The Transition

I thought I'd just end the blog upon returning home....sort of write a good-bye and move along with land life. When I mentioned this to a friend, she said no way. She said she wanted to hear updates about our transition to land life.

So, in September, I began to put together a blog post with pictures telling and showing how things were going. And things were going well, and fast! We were so busy that we, sadly, didn't think a lot about Gromit. Unfortunately, those pictures cannot ever be posted and the emotion of those first days and months are now too far back for me to express them the way I had them written at the time. So much has happened.
So in a nut shell, as best as I can remember.......

August was really busy with unpacking and reorganizing and going through many, many boxes of stuff we had stored away in the house before we left. The girls were studying hard to get ready to write their exams. Liam was enjoying his last days of 'freedom'. Michael started work with his former company and I had an interview scheduled for September to get on the supply teacher list of my former school board. Things were moving in a good direction with the expected ups and downs.

September had us feeling more settled in our house, but there was then the adjustment of going to school. It was a time of tiredness and overwhelm, but as the weeks progressed, things began to settle. I was preparing for my job interview and feeling very stressed. The interview went well and I was offered a job as a supply teacher. Yeah! My orientation for starting work was until early October, which gave me more time to get us more settled in. It felt like everything was falling into place and we hadn't really had much time to think too much about Gromit and missing him or our former life. We were all just too busy and tired to think about anything but our day to day.

And then it happened......

......our house caught on fire.

Fortunately, we are all safe and well. Fortunately, our house was insured. There is so much, too much going on now for me to be able to, even in a nutshell, write about it. Lucky for us, we have had practice with crisis and do fairly well in high stress situations. Zoe made a beautiful comment one day, that we were a tight group already, but now we've become even closer. We've had to.

We lived with our wonderful friends two doors over for the first couple of weeks and are now renting a house. The day we moved into our rental, I was picking up a few things so that we could make pasta for dinner, when the enormity of it all hit me. It wasn't just noodles and tomato sauce that I needed to buy, it was everything. We have to replace everything. I just stood there paralyzed and befuddled.

So, needless to say, we have had to go on 'shopping marathons'
to get clothes, shoes, mattresses, kitchen stuff and on and on and on. Many of our family, friends and neighbours have offered help to get us re- established. Thank you so very much everyone for your love and support!