Home

Aaaah. We are here. Home. It hasn't quite hit me that on the 20th, we will have been here a month.

   

We arrived last month, our family, my mother-in-law, and my brother. It was 25 BELOW zero. Are you kidding me? I didn't even know things could LIVE in temperatures below zero.

  

All right, so I knew they could live. Just not longer than five minutes.

       

We met our new church family, celebrated Christmas (which included a church get-together and sermon at a family's house on Christmas Day -- which I loved!!), celebrated a new dog (you can see him here), and said goodbye to my brother and mother-in-law.

  

And then it was just us. Us here in Montana City, trying to figure out Helena and church and life in the cold and who we are ... just us ... without former friends and family close by.

   

And I have already been introduced to things I knew nothing of beforehand -- studded tires, shoveling snow, block heaters (you have to plug your CAR in?), shoveling snow, an obedient dog, shoveling snow, crunchy nose hairs (that's how you know it's below zero when you're not near a thermometer), shoveling snow, snow boots with velvet church dresses, and, well, you know...

   

I have to say that I do love it here. Sometimes I forget that we are here indefinitely -- that THIS is HOME. Sometimes there's this odd feeling when I remember that we are not just on vacation, that we will not be traveling back to Virginia in the next few days. And that's a mixed feeling: hard when I remember that I can't just drop into Mom and Dad's house (and drop a few kids off!) and exhilarating when I look at the incredible views and think, "WOW. I LIVE HERE!!"

      

I do hope to post more regularly, now that we're settled and the Internet is finally Really Connected (as opposed to the plenty of False Starts we've had in the past few weeks!).

  

But. We're here. Home. And it's very, very good.