Moving day is here....... Again.....

A good friend of mine recently announced that she was putting up a blog to share family news and such. I thought hrrm, better update my blog. So here we go...

The biggest change in my life is the fact that we have moved from the West side of Phoenix to the East side, after moving in May... About a month ago I came home to a notice on the garage door of the house I was leasing. This notice essentially told me that the town is owed a substantial for a special assessment and was selling this "debt" to the highest bidder, I sat down with Erica and told her, our initial reaction was panic, but Erica being the industrious level headed person she is, called the associated lawyer and got the details. Essentially the town created a lien on the property and was raffling it on the 14th of September. We decided to call our landlord and find out their intentions. They claimed ignorance and told us they would take care of the issue immediately. So we gave them the opportunity. Needless to say the 14th of September rolled on by without the debt being paid. Now we were at a crossroads. We had to decide to stick out the year in a house that we have no confidence in it's status, or move on and try to re-establish ourselves. My wife and I went back and forth, contacted lawyers, even looked at a few homes in the East valley. I then came to a decision myself that it wasn't worth all the expenses to move, I'd made up my mind. We knelt down to pray that night together, and even though I had decided the matter we asked the Lord to guide us in the decision. Well, like the decision to come to Arizona, I woke up with a clear direction from Him to go ahead and complete the move.

We started to house hunt in earnest with the decision made. We found a few nice places, but didn't feel particularly inspired. One listing stood out to me, in fact when Erica and I looked at it I stated that it would be nice if we could have a place like that, but I wasn't holding my breath. Literally hours later we received an email from the owner of the house asking if we would be interested. (We posted a "housing wanted" ad on Craig's list.) So we went to see the house, and I fell in love with it immediately, it was close to conveniences (translate: WalMart), had several parks in the neighborhood and a community pool. Erica was a bit slower to warm up to it, but I think she was looking at all of the work involved. (Understandable...)

A few weeks later here we are... Now I must also mention, that the timing of this whole thing was/is providential, I received a performance bonus from my employer this month, I am grateful that the Lord is looking out for us. Without that bonus this whole process would have been a big struggle.

On to something else, as many of you know we homeschool our children. As of late we have been concerned that while we are doing fine on the core subjects, we have not been able to give the children the breadth of knowledge they need to be successful in life. So with much prayer and research (mostly on my wife's part), we found an organization called Arizona Virtual Academy, they are essentially a publically funded charter school that provides structure and curriculum to children in Arizona, they are approved by the State Board of Education and this program is equivilent to going to a public school curriculum wise. We decided to give it a shot, and let me tell you, every time I turn around I am more impressed with this program. First of all they tailor the classes to the student, for instance I have one child who is a little behind in reading and math, but is very into science and history, so this student has classes at different grade a level per subject, in fact all of my children have tailored curriculums. It is very nice, they all have the same teacher and she seems to be very involved and interested in each student's progress. Now being in the "public" school system we now have to keep attendence and follow the lesson plans. Where we were initially concerned about this, we came to the conclusion that Erica's time would be better spent with each of the children teaching them instead of constantly worrying about planning lessons and making sure each child gets enough attention. The hard work of lesson planning is taken care of by AZVA. They supply a computer for every two children in the program (we have 4 school age kids right now).

I look forward to sharing each child's progress with you in the coming months. I think we have found what we need to give the kids the education they need while providing them with the moral foundation to move forward in life to make good decisions that will please the Lord.