In December, I wrote:
The last month has been a whirlwind, and the next month will be a whirlwind too. I can’t get into a lot of details yet, but life in Buckleyland has been changing — a lot. Good changes, but stressful at the moment. We’ll be glad when it’s over.
Well, it’s over.
If you haven’t heard already, we moved down to Texas back in January — partly for Betsy’s job, partly because we’d been living in one little town in Ohio for about a decade and we wanted a change in our lives. We stayed in a hotel for a few weeks while we bought our new house, then we got moved in, and then we sold the old house. (All of those things had complications of their own, but I won’t bore you with details.) We’re still transitioning in a few areas, but for the most part, we’re full-time Texans now.

Big changes like this never feel real to me ahead of time. I always feel instinctively that they won’t happen, or that they’ll be an explosive disaster, or both. I don’t believe that, I just feel it. So I’m happy to report that we didn’t get disastered (yet) and we’ve settled in pretty well and life is pretty good. We’ve got Evan in a new daycare. We get to see a lot more of my dad and stepmom, who now live (relatively) nearby. We even found a Half Price Books in the area — I’m reading some stories by Jorge Luis Borges right now, and they’re fabulous, but that’s another topic.
One thing we were really worried about was having Evan on a 3-4 hour airplane flight. I had visions of screaming and more screaming — not because he’s a habitual screamer, but because you never know how a kid will react to something new. But he did great. Played with stickers the whole time, didn’t cry a bit.
Plus, we’re living fairly near the coast, so the weather isn’t quite as horribly hot in the middle of summer — or so I’m told.
We live in a great little neighborhood, lots of big old trees for shade, not much traffic, plenty of other families with kids. We go out walking around side streets with Evan a lot, and he loves pointing out house numbers. (I sometimes suspect it’s his main reason for wanting to walk.)
On one such walk, I saw a car with the bumper sticker:
I’m a conservative. DEAL WITH IT.
Of course, I was taken aback by the car owner’s courage and boldness. (A conservative? In Texas?) But you’ll be happy to learn that, after a week of soul-searching and intensive therapy, I have, in fact, dealt with it.
I’ll be fine as long as we never have any hurricanes or anything like that. I’m pretty sure that the quadrupling of our homeowner’s insurance premiums was just an abundance of caution.
Have a good weekend!