Just as when we left Blacksburg, there were tears on our last day. It felt eerie having no one else around; I think that's the only move where we had no one helping us close the truck and keeping us company. At one point, someone we only just befriended brought us chocolate chip cookies! And our realtor stopped by to keep us up to date about re-listing the house. But we closed the truck (with great effort!), we took our family drive around Pueblo to say goodbye, and then, much later than we'd intended, we drove away.
I decided there are too few pictures of me on this thing. Here I am, fooling around in the hotel room where I'm dog-sitting while the rest of the family eats. I was interested in the effect of humidity on my hair; we were in Kansas.
Our only real break in the journey was in St. Louis, where our dear friends of 10 years now, Josh and Melissa, put us up again in their beautiful home. The VBS program on Sunday gave us a kid-free opportunity for a walk; some of our only alone time of the move. What a blessing! Downtown St. Louis is lovely and quiet and contains some very hip coffee shops.
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| A Missourian baby robin greeted us! |
And the kids clustered up for a pic. This was our first visit with two month old Micah! He is a truly beautiful baby, and totally gave me the baby rabies again. Yikes....
I spent lot of time in parking lots, which is what happens when you drive two vehicles with two cats and a dog across the country and still want to eat. I loved that we found a Big Boy's! I vividly remember climbing onto that thing's head, and only really getting mild disapproval from my parents, which makes me feel better about the things I've been too tired to stop my kids from doing.
When you break down the drive, it oddly seems to take less time. On our last travel day, we finally got to see a Great Lake. Here's Erie:
And suddenly, we were in Rochester, unloading our summer baggage into his waiting little house. He's been living in the basement since we arrived to fill his house with noise and stuff! Pray for Dad.
The next day, we got our Wegmans Shoppers Club Card!!! Only three days later, we got our Monroe County Library Card. (We've since acquired NYS licenses and plates and... other things...).
We also got ourselves a Strong Museum Membership! This has to be the most valuable membership in town, over the zoo as the zoo is really only usable for half the year. The Museum of Play is going to get us THROUGH this winter.
Here, Adele sorts mail at One History Place in the Strong:
This is one of my favorite nooks in the museum, upstairs behind the arcade. It's got like 20 floor games, including dodgeball and dance and jump rope games, and I've gotten sweaty and closed my watch rings on this glowing mat.
Since Jon started work on June 28th, I've spent most of my time at Dad's house. I only have a car about half or 2/3 of the time, as Jon's carpool (the lovely and esteemed Allison Brown) can't ALWAYS take him to work when he wants to be there. We have cobbled through, though, thanks to help from Dad's fiance, Agnes, who loans us her car so generously. (We can't buy our second car until we close on our new house for debt-to-income reasons; we know we need a second car).
So I've made a LOT of use out of the park down the street from Dad's house. There's a dog park just around the corner! And these guys are either at each other's throats or in a close confederation. They have "secret meetings" almost every day. I try to be mature and not barge in on them suddenly.
We hit the fireworks at Henrietta Town Park this year.
And, it's looking like, we're going to see them there kind of a lot in the future...
I need to lead with the fact that it's been an intensely difficult and stressful few months. We're working hard to get enjoyment where we can, but I've had at least a mild stress stomachache almost continuously since mid-May. These candles are used in Mayan ancestor ceremonies, and I bought and used them in a private ceremony of my own after my Grandmother, Dorothy, died in early June, just a couple of weeks short of her 96th birthday. It comforted me that our visit in 2017 was so quality, and that she was feeling so good, because she was poorly for most of 2018. But I really hate that I was only a few weeks from moving east when we lost her. In so many ways, this transition was way harder than I'd imagined.
We enjoyed the desert, and also danced in the rain!
And at the public library:
Don Otto with a goat on a local Virginia farm:
That week was so meaningful and beautiful. I'm so glad I made it a priority to go, despite the engrossing project of getting out house ready to show. That took most of April, by the way. From the time that we found out about the job, until we arrived here in Rochester, we've been devoting every bit of non-work, non-church, non-girl-scouting time to our house. I think this is part of why I can't relax until the business is complete. But in the second week of May, just a week after we put our house on the market, I was faced with another emotional and labor-intensive project: the D60 Teacher's Strike. 
Miles and Adele were out with us every morning, and Miles, every afternoon too. They learned the chants and made signs and loved being close to their teachers as they learned these very real civics lessons. 
Finally, when the board realized they had burned through the allotted snow days refusing to meet with the union, they got it done and we had a contract and a return-to-work agreement we could live with. We had to use two personal days for the strike, but the rest were paid for and there was no retaliation.
My favorite part was the line dancing! I loved the opportunity, too, to get to know my colleagues, outside the classroom and the usual contexts. As on sign said, the strike was the "Best Professional Development Activity Ever!" 
My favorite goodbye to Heaton happened about we week after we returned. There was some discomfort in going back and working among people who had chosen not to strike, and among the administrators, who were fairly weird about the whole thing. So, those of use who did strike, and who called ourselves the Warhawks, ordered tee-shirts and organized a couple of reunion events to keep the spirit. I'll never forget that I had the privilege to be part of this!
I'm also grateful because that week provided a needed distraction from the engrossing project of selling the house. It's been so exhausting! And only some of the exhaustion is physical. Not only did we have to keep the house absolutely clean at almost all times for the last month before our move, but we had to ride this weekly roller coaster. We had probably 20-odd showings while we were still in town, and our hopes kept spiking and plummeting. This formed the backdrop to the strike, the end of the year wind-down, the field trips, the year-concluding festivities for the kids. And it's why I couldn't bring myself to update.
The month of May did still have a lot of lovely moments, for which I did manage to stay present. I kept my eyes open to the desert landscape, even as I worried and prayed, because I knew I'd miss it. 
And I do.
Easter was delightful. We got up early, as is our custom, to go to church for the earliest possible service. I was disappointed that it wasn't a vigil service, though, but an ordinary mass! It just started in candlelight. Next year I will be sure to find a vigil; that's my favorite service of the year. For the first time, we attended a church that had an Easter Egg hunt, though! So that helped make up for it. I sang in the choir for the second service, which was fabulous! And then the romp began. The lovely woman who planned it got WAY too many eggs, so by the end they were begging the older children to help clear the eggs from the tot area. We still have plastic bags FULL of unopened eggs. But the kids felt like leprechauns at the end of a rainbow!
Miles' third year in a row in an Easter dress. There are lots of people at our church who think we have two daughters, and that's fine with Miles. He says, he doesn't mind if people think he's a girl, but he corrects them because he just wants them to know that he IS a boy. He is and forever will be his own person. 
I had someone snap a picture as it had been a while since we'd had a family photo. Too bad it's so backlit, but it's otherwise pretty good!
And then it was Easter Monday, and I was back at work for a teacher work day, planning with my teammate, when I got the texts from Jon, and we learned his mission out East had been successful: Geneseo had offered him a job!
I am trying to pump as much love into my last two months here as I can. I'm trying to stay present with my sixth graders (it's HARD, man; I am so over this school year!) even while I'm applying for jobs. I'm trying to cherish my runs with Koopa around town, the gorgeous views, even while I'm compulsively checking Zillow and worrying about how we're ever going to get our house sell-ready while we're still living in it and working full time (any tips for this appreciated, Melissa!). I'm trying to enjoy ordinary things, like our choir anthem today or our trip to Home Depot with Adele's Daisy troop yesterday. 
Or in another trip to El Pueblo Museum to buy Pueblo paraphernalia at the gift shop while Adele played in the teepee and with the chuck wagon. 
I'm alternately exultant, and then worried. All my anxieties are spiking; something is bound to go wrong, right? Melissa gave me a valuable reminder via this Brene Brown clip: this inability to accept and enjoy the good, and constant fear that it will somehow be taken away, this is just my unwillingness to be vulnerable. And if you can't be vulnerable, you can't be happy. Ever.