've been talking for quite a while about if our renter ever moved out of this house and what we'd have to do. It took us 8 months to find the guy who rented the house the first time and even then we had to lower the rent we were asking before we found him. We knew we couldn't wait another 8 months or really even 2 months before we'd just have to move into it and leave Jeremy down there. Every time we'd talk about moving back into our house we'd preface it with "now remember, the house is really small" or "it's going to be a big change from what we are used to now" I know it sounds superficial or silly but I really worried if we'd have enough room in the house or if we'd feel very cramped and packed into the place. When we lived here before Jakob was just a newborn and he didn't have much in the way of toys and stuff in general. Now he has a lot of stuff. I guess we had both been dreading the tight living quarters but I had determined in my heart that I would be thankful and not complain with my words or even in my heart about the house being too small. When we got here we were very happy that everything fit into the house and it doesn't feel cramped at all. We don't have a garage but I think eventually there's a plan to add a big shed/barn in the backyard where we can have a lot more storage. Our mortgage payment is actually over 200 dollars less than what we payed in rent so we will appreciate that too, I'm sure. 

We already knew that the yard had not been taken care of because Jeremy comes over a couple times a year and pressure washes the house and does some maintenance type stuff on it. Last time he came the yard was a wreck. That's pretty much when I knew the guy would be leaving soon because he no longer cared how the place looked on the outside. It made me nervous about what the house looked like on the inside. Thankfully there was no major damage to the house. When the guy moved out he really tore up the door frames (obviously he had giant furniture or something) and banged up a few of the walls. My dad patched the walls and painted my bedroom for me. Eventually we will have to replace the door frames that the guy chipped up but we can do that later. I took some pictures and they will probably look pretty familiar to y'all because everything is pretty much in the same places as when I lived here the first time :) I took a picture of my bedroom because I picked out a light blue paint (it actually looked lighter than it is on the little card) and I am really loving it. We turned Jakob's old bedroom into the office. It makes me a little sad because we made his room so nice but it is the smaller of the two bedrooms and we wanted him to be comfortable so we gave him the bigger room. His room needs painting but it will wait into Jeremy gets here (either by moving or for thanksgiving) Jakob is loving having trees (we had no trees in our yard in Labelle) mostly because he can collect acorns to his hearts content :) He is also loving visiting with his family. All day he's been saying "go nana's house a-morrow" He hasn't yet learned that we have our own house here, we won't be staying with nana all the time. 

When we left 3 years ago I thought this place was a little ghetto ;) Now I've lived near a pretty ghetto town, and we had a little bit of ghetto in Labelle too and I realize this place is just redneck, there is a big difference. Our neighborhood is growing. I saw a lot of mom's walking today with their kids in strollers. Couples out for a jog. It's turning in to a family kinda place instead of a few houses out in the sticks, which is what it was when we bought our house. I am loving it. It doesn't matter that we've been gone for 3 years, this house still feels like home. I feel kinda guilty because I am feeling so good about being here and Jeremy is down there by himself :( hopefully he won't have to be for too much longer. 

It was super cold the first few days we were here...let me preface that by saying y'all know I'm a florida girl and cold to me is 70 degrees. The high has been in the 60's and the morning I took Jeremy to Pensacola it was 40 something. That is cold to me! Today was a gorgeous 75 degrees. I am excited to take Jakey to the park and the library. I've still got to call and try to rush them along in getting him into speech therapy. 

Well, that's about all I can think to write right now. I am super tired. Single parenting doesn't seem too hard until the end of the day when your child is tired and decides they don't want to do anything you ask them to. That moment when you'd look at your hubby and he'd step in and take care of stuff. Yes, we had that moment tonight. It has worn me out and I'm ready for bed. Thank-you all for your prayers. Hoping to have good news to share with you very soon. Until then, here's a few pics of the inside of the house. The yard looks pitiful right now. I'll probably take pictures as we work on the yard and show you before and afters :)       

View of the living room

Living room and bubbie playing with his angry birds :)

My bedroom

Jakob's room

Jakob's old bedroom aka the office. Yes, it's Jeremy's man cave and he has free reign of decorating with this one room. There's also a turkey tail hanging on the other wall (lol)

Honestly...

I keep starting blogs and then not finishing them. Honestly I have way too much going on around the house as well as in my brain to be completely real and honest about how I'm feeling. I've been waiting to leave this place since the first day we moved here :) sounds crazy right? Well you've probably never seen a town like Labelle before. Very different. Anyways, the job announcement closed early this morning so that means the company will go through all the applications and send the best ones to JG. We may hear something in a week or two. We're excited, nervous, happy, anxious and trying to trust God in the situation. It seems totally insane that we're making this move without Jeremy having the job but we really don't see any other options as of right now. It'd be nice to look back and see how God opened all the doors (and windows) for us to move back to Crestview. Right now though we don't want to presume anything, just take it a day at a time and lean on Him. I will definitely be blogging a whole lot more once we get settled. Thanks for all the encouragement and prayers! 

-Shauna

Scatterbrained...

Well, most of you know that Jakob and I are moving back to Crestview at the end of the month. If you didn't know, well, Jakob and I are moving back to Crestview at the end of the month. Here's what happened, it's an even longer story than we had first thought. 
Last Saturday night my mom called me and said they drove out to our neighborhood (so my dad could hang a deer stand on Pastor Humphries property) and they saw a moving van outside our house. The guy was taking an empty dolly into the house, so they assumed he's moving out. Had we gotten any notice from him? Well, no we hadn't. Immediately Jeremy starts e-mailing people from our rental agency trying to find out what's going on. Our mortgage payment is due on Monday and we haven't heard a word about this from anybody. Sunday someone from the rental agency e-mails and says no they had no notice he was moving. They said they'd get in touch with him on Monday and try to find out what's up. The renter said he'd notified someone that works at the agency in August telling them he'd be out of the house by the end of September. The person Jeremy was talking to said he didn't notify them because everyone at the agency knows a notice to vacate must be in writing.
 Anyways, now we're faced with the fact that we owe a mortgage payment right now. We also cannot afford our rent in this house as well as our mortgage payment for multiple months until we can rent the house again (last time it took 8 months to find a renter) so we had to decide what to do. We thought about looking at cheaper housing in Labelle, but it is just not even an option. As I stated before this town has very little rental properties and anything available in a price range we could afford is in a very bad part of town where it would not be safe for us to live. Our county has the highest unemployment rate in the state of Florida so it's not like I can go get a job and we can squeak by. The only option we really feel we have is to move all of our belongings back home into our house.
 Me and Jakob will live back home and Jeremy will stay here and work and look for another job. His boss from back home says the job @ JG should be advertised in October and hired in November. Obviously we're hoping that comes through but we're not counting on it because they keep doing this to us over and over. There's a couple other opportunities coming up so he will just have to do some serious searching for a job closer to home. In the mean time I will get Jakob into speech therapy in Crestview as well as hopefully a "day care" type program where he can be with other kids a couple hours a day. I feel much better about putting him in a head start program up there than I do down here.
 We were very nervous about what our house might look like on the inside considering the guy left in the middle of the night and gave no notice. Jeremy's mom went by and checked it out for us and it looks great. Spotless. Praise the Lord for that. It turns out after all was said and done the guy had given his 30 day notice. The agent who dealt with our rental (who happened to be his niece) had been fired sometime in August so she never told them he was leaving or filled out any paperwork. Everything has worked out o.k. so far. We got a few boxes packed yesterday. 
I am very emotional about the whole thing. The part that is hardest for me is the unknown. I don't know when our family will be able to be back together. I don't know if Jeremy will get the job back home or if we'll have to move again and figure out once again what to do with the house we own. I don't know how Jakob will do without his daddy at home every night. I know I will miss my hubby, that's not a hard one to figure out. 
Jeremy will be staying at the Pastor's house down here. They have a really nice travel trailer that company stays in when they visit and they've offered it to Jeremy. I am glad he can stay near our church family because I know they'll take good care of him and keep him company. Even the how's of trying to run 2 households are pretty much unknown to us right now. 
I thank everyone who has been praying for us and offering words of encouragement. I haven't really said anything about all of this on FB yet because honestly I don't want to talk about it or think about it any more than I already do. I figure I'll give it another week or two then announce it. 
Yesterday my endocrinologist (or doctor wonderful as I like to call him) was being a total jerk to me and I broke down crying. He told me he thought I was depressed. I was thinking dude, you have no idea how much I've got going on right now. The last thing I needed was a rude doctor who wouldn't let me speak or ask about a medication that I am greatly in need of. I didn't tell him how I really felt, I just wanted to get out of his office and never have to enter it again. No more doctor wonderful. Praise the Lord for small favors :) 
I know this post is pretty scattered and random. That's about how I feel my brain is right now. Scattered and random. It does help to get my thoughts/fears/ feelings out of my brain and onto this page. If you think of us please pray that we will have peace and that God will work this whole situation out for us (he's the only one that can!) and please know that I'm not just always asking you girls to pray for me, I pray for you too. That is one reason I'm so thankful for blogs. You can be honest with me and I can be honest with you and we can all pray for each other. 
xoxo
-Shauna

Even if...

This song is soooo good! Don't we all have those things in our lives that we're anxious about? We don't know if they're going to work out the way that we hope or not. I know I've got multiple burdens on my heart right now. I am thankful that I can trust who God is and know that he will do what's right for me. He is good and faithful no matter the outcome of circumstances in my life. Even if my path in life is rocky and difficult it doesn't change who God is. He is God, he is good, forever faithful. I am so thankful to have him in my life