01 Dec 2006 03:18 PM

On the Road

I'm going to go ahead and add some 'introductory' entries that I already wrote!

16 November 2006

We have left the building! As of 10:45 this morning, we are officially living in our motorhome. We packed up our belongings last night - actually, I did the final (as well as most of the original) packing, staying up until 5 this morning. Then we got up at 6:30 and tried to leave. The kids spent the night at their grandparents house while we finished everything up, so we had to pick them up so Grandmommy (my mother-in-law) could leave for work this morning. Even without the kids, we didn't manage to leave on time, but fortunately she had called in late. Then we thought that we had left the wireless broadband card for our laptop at home. Since I absolutely, positively MUST HAVE INTERNET while being trapped inside a 35 foot motorhome with three-going-on-four kids, we turned around and drove back across Atlanta. Of course, we couldn't find said card; after careful hunting, we determined it was actually inside the motorhome. That should give you a clue about the state of our new residence - a lot of the last-minute packing got thrown into a box 'to sort'. I am going to dump what is left when we go back to Atlanta for Christmas. For now, however, it is piled in the back. In addition to all that , we sold our washer and dryer at a yard sale on Saturday, and so have gone without for five days (it's Thursday now). So we have huge bags of dirty clothes piled in the back, ready to be thrown into the laundromat. Fortunately for us, we have lots of quarters. I intended to try to get at least one load of socks and underware done at my inlaws, but of course I kept forgetting to take them over. Something about downsizing from a 2700 square foot house to a 35 foot motorhome keeps you busy.

For those who don't know - since this is my first post, that would be practically everyone - my husband has taken a new job that involves him traveling aproximately 25 days a month. Rather than having me sitting at home alone with three children plus one due in April, we decided instead that our family should travel with him. We already had planned to homeschool, so education was not a problem. In fact, our biggest problem so far has been getting rid of all of the junk we accumulated in almost six years of marriage. You wouldn't think that would be a lot, but since we are both descended from serious packrats, it was a surprising amount of stuff. Throughout our yardsale, folks would ask us, "Where did you get so much stuff?" My husband just turned 30, and I am six months past my 27th birthday, so it is amazing. Even more amazing was how much of it was given to us or purchased at yard sales. This means that the majority of it was fairly easy to part with. Amazingly, I had a harder time with my kids' toys and clothes than with any of my stuff. It was too easy to look at an adorable outfit or a great toy and remember my oldest when she was teeny tiny. Of course, some toys and stained outfits were far easier to get rid of than others - but I escaped with about four boxes of toys still in my clutches.

A quick introduction to our family. We are an LDS homeschooling family of five at present. My husband, Michael, has not only recently switched jobs, he completely changed industries. After five years and two layoffs in the telecommunication industry, we decided that it was time to jump ship and change fields. Recent mergers convinced us that the smaller CLECs were struggling too hard stay afloat for our comfort zone. So he chose a to take a job in the construction instillation field, doing the same type of work he did straight out of high school. No college degree needed, but it makes almost twice as much as he made working in an office. Granted, the work is harder and more physical, and a lot of travel is involved, but frankly, that is something of a plus. I like the idea of traveling, especially while the kids are young (when they are older, I'd like them to be able to do more sports or clubs, depending on their interests), and think this opens up excellent opportunities for homeschooling on site. How much more do you think they will learn from a Gettysburg reenactment than reading about it in a history text? Lest you think they are too young, they've already picked up a great deal of civil war information from our visit to Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg.

Speaking of children, we have three. My oldest, Dawn, is five and a half. She loves to draw and read, as well as make things. She practically taught herself to read while she was four; an early reader myself, I worked hard not to push her and so only helped when she asked me. She is reading at approximately a second grade level, I would guess, although she also loves to read her scriptures. She struggles over some of the harder words, but after one or two exposures, she is confidently sight-reading. Her newest acquisition is 'synogauge'. My currently-middle child, Michael (or 'Mookie'), will turn four in January. He has started working on reading, with a lot of help from his big sister. He can sound out three-to-five letter words, and I plan to work more intensively with him while we are living in the motorhome; the last month has been rather chaotic. The baby at present is Jimmy, also only a few months shy of his birthday. He'll be two in February; hard to believe he will be so big! He is my least-verbal child thus far, although after Halloween (when he learned the magic words 'trick or treat') his speaking ability shot up. Prior to that, he would articulate basically whenever he felt like it, but relied more on grunts. Between his dad and his older siblings, grunting got the job done, so he had no incentive to learn to talk. Now he is clearly speaking a variety of words, and I love listening to him work on a new one. The last child is due in April; we have no clue as to the sex. In fact, we have no clue as to the due date. We have been without insurance for a number of months, although our new job includes full medical, dental, and vision benefits for the family. Although they don't kick in until February, I intend to visit the doctor once we get to our new destination.

Then there is me, the Mommy of the group. I'm 27, a graduate of Agnes Scott College with a Bachelors in Astrophysics and Creative Writing. I'm a stay-at-home mom, a job I fully enjoy. As I mentioned, we are homeschooling or plan to homeschool our kids, a job that falls primarily on my shoulders. Finally, I am an 'aspiring' writer; I keep vowing to freelance and have sent out several queries (and recieved several rejections; that makes me a 'real' writer, right?) for nonfiction articles. I also keep a portfolio of short stories on Writing.com, under the penname 'scottiegazelle'.

It's time to fold up the laptop now. My husband is driving our land yacht down the road and muttering evily because I won't let him listen to the radio while I type. We still have a lot of hours on the road for our first leg - we are still in Georiga (just north of Commerce) and headed all the way to Natural Bridge, Virginia tonight. I'm looking forward to the trip and plan to do a little siteseeing. In the meantime, I think I'd just like to crash, since I got only an hour of sleep; however, the bed in the back of the motorhome is covered with (seperate) piles of dirty and clean clothes, and is just too much to deal with. The nice thing about the motorhome, however, is that the front seats are pretty comfortable. So I think I'll stretch out and just relax! It's nice to let my husband do all the driving.

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