20 September, 2013

Update: September 2013

I have realized the past few weeks that people are still reading the blog. People are looking for advice on moving companies when moving across the ocean. I thought I would give you an update since I have posted in years.

My husband and I split up. The divorce was final in 2012. Did our troubles in Europe contribute to our marriage problems? Probably. But that's a long story, and there is a lot of blame to go around on both sides, so we'll save that for another post. Or maybe not.

The girls and I moved to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and we're happy here. And since this blog was about moving, I will say for the record that we did move ourselves with a large U-Haul truck. The girls and I were homeless for a few months and living with families from our church. When it came time to actually move into the house I had bought, it took some time driving around collecting things from all over. It was a very interesting time for us. But we've been in the house now for over a year, and we're settled. This is the first time in a long time that I have felt like I have a home.

My oldest daughter is a junior at the University of Alabama Birmingham. She is a Blazer Elite Scholar, a very good scholarship. She is studying mathematics and anthropology, and she's going very well. She finished high school very near the top of her class. I'm very happy that we stayed with Christian Liberty Academy (CLA) through the Luxembourg years and in Tennessee, too.

My youngest daughter is a senior in high school with CLA. Now that we live in a town with a decent school system, people wonder why she's still doing correspondence school. At this point, it's all that she's known, and we know it prepares the girls well for college, so she's finishing up her school work through correspondence, just like we've been doing for years. She is still taking tours of colleges and deciding where to go to college next school year.

My middle daughter, the one who absolutely hated Luxembourg, is now an Airman in the United States Air Force. She credits living in Luxembourg as one of the factors in her decision--living in Luxembourg (which she calls "Suxembourg") helped her to appreciate how much she loves the United States. However, with as much as she loves the U.S., she also decided that there were parts of the rest of the world that she likes very much. She asked for assignment to Lakenheath AFB in the United Kingdom, and she was given her wish, so she will be moving to the U.K. as soon as she has finished her training.

On her application for the Air Force, she needed a reference from everywhere that she had ever lived for a background check. We asked Joan Lyon, one of our pastors in Luxembourg to be the reference. We also discovered that it's easier to get into the USAF with a real high school diploma (for example, one from CLA) that it is if you are strictly homeschooled. Once again, I was reminded of two great decisions in made in Luxembourg: being a part of the Anglican church in Luxembourg and correspondence school through CLA.

I am still working for Catherine Hood Consulting. I also work fairly regularly at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. Working for Belmont gives me a chance to get health insurance. I also really enjoy teaching statistics, and I get to teach elementary statistics to the business and psychology majors. It's a lot of fun.