 |
| As seen on the baby monitor... |
Did
I mention that our son decided to attempt climbing out of his crib the
very day that Jason moved down to Florida? Yes. And he wasn't any good
at it. I mean, he could have been successful, but it would have likely
resulted in great bodily injury and/or head trauma. You see, the problem
is that he would get most of his body out of the crib...with his head
pointed to the ground. I even caught him once with three of his four
limbs dangling over the ground; only his right leg was still in the
crib.
For that reason, we opted to convert his crib
when we moved to Florida. I ordered bed rails and the double bed
conversion kit online (after a little searching, since his crib set had
been discontinued at this point) and had it sent to our apartment in
Florida. That way, Jason could put his bed together and have it waiting
on us when we arrived.
Our very first night in our
apartment was also our son's very first night in a big boy bed. I'd
hardly been out of the room for twelve seconds after putting him to bed
when a bubbly little boy entered the living room and announced, "HI!!!"
We
eventually set up a baby gate in his doorway so that he at least
couldn't get out of his room and wander away. Ahh...our very first
challenge of living in our new space in our new city!
My
mom crashed on our couch the first night before heading to the airport
to catch a flight home the next day. I cried when she left. Now we were
officially all alone. Our family of four had absolutely nobody anywhere
nearby. No friends. No family. No babysitters.
No one.
Our
first full day there (the same day I said goodbye to my mom) was our
seventh wedding anniversary. I don't even remember what we had for
dinner. I just remember Jason picking up takeout. Olive Garden maybe? It
was simultaneously the most memorable and least memorable anniversary
we've had.
While I definitely have plenty of vivid
memories from our time in Florida, the fuzzy memory is also pretty
common. Our time there, in retrospect, was a blur. It didn't feel like
that at the time, though.
New Beginnings
I
knew no one. My husband was at work all day long and/or traveling. His
new job kept him quite busy. It became habit for him to leave the
apartment shortly after 7:00 each morning. I was lucky to have him home
between 5:30 and 6:00 each day. It wasn't uncommon for him to be so
swamped that he had to work much later than that.
 |
| Our first attempt at finding somewhere to play |
I spent my days mostly at home. You don't get out much anyway when you have a two-month-old baby
and
a toddler. I'd joined Foursquare when we were still in South Carolina,
so I started to use that app, and whatever else I could find on the
internet, to locate playgrounds. Since we didn't have a yard, I had to
find places for my toddler to burn off some energy. Despite the
1300-something square feet in our apartment, too much of it was
allocated to bedrooms and not the living area.
I
remember that the first place we went to play was barely a play area at
all. It was a simple pirate ship stuck in the middle of a shopping
development. (Thanks Foursquare.) We gradually found all the playgrounds
in a 10-mile radius. I'm confident we visited every single one of them
at least once. (My early favorite playground quickly became my least
favorite. While it was a great park, the squirrels there were so
accustomed to being fed by visitors, that they had no fear of people. I
kid you not, I almost got climbed by a squirrel.)
One
of the hardest things to leave behind in South Carolina was our church
family. We joined our church back in the beginning of 2006. Over the
years, we became more and more involved. By the time we left, Jason and I
were in charge of planning all of our church's international missions
efforts and Jason was the vice-chairman of deacons. It physically hurt
to leave.
Naturally, we sought a new place to worship
and get plugged in. Jason visited a church the first couple of Sundays
he was down there. Once that first week rolled by, we celebrated our
one-week anniversary in Florida by taking the whole family to church
there. It was overwhelming. Thankfully, my go-with-the-flow boy let me
drop him off with strangers in nursery. Meanwhile, I clung to my baby
girl. I kept my sweet girl close for many more weeks. If we'd still
been in South Carolina, I would have probably been close
to the point of leaving her in the nursery. It's completely different
when the nursery volunteers are practically your extended family. But,
in Florida, I held onto her like a security blanket. Toting around a
baby is always a good conversation starter, too.
I
remember going to Sunday School and feeling shy (side note: I'm not). I
remember several weeks of mixing people up, having no idea who went with
who. I vividly remember needing to change a diaper during Sunday School
and not knowing where to do that. I wanted to do it right there in the
pew outside our Sunday School space, but I was afraid someone would walk
out, be totally offended and never be my friend. (Can you tell I was
desperate to start fitting in?)
 |
| My sweet girl at two months old |
Two
sweet couples from the Sunday school department invited our family over
for dinner, which helped us begin to form relationships. People reached
out to us so quickly that we didn't even visit another church; we
continued the first place we visited, because those budding friendships
were so precious to us.
It didn't take me too
terribly long to realize that the move somehow slashed my self-esteem.
(It also didn't help to still be in that sort of post-partum,
sleep-deprived fog that you live in for the first few months of your new
baby's life.) As I met more people and began to hang out in social
settings, I found myself second-guessing everything I said and
over-analyzing every situation or conversation after it happened. I'd
gone from a place where I had more friends than I could count to a place
where I had few enough acquaintances I could count them on one hand.
When I added that to also being completely unfamiliar to the area and
the lifestyle there, I felt lost.
New Friends
Sunday
mornings were the only times I had regular social contact. Caring for a
newborn also limited my time to get to know other people. I always had
to slip out of the church service or Sunday school in order to nurse the
baby. (Side note: the nursing mothers room is where I eventually met
and got to know one of my sweet Florida friends whose baby boy was
exactly one week younger than my little girl.)
As we left
church one day, Jason handed me a piece of paper with two phone numbers
on it. Yes! I got some digits! (And, yes, they were girls' digits.) Two
of the girls in the Sunday school group we had been visiting reached
out to me. I was relieved. I took a chance and got in touch with one of
the girls to set up a play date. We chose to go to my favorite
playground one morning. I was shocked that she'd never been to that one.
(It turns out that my research hadn't been in vain.) She invited the
other girl who'd reached out to me. Suddenly I had two friends!
Soon
one play date led to another. Two friends turned into four. A few girl
friends turned into couples and families we could hang out with. We got
involved with the leadership team that planned everything for our young
married Sunday school department. We got involved at the beginning of a
new project our church was doing -- Saturday night outdoor worship
services -- which is where we got to know our church's staff better. I
began going to our church's moms group, which is where I met a few
ladies who mentored me (one of whom I call my BFG...
Best
Friend from another
Generation).
I have no idea how I would have ever gotten to know anyone if we
weren't so committed to church (trust me, I tried). The Lord provides.
Now
I had friends, but I still lacked a "best" friend...someone I could
call day or night and knew would love me no matter what. Don't get me
wrong, I made friends in Florida who I love dearly! I remember reading
somewhere along the way that it typically takes three years to develop a
really close friendship (a
best friend, perhaps). Little did I know we wouldn't even be there three years.
Trying to Settle
I
often felt like we were in limbo during our time in Florida. We
couldn't get fully settled and feel like we were there permanently. I've
never been the Martha Stewart type, but I found myself itching to
decorate, but hesitant to do so while we were in such temporary living
quarters. We finally found a house that we really, really liked. When it
came time to really consider putting pen to paper and put a contract on
the house, we just couldn't. The house was everything we'd been looking
for, but it didn't feel right. We felt that God was saying no. We had
been praying so hard for a place to settle. Now we had it, and we knew
the answer was no. We still had our house back in South Carolina, and it
made us super nervous to take out a mortgage on a second house. As much
as I hated thinking these thoughts, I actually remember thinking, "if
things take a bad turn financially, we can always move out of an
apartment and into something cheaper and less ideal...but we can't just
default on a mortgage."
 |
| The awesome house the ultimately ended our house hunting |
That's
when we completely quit house hunting altogether. It seemed like a step
backward in the process of trying to get settled into our new lives.
Instead of breaking our seven month lease on our apartment, the time
actually came for us to
renew our lease. To add insult to injury,
we even had to sign a 12-month lease just to keep our rent payment from
increasing. I'm pretty sure I cried when we did that.
I
longed for home. I visited every chance I got, but it was a grueling
trip to take on too often. (I ended up visiting about every three
months.) I often said (half joking, half serious) that if we could move
back to South Carolina, that I would gladly move back into our house
without a single complaint. I even daydreamed about how I might rework
some things in the house to make it better for our needs. I daydreamed
about painting the downstairs, turning the dining room into a playroom
and having a humongous yard sale to get rid of half of what were keeping
in storage...and actually letting my baby girl sleep in the nursery
we'd prepared for her.
 |
| I took B's picture by to the tree in her original nursery each time we visited. |
It
was around the one-year mark that I began to concede that we were there
for the long-haul and that God was trying to teach me something. I
didn't know what He was trying to pound into my head. I'd never imagined
that, in following His will for our lives and agreeing to move so far
outside of our comfort zones, He would make life so difficult for us. I
finally put myself and my desires aside and just started praying. I'd
heard of people crying out to God before, just like in so many of the
Psalms. But I can't say I'd ever really done it...until then. I prayed
for God to make Florida feel like home. It hurt. I didn't
want to
feel completely settled there, but I didn't want to be miserable by
clinging to my own desires anymore. I was doubly confused when I didn't
receive an affirmative answer to my prayers. Seriously, God? What more
could you want? I cried. I cried real tears, and my soul cried out to
God for comfort and answers. I desperately wanted to feel like I
belonged. But I continued to feel like a Carolina girl on a flat Florida
beach. I was spent and confused.
I began to push
myself. I took on my own little project of engaging people in parks and
when I saw them on the side of the road begging for help. I had a couple
of very awkward encounters and a few very encouraging ones. I felt like
I had purpose, but I still didn't feel like that was where I belonged,
and I didn't understand why...
