In Which I Surprise You

::The table, before and after it is filled with food and people.

::The babies have become entirely proficient at using the slide in the backyard.  They climb up the ladder, slide down (or get pushed down by a twin if they are hesitating too long), and repeat.  

::Zosia made this flag at school, and I think I'll leave it up until the fourth of July.

We're moving to California.  The Bay area, to be exact.  This summer, after the kids get out of school, and after we watch the neighborhood fireworks on the fourth of July, we are heading to the west coast. The kids lobbied really hard to fly on the fourth of July, so as to enjoy all of the fireworks displays across the country (sort of brilliant, don't you think?).  Then, a long debate followed as to whether this would be safe or not.  I'm not sure the children reached a satisfactory conclusion, so after the fourth of July it is.

We have signed a lease on a house that we have never seen.  We are renting out our house.  Have I surprised you yet?  Whew, I think I am sort of surprising myself, to tell you the truth,  but what's even more surprising than the fact that we are uprooting our little family and making a huge move across the country is the fact that I'm entirely at peace with all of it.  Excited, even.  

I'm not the adventurous type.  When I was a kid, immediately upon arriving at sleep away camp, I would start an intensive letter writing campaign to return back home.  Once, I convinced my dad that the food at our camp was so lackluster that he actually contacted a local grocer, who delivered a truck full of groceries to the camp (true story).  The camp director threw a party for the whole camp with those groceries, but I didn't get to go home, much to my dismay.

This place, here in Virginia, is home.  We love our neighborhood, our house, our church, the girls' school, our friends, our family.  We both grew up here and our parents live here.  We are very attached to this place.  But Ben's little startup has been given an incredible opportunity, and somewhere in the middle of our multi week marathon of discussing whether we could contemplate a move and what it would look like, along with a lot of soul searching and discussions about our overarching goals for our lives (and throw a trip to the west coast in there for good measure), we realized that this makes perfect sense for our family.  We woke up one morning and felt the certainty of God's guiding hand.  Life has reached out and offered us an incredible, beautiful, thrilling adventure.  It is somewhat neatly packaged, and involves some risk, as all adventures do, but also a great deal of security.  We will be exploring an entirely new part of the country for a couple of years, living in a place where it appears to be beautiful year round (yes, please!), and creating a new home.

There are still a million details to figure out.  We are working on those, and also working on being happy to live in a place where not all of the details are figured out.  

So there!  Did I surprise you?