Big big news!

I'm pregnant!!! Oh wait...you already knew that.  Hmm....if I already told you that, then what am I here to tell you?  I thought there was something.....ah yes! That! 

Friends, my family will be very soon leaving their ancestral home (aka they've lived in it since I was 4) and moving to Utah. This is brought on by several years of incredible strain at work for my dad, the realization that his job may also be ending in a few months, and a sudden job offer from a company in Utah that my dad has worked with before and would greatly enjoy working with permanently.  The decision to move came after a lot of thought and prayer on their part, including a very lengthy Pros and Cons list.  The Pros, obviously, won out--it was hard to argue with my dad being able to have a job that wouldn't make him crazy, that would allow a similar standard of living to that which their family already enjoyed and that would allow him to be employed before his current job chose to unemploy him.  Uprooting Aaron from school just before his junior year was a big decision, but becoming a Utah resident would help Aaron be able to afford to go to the University of Utah to study architecture (his current top choice) while paying in-state tuition, a price difference of somewhere around $14,000, making that a big factor.  My mother, I think, is happy for the chance to find a house with bigger windows and more natural lighting than our current house, as well as to live in a place where there are less hills and therefore taking walks is much less strenuous.  There are obviously many more reasons than just these, but let it suffice to say that the benefits outweigh the negatives, and they've made the decision!

Finding this out while several thousand miles away in a foreign country has been interesting to say the least.  I've always been opposed to my parents moving when mention of it has come up in the past (as it has, with my dad's job having been so nutso), mostly because my family has almost never moved before--we moved into that house when I was 4, and lived there ever since! It feels like losing part of my childhood to know that I won't be able to go back there again and show my children the swingset I built with my daddy when I was 5, or the tree I climbed when I was running away, or the place where my best friend and I played for hours and hours every day after school. But then I realized--this isn't my home anymore anyways.  My home is with Jesse, and with our coming baby, and all the other babies we'll have after that.  Why is it so important for me to have my family live in the same place, just so I can come there once a year or less for the rest of my life, when the right decision for them is to no longer live there anymore?  And I realized--it isn't.  My parents need to do the right thing for their family, and Jesse and I will do the same for ours--and we'll still see them, no matter where they live, and that is what is important.  And then, a silly, selfish part of me realized--now when Jesse and I live across the country or who knows where, and we come home to visit my family or his family--we won't have to choose! They'll be so close to each other, we'll be able to see them both! Muahahaha! Juli, feel free to tell Dave he was right--my family SHOULD just move out there--and now they will! Certainly, it'll be a bit strange to say that my family lives in Utah, but this move is for the best, and I feel good about that.  

And now, you miiiight be wondering..."Well didn't Catherine and Jesse just barely move to NC to be near her parents?  What are they going to do?"  

Well I am here to tell you! Jesse, before we left, applied to a public interest group out of Raleigh, and has actually had a phone interview and a skype interview since we've been here in Germany with them, and will hear back from them in 2 weeks as to whether he gets the job or not.  So far, our plan is if he gets the job, we'll stay in Raleigh and he'll work there for 2 years (which is how long the position lasts).  The position is also available in a few other major cities along the eastern seaboard, so there's the possibility that they could offer him a job in one of those cities instead, and theoretically right now, we're looking at moving to another city if they offer us the position (and possibly some money to move! We're broke!).

But then comes the question--what do we do if they say "thanks, but no thanks!" ? We could stay in NC, with  nowhere to stay until he gets a job, and then be far away from both his family AND my family....or we could do what we've decided to do if he doesn't get the job--and move back to UT with my family! Yes, it's kind of silly....we just moved out to NC, and we're potentially going to be moving back only a few months later! However, given that we'd have nowhere to stay in NC at that point....and more importantly, given the facts that Monica is having a baby in UT this fall, Tim is back, Calvin is growing like crazy, and, oh yes, I'd like to be near our families to have our OWN baby, there are a lot more reasons to go back to UT than to not at this point!

So we're playing it by ear for the next few weeks, waiting to see how things will pan out (while we relax in mild Southern Germany) and in a few weeks we'll know what we'll be doing for this next year or two! 

And that, friends, is the news!