Easy Peasy All-in-One High School

We have a home!

In 2016 my family returned to the States after living overseas for fourteen years. In 2017 I told you that we were going to be getting an ADA compliant home from Habitat for Humanity since we have a son in a wheelchair. In 2018 I told you that it fell through and we weren’t getting a home. Since then we’ve been house hunting. We not only looked at homes for our own family, but we looked at homes to move together with my parents. We found a couple homes we really loved but never felt we could move forward on them. At one point, we made plans with an architect to build onto my parents’ home. In the end, my parents decided to move to a retirement community. It’s something they’ve thought about since long before we started living with them. In fact, they stopped thinking about it when we came back; they liked living together. But with the kids in one bedroom (resulting in the two teen boys sleeping on the couches downstairs) and the clutter of us squeezing into my parents’ 40 years of collections, something had to give.

We are taking over my parents’ house and they have moved just ten minutes away. We’re not really buying their house as much as paying what they needed to move into their new place. This is the only house I know, as they moved in when I was a toddler. My one son was even born here. The house is all paid off, so we are in a debt-free house, which was our hope. We have always lived without debt, so this was a big deal to us.

When my parents took their furniture, we took advantage of the emptiness and had the floors on the first floor redone to be level. Every room had a transition which made it impossible for our youngest son to get around independently. He now can wheel himself around the house and is loving the independence of it.

We’ve moved quickly to settle in, though there is a lot still for my parents to go through to decide what they want before we purge the rest. That year of working Saturdays at the Habitat store paid off and they’ve been giving us discounts on their discounted furniture, resulting in our getting six large pieces of furniture for less than $200.

We’ve got a lot to do in order to feel settled in (still don’t have a couch), but we’re getting there and are thankful that after all this time it happened at the end of the year when EP work is slow, so we’ve been able to pour time into cleaning and organizing as fast as we can, so we can get back to normal as fast as we can.

This was a huge thing for me. We’ve accepted the Lord has us here in the States for now, and are very thankful for our own place. I’ve had to guard my heart against longings for a home for years while we were overseas. I saw my friends getting homes and settling in and as a homebody, it’s what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t what the Lord had chosen for us. In the first two decades of marriage, we lived in more than a dozen apartments, moving twenty times, with furloughs and such. When we got back to the States, I let myself start dreaming of my own home, but the wait was hard. I know the Lord has worked it out for the best in His placement and timing. We would have been willing to live anywhere in the world, but He’s brought us right back to where it started.

My husband and I just celebrated 22 years of marriage. He’s working for EP now. We work daily on replacing Flash activities and are making changes to some of our high school courses in order to see if it’s possible to get any of them approved by ACE for college credit. That’s a years-long process, so I can’t answer any questions about that. “To see if it’s possible” is where we are at right now, but those are some of the big projects we’re working on together, for you. 🙂

This spring we’re also planning on hosting a leadership experience together. This is for high school students. The first group will start in March. We’re hoping every high schooler will consider taking part in one of the groups at some point. I think it would be amazing for every kid to experience. The cost is just a recommended donation, so that everyone can participate. Any money leftover from things like this, the Spanish classes, and the competitions just goes right back into EP. We’re here to serve this community.