Daily Q

Question:  Of all the geographical moves you've made, which one was your biggest adjustment?  Why?

Answer:  That's easy.  Our move to where we are now.

We had dreamed of being able to move our family to a place like this.  Beautiful, clean, managed, nice homes, really good schools, etc.  Unexpected, the opportunity presented itself and we jumped at it.  It was and still is all of those things.  But the adjustment for us was a hard one.

I guess it would be good to understand where we came from in order to understand why it was such an ajustment for us.  We graduated from school.  We were young, two little boys, poor, and just starting out in life.  Our job took us to socal.  We rented an apartment for a while and then bought a duplex with some friends and each lived in one side of it.  We bought when interest rates were 18%! But it was a START. It was in Santa Ana.  I did inhome daycare in order to make ends meet. And I cried every morning because I couldn't just be home with my own little kids. But it is life, and you do what you have to do.  I had one pair of shoes--flip flops and I wore them even to church.  We had another baby and had 3 kids in one bedroom, while our friends had 5 children between the two bedrooms and turned their living room into the master bedroom at night with their sofa bed.  Interest rates went down and we sold and bought our home in Westminster.  It was in foreclosure and in really bad shape, BUT we got it for a great deal and during the 10 years we lived there turned it into the best house on the street.  We had great friends and a wonderful ward, even though our church building was in the middle of quickly becoming gang territory.  I remember some RS activity nights that were cancelled due to some gang violence, but that's just what we knew. 

Duff changed jobs and it brought us to south orange county.  We thought we had died and gone to heaven!  And it was all of that.  I would take Shaun to soccer practice and look around and pinch myself that we lived here.  When I would run errands I would do the same thing.

We bought in a new community with a gate.  Naievly we thought it would be about cars not being parked on lawns and houses not being pink or purple and residents needing and wanting to keep their yards nice.  It is about those things, and we love that.  But it was also about decorating your home and yards and that caught us off guard.  Toys and vacationing.  People often think that having money solves all of your problems--or at least most of them.  Affluence just presents a whole other set of problems.  Some that aren't so easy to spot and you have to be careful.

For some reason, schools and school districts were a big issue.  That ended up being hard for our kids and when your kids have a hard time, so do you.  We just believe you live where you live you go where you go.  And you should've checked that out before you bought.   You know:  Bloom Where You're Planted.   It was interesting to find so many people who knew just how to manipulate the system with addresses and utility bills, letters from 'professionals', certain programs offered.  It was that way at church too.  It was hard to understand.  I grew up in a ward with 3 different high schools and we weren't defined by that.  We stuck together and our friendship groups were not based on where we went to school.  Our church relationship was more important than where we went to school.  One of my very best friends to this day at church didn't go to my high school or live in my neighborhood.  Our seminary classes were that way too.  3-4 different schools met together.  The only time school came up were on the weeks when we played each other in football and after the game we went back to not being rivals.  Our mutual nights weren't calendared around which school had finals or vacations, and we never had announcements about which school was doing what in sports and such.  Sometimes it reminded me of the scriptures where it talks about classes of people based on their opportunity for learning.  The difference in education we experienced was so huge and yet people were fretting over which school they had to go to.  I don't know if they realized how blessed they actually were with their kids schooling.  We had just come from a situation where when I picked up the carpool from the high school we had cops involved in a gang fight.  And our enthicity only made up 13% of the school.  Our announcements came home in 4 different languages.

Since so much of our area was new building, there were at least 10 new families per week moving into the ward.  It took a while to settle down.  Our poor bishop!  Can you imagine?  So many new people to find callings for.  Christine was the 20th new baby born that year!

So it was things like that, that made the adjustment hard for us.  But we learned a lot and our kids learned a lot too and we are better for it.  At a stake conference shortly after we moved here, the visiting authority changed his remarks and talked to us about the area where we live and told us that if we lived here it was because the Lord had led us here.  That we were a unique area and were here for our profit and learning to lead out.  I have never forgotten that.

Time is a wonderful thing.  Our family has had some of the best experiences we could have ever asked for living here.  We have had great and wonderful leaders and teachers and schools and friends, and neighbors.  We love living here and don't have any regrets about our move.  But the adjustment was not as easy as some of the other places we lived prior.