New Beginnings

Well hello there my dear Internets.  I cannot tell you how many times over the last three weeks I’ve longed for this moment of being able to sit down at the computer and tell you a story.  It’s a crazy story of life- life that actually happened to our family over the last few months.

Over the past few years the world of dance has taken over more and more of our daily life- that is no secret.  Combine that with our homeschooling, and I was simply feeling that I was in a season where my hobbies had to be put on a shelf for the time being.  My love of cooking?  On hold.  Our meals revolved around the simple.  Tacos, spaghetti, pizza, burgers.  Made from scratch, yes, but not very exciting or blog worthy.  My love of blogging?  Way on hold, because that took time I didn’t have due to the aforementioned dance and homeschooling.

And then on April 15th the unexpected crashed in.  Our dance studio closed.  Suddenly and abruptly, with no warning.  We had just spent the previous weekend at a competition and when we woke up Monday morning there was a note that classes were cancelled that evening.  Naively, I thought that our teachers were just so exhausted, that the owners decided to give everyone a day off to recuperate from the weekend.  Not so.  Late that day we received an e-mail that our beloved studio was gone.  Too much in a deficit, the studio could not operate for another day.

I honestly equate that 24 hour period with losing a loved one. I literally sat on our bed with a kid in each arm for hours.  We had the TV on, but weren’t really watching as the tears just would not stop flowing.  This was our world!  Our friends, our life!  Gone, just like that.

But if anyone has seen a mama bear or papa bear in action, you’d understand that this was not actually going to be the end of that world.  Seriously, by Tuesday night an ARMY of angry parents and teachers came together and created a plan.  We planned to continue our dance season to the end.  We devised a  short term plan that included competing at our last competition of the season in Chicago and putting on an end of year recital.  We also came up with ideas for a long term plan, but with little knowledge of how to put those thoughts into action.  How could we keep our beloved dance family together?  This was no easy task.

And yet the pieces began falling into place immediately. By the end of the week, we had practice space donated to us for all our competition teams to practice.  A complete dance schedule for a whole studio of families was put together, and one week after the close of our studio, we were dancing again.  It was nothing short of amazing.  By the end of that week, negotiations had been made with our previous studio space, and we were going to be allowed to use our old studio space at no charge.  We organized and called ourselves a new name and forged ahead to get ready for our competition- as well as work on our recital dances.

During this time, I did the first thing I could think of.  I used my powers for good.  🙂  I hopped on the computer and started writing.  It started innocently enough- I’d taken notes at the parent meeting that one night and offered to e-mail them to a few people.  Before I knew it, my e-mail list swelled to 325 families, and my new beyond full time job was to keep the communications flowing between teachers and parents.   Every day my task was to compile all the information and events of the day and send this information out to every dance family we could get ahold of.   And of course, along with this, I had to answer questions.  And more questions and more questions, and funnel information to the right people, and connect those people together, and most importantly, keep the negativity out of this experience.  It was absolutely crazy!!  I literally spent six weeks sitting at my computer- unless I was running the kids around.  And then the instant I was back at home I was answering more e-mails and creating new newsletters.

Things were moving forward with our short term plans very quickly.  The long term was still up in the air, and we all were holding our collective breath to see what would happen.  You see, 325 families is a lot of dance families.  125 of those were our competitive families, and these numbers also don’t include the 150 or so families who we never were able to get ahold of, or who decided to pursue other options in the area for dance.  With the numbers we were talking, it was literally impossible that we could all walk into another studio in the area and say “give us a home”.   And yet… mysteriously enough, that’s almost exactly what happened.

A very prominent studio in nearby Green Bay had been eyeing an expansion to Appleton for years.  But one thing prevented them from doing so.  Us.  So when our studio closed, contact was made with this other studio and the ball started rolling.  By early May we had our answer that we would have a new dance home that we could all join together.  It was amazing news, and gave us so much encouragement and hope.

But on the home-front, a new twist unexpectedly arrived.  On the first of May we were given our 30 days notice to leave our home.  Our landlord was selling our home to his son, and we needed to leave.  On top of all the dance chaos we were in the midst of, we now needed to pack and find a new home.  And we needed to do it immediately.  Fortunately, there was no time to really get upset or get emotional.  Running a dance studio was taking everything I had in me- somehow I needed to find a whole new reserve of energy to pack up our household and find a new home.  It was absolutely awful.  I divided my time as evenly as I could between packing up boxes, searching for a new home, and spending my time at the computer.

As May went on, we were having such terrible luck finding a home.  As we looked at a calendar and planned out our month, it quickly became clear to us that we had to move out Memorial Day weekend in order to meet our 30 day deadline.  We so wanted to exit our home on a positive note and meet that 30 day deadline.  Yet as Memorial weekend closed in on us, we STILL had no place to move to.  It was so stressful- and yet it wasn’t.  I can’t even explain it, but as we left each house we looked at, knowing it wasn’t the right one, we just had a sense of peace that God would lead us to the right one, and we would know it when we found it.  It was still frustrating though- and on top of all the chaos, Andy was working like gangbusters.  This was great from a financial standpoint, we needed funds to move.  But I felt like I was trying to navigate this process alone sometimes.  Thank God for my amazing children.  Seriously.  They packed up everything they could themselves- and they did it proudly and without complaining.  They were absolutely amazing and very quickly acclimated to the idea that we were on a new adventure to find a place to live.

Of course, by Memorial weekend, we found a house.  We thought.  I mean, we did, but this homeowner that we were looking to rent from is a genuine Southern lady.   Meaning, time really doesn’t have much meaning.  She comes and goes as she pleases, and things get done eventually.  Clocks and calendars really don’t hold much meaning for her.  We finally got together to look at her house- which needs a ton of work and love.  We talked and verbally agreed to rent from her.  YAY!  This was a huge answer to prayer, so we then made our plans for moving weekend.

Only our plans were not her plans.  At all.  We had to do something though, so after thinking long and hard, we decided to move in phases.  The Monday of Memorial Day Andy and a group of guys moved everything we own into a pair of storage units.  We packed up suitcases, the laptop and the Keurig, and moved into a hotel for a week- thinking a pool would be a nice luxury while waited for this lady to move her stuff out of her house so we could move in.  The pool was nice, actually.  The kids had it to themselves all week long, so when we weren’t at dance, they were in the pool having a blast.  But hotel living got old quickly, and we waited and waited for news from our landlord that we could move in.

We didn’t get it, of course.  Not when we wanted it.  We didn’t want the expense of another week at the hotel- and we also would have gone made staying there another week, eating out for two meals a day.  So we did what anyone else would have done.  We called up Mom and Dad.  Of course, they were thrilled at the idea of house-guests for a week or so.  So we gathered up our things and moved back to Seymour short term.  While it wasn’t what we wanted, it really was what we needed.  We were able to sleep well those nights we were there.  We ate real food not out of take-out containers, we did laundry that didn’t cost a roll of quarters, and we were able to relax a bit.  And this was despite this week also being our recital week!  The long drives back and forth to Appleton were exhausting, but it sure was nice to come home at the end of a long day and have mom cooked meals waiting for us.

So we next planned to move that weekend.  It was recital weekend, the day we had been waiting for.  Once the recital was over, my duties running the studio were over as well.  The recital was Saturday, we planned to move into the house on Sunday.  All day at the recital we waited for contact from our landlord yet again.  Nothing and nothing and as the day went on and an amazing recital happened, we made the abrupt decision to wait one more week.   When I finally got ahold of the landlord and let her know this, she truly was moved to tears.  She had been working so hard to try and get out for us, but it just wasn’t happening.  Waiting one more week was going to be the best for everyone.  We certainly realized that on Sunday because we were just drained.  No one was in any condition to move boxes and furniture.  So we settled in and looked at relaxing another week at Mom’s Bed and Breakfast.

Boy, did I sleep that week.  Seriously.  The recital was over, our move was planned, and I literally had nothing to do!  The kids auditioned for competition teams at our new studio and took some fun master dance classes. (Zander got to dance with Twitch from SYTYCD!) but otherwise, it was a relaxing week for us.  Until Friday. We finally got ahold of the keys to our new home late Friday evening, so we headed to the house to make a plan for moving in the next day.

See, that Saturday was also the date of our Nationals dance competition- where one of Zander’s dances was competing.  I had to take the kids there- and it was a several hour drive one way.  So Andy planned to move us in with a crew of people, but I wanted to let him know where to put things.

What I didn’t expect was what we found when we walked into the house Friday night.  Garbage everywhere.  And such filth.  We’ve since learned that no one has really been living here for a good year- and it showed.  The basement was piled full of garbage and non-working appliances, and the house was just plain gross.  They were smokers and cat people.  Smoke is gross, and I’m severely allergic to cats.  My vision of  coming home from the competition late Saturday and finding stuff moved in, beds to sleep in and a place to make our home was gone instantly.

Thank God for Mom and Dad!

The move did happen.   But those precious people who helped us move in also helped move some of the garbage out.  They did get two storage units emptied out by the end of the day, but there was no way we were going to be able to live there yet.  So we settled in for ANOTHER week in Seymour.  Every day our time was balanced between working at the house and interim dance classes in Green Bay.  As the week went on, things began to shape up.  Everything was getting scrubbed, boxes were slowly getting unpacked, and things were looking up.  The big sticky wicket in the room, though was the plumbing in the house.  I won’t go into detail, but there was a major plumbing project that needed to happen before we could attempt spending the night in our new home.  That project was finally tackled by Andy and my brother on that Saturday, and that Sunday we made the decision that we had enough of a working house that we could move in.

So we did.  We officially took up residence at our hew home in Appleton on Sunday, June 23.  A full month after we’d wanted to do so.  It’s been a long, long week.  There are still boxes everywhere, things to be determined, and so much work to do.  The house is about the same size as our last one, but we lost a significant amount of storage space.  Not enough closets or cabinets, so we’re trying to figure things out as they come.  It’s slowly turning into a home.  Regardless of the disheveled appearance of everything though, it is our home, and we are going to love it here.  We will probably purchase this one when all is said and done.  It just is SO right for us.  It needs so much love and care- but we’re the right people to do that,  and the basic bones are there to work with and get it where we want it.

And here I am!  Internet was finally installed late last Friday, but I’ve been dying to get on here and chat.  Because I’ve learned a few things during these two months of chaos.  As I was serving as the communications person for our dance family, I discovered that I actually did have time for blogging if I purposed to do so.  Every day I was spending hours upon hours at the computer- imagine if I was able to even put a little bit of that time to the blogging I loved so much!

And secondly, do you know what I did this last week?  I actually cooked.  And not just the same old quick food we’ve been living on for the past few years.  I actually opened up a magazine, found a recipe I wanted to try, and I made it!  And then I did that again, and then I did it again!  Oh my gosh, did that feel good!! It felt really good.  I almost feel like I’ve been in a fog for the last few years, and that fog is lifting.  I have decided that I must have time to blog.  I have to!  I miss the writing terribly.  And as we tackle the many, many projects with this new home, I’ll have things to share on the Piece of Home blog about remodeling and organization and storage.  I’ll definitely have things to share on Garden Notes, as I have to start over once again- first of all by removing the 500 square feet of stinging nettle currently in my garden space.  There will be things to share at the Sacred Sprouts Schoolhouse as we return to school this fall in earnest- excited to hit the books and try some new things.    Books will be read, and there may be some insight going on over at Heart and Soul.

It’s a new day, and new beginnings abound.  July 1st is exactly the halfway point of the year, and what a great day to start over!  I will be back.  Probably tomorrow- I have recipes to share this week!  Expect a face lift to the website in the weeks to come as well- it’s past due.  So I leave you today with a photo from our last competition dance season.  Here’s my dancing beauties in their Production Number costumes at our last competition at the Paramount Theater in Aurora, Illinois.  I loved this dance so much, and I love remembering that weekend because it was one of the many miracles we witnessed over these last months of disaster.  When you put your mind to something, and your faith in God, anything can happen, and all things are possible.