This year has started with a bang! It's definitely going to be a year full of new adventures and changes for our family. In January,Michael was offered and accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor job at Eastern Kentucky University! Which means we will be moving to Kentucky at the end of the summer!
As with all of our moves in the past, we have seen Heavenly Father guiding us to this job. We had decided we'd remain in Iowa until Michael finished his PhD, at which point we'd begin looking for a tenure-track job. ISU has been great, but they don't plan to grow their department at all and Michael already feels capped in his current position. Plus a tenture-track job is the next logical step. They are hard to find and even harder to land so we expected it would be several years before we moved. But for some reason, Michael felt prompted to look at EKU and found they had his dream job posted. Literally, his dream job. With nothing to lose, he sent his application the day before the search closed.
Within a week he'd had a first interview and at the beginning of December they flew him out for an on campus interview. Remember when he landed in the ER with a kidney stone? Well that was the day before he was supposed to fly out. Thankfully, he was blessed to be able to complete his trip and the interview without needing his pain medication and with minimal pain. It was such a huge tender mercy!
Michael LOVED everything about Kentucky while he was there. The job, the department at EKU, the people he will be working with, the area. He said the department is much more family oriented than here and there are so many more Deaf people. They have two BA degrees and plans to add two Master's programs the Fall of 2018.
Even with so many positive things, it was a difficult decision to accept the job. The health insurance isn't great (and we have the most amazing insurance at ISU). Kentucky is even further from our families. Was this the right job? The right place? Somewhere we felt we could live for a decade or more?
In the end, just as when we moved here, we felt so much peace about the decision to move. We are excited for this new adventure! We're excited to FINALLY settle down in one place for more than a few years. We're excited for the beautiful Kentucky landscapes. I'm SO excited about the mild Kentucky winters! We're excited to be within a days drive of so many cool places - New York, DC, the beach, the south, etc. We're excited for mountains again!!!!
The kids are okay with the move. Obviously Orson doesn't care. Lenora doesn't really know what it means,but she talks about moving to Kentucky a lot. Eliza will be sad to leave her friend Abe, but otherwise she's very happy about our new adventure. Hazel is a bit hesitant. She actually understands what it means to move. She's going to miss her friends a lot. But she too has been blessed with peaceful feelings about our move. She told us, "I know we're supposed to move to Kentucky, but I don't really want to!" Slowly, she's warming up to the idea. She LOVES horses and is looking forward to all the horses out there. She wants to go to the Derby! I think, in the end, it will be hard, but she will adjust quickly and love it out there.
So now we just finish out the school year, Michael finishes up his PhD classes, takes his "comps" (huge tests over all his PhD work), and teaches summer classes at ISU. We sell our house, find a new house (hopefully in that order), have family come to Iowa for Hazel's baptism this summer, than pack up and move. Yikes! This is our fourth major move since we've been married so at this point I'm not worried. It always works out. Remind me of this come July okay?
