Our Story: The Big Move

We decided in February of 2006 that we would make the move to Northwest AR once Manly was finished with his undergrad so that he could go to school at John Brown University. He began to interview for jobs there, as he was planning to have a full-time job as well as working on his degree. He did well on his GRE, and was quickly accepted to JBU.
On April 1st, after feeling like I had the stomach virus, I took the afternoon off work and ran by the store to get a few things on my way home. Just to be sure, I picked up a pregnancy test. Sure enough, on APRIL FOOLS DAY we found out we were expecting again. We were really excited! Olivia would turn 2 in September, then the baby would be born in December. I felt like that would be the perfect age difference between them. I was SO sick from the start. Every. Single. Day. I just knew the baby was a boy because I felt so different this time.
I kept my job at the church, and Manly worked at Target and Stoby's, but mostly stayed home with Olivia until he graduated. We had also made a move into a town house, but after pot smoke started to billow into our house we decided we couldn't live there. We moved out two weeks later into what we like to refer to as the Weems Street house. We loved that house and the couple who rented it to us for PEANUTS to "help us out in our efforts to minister to others." We were so blessed to live there. We really cleaned it up and it was the first place we really felt at home in. I couldn't stand the thought of leaving that sweet home we had made. It was also impossible to think about leaving my family who I had always lived close to.
We made plans to move up to Cave Springs. This is the town where Manly grew up. His grandfather had a house that he had been renting out that he was willing to rent to us while we lived there. That was such a blessing. The house had plenty of space and was in the center of NWA, so Manly would be able to get a job wherever he wanted, and still be close to school.
He ended up getting a job at Ozark Guidance, which is a mental health facility. It was making more than we had ever made before, and plenty for us to live on. We were so excited that we would get to do normal things like have weekends off and go on an occasional date. Life was great except that I had to leave everything I'd ever known to move up there.
The day we moved was so hard! I experienced what most people feel when they go away to college. I was so sad to leave my momma! I cried the whole way up to our new home. As I unpacked boxes into our new home I kept thinking of what I was going to do! It was going to be a ROUGH road ahead, but we were going to learn leave and cleave the hard way!