The Winds of Change Are Coming

It took a few weeks for me to blog about this, and I had to keep the secret hidden until the official announcement was made.  John had been interviewing for various church positions a little closer to home, and recently accepted a new job at a Lutheran church a few towns away!  There are a ton of reasons why he began searching almost a year ago, the biggest being that we knew he had to find something closer so we could save on gas (especially with the prices going up again), wear and tear on our cars, and so the long travel times wouldn't continue to wear on our family.  It's not fair to Judith to make her hang around the church in John's office during one of the services (granted there was plenty for her to do, as we have a stash of toys there), and to keep her up past her bedtime for rehearsals.  When she was an infant, it was easy: she would hang out in her carrier or John would wear her while conducting, and she would sleep.  Now that she's an active toddler, and a nosy one at that, she wants to play and explore the church, which means she's not falling asleep until she's in the car and gets grumpy when we bring her into the house to get her ready for bed (hey, who can blame her for that?).  Coupled with the other reasons, John and I had some discussions and decided it was time to move on.

John is a bundle of nerves, which is normal for him when we're transitioning, but there are times when it's driving me nuts.  We only have a few more weeks with our current schedule, and then we'll all have to work on adapting to the new schedule.  One nice thing is that all of his rehearsals will be on one night, so with the exception of Worship and Music meeting nights, he'll be home with Judith and me more often.  He'll be able to drive to the church and practice whenever, our total commute time is cut in half, as is the mileage.  I'm excited, because the church we are going to has almost 5 octaves of bells, which means that if there is an opening and I can continue ringing, I might be able to save my wrists a little bit and shelly ring again instead of ringing 4-in-hand.  Judith is also going to have an opportunity to make some new friends, and I'm curious to see how she interacts with the children at the new church.

Of course we're leaving a lot of good stuff behind, along with some awesome people, including Judith's godparents.  We're already working on planning some activities so we can all see each other, and we promised that we would be back to visit every so often.