We said our goodbyes, and we were on to bigger and better things, or so we thought. Looking back, we headed into the lions' den, and we didn't know it. There would be good things and bad things about this move, and we would discover them soon enough.

We got to our new home, and I set out to get the family in order. The first order of business was to get us moved in. We managed that okay, after I got over my flu. We got the kids registered in school, and all seemed to be going well. Our oldest daughter was in the second half of the fifth grade, a difficult time to move, but she seemed to adjust well. We wouldn't know until much later that it was a really difficult time for her, and it would continue to be difficult until we left. We had moved her from a secure situation into a competitive situation for which she was not prepared to enter. We will forever regret putting her into a situation that made her feel inferior. The people around her, especially at church (imagine that), would put her self-confidence to a test. We put her into a social situation with people who were so self-absorbed and so arrogant, and we will regret that forever. I hate that she had to be around the so-called "upper class" who made it their mission to make her feel like she was inferior. She was never inferior; in fact, she was superior to them. She managed to rise above these snooty girls, and she made something of herself. I hate that she had to go through the hate that she had to endure. I can't stand that she had to withstand ridicule and belittling. I am so proud of her and the accomplishments that she has made. She is a productive citizen, and we are so proud of her. I just can't stand that her self-esteem was damaged by these girls (in our church, no less), but she has gotten past it, and she is a bigger person for it.

Moving with Chase was a good move. We knew the teacher she would have (we bought our house to have her in this school), and we were excited at the new possibilities that we would face. We would soon make life-long friends with the teacher as well as the speech pathologist who would serve her for the next several years. These women would help to renew our hope and our confidence in the system that would serve Chase. We settled in and spent the next several years reveling in the comfort of being in a situation in which we did not feel threatened.

The sadder goodbye would be the one we would have to say to my parents. They had become really a second set of parents to my girls. I am so very thankful that my girls had the time that they had with my parents. We could never have known that our time with them would come to an end in such a short period of time. We thought that even though we were going to make a geographical move, they would be there for us for a long time to come...how wrong we were in that assumption.

We finally moved to Abilene in January. Rob had worked his butt off getting our house ready for the family to move in. We bought a real "fixer-upper," and he really fixed it up. He did such a great job of getting it ready for us while we were trying to wind up our time at home. I don't think that I have really thanked him for that. I know that he was starting a new job, but he also set up our housekeeping in his very limited spare time, and I don't know if he knows how much we appreciated it.

When we finally got ready to move, I happened to come down with some kind of virus. We managed to get the U-Haul loaded and to get everything to Abilene, but I was so sick that I just wanted to expire when we got there. I just wanted to die. I don't remember how we did it, but we managed to move in. The house was ready, and we were ready for a new start.

Okay, so we would have to endure this for a little while longer. We could handle it, and our daughter wouldn't have to be in the classroom of the superintendent's wife. We could do this, and we could monitor it.

It was fine. We were biding our time. We knew that we would be leaving as soon as we could. We took our time as my husband lined up his new job. As far as I was concerned, he could not do it fast enough. He did get the new job lined up, and we bought a new house in the new place. It needed lots of work, but he was willing to do the work while we finished up business in the "bad" place. We were finally ready to move after the new year, and, let me tell you, we were ready. I was so sad to leave the two friends that I had made that had been there for me, but I was ready to move on.

I had a very sad goodbye with my friends, and I cried lots of tears, but the excitement of moving on was so invigorating. It was a new beginning, and we were so excited to find out what was going to happen next. As it turned out, it would be a new beginning after all.

We registered the kids in school, knowing that we were "the enemy," and we would watch and monitor what they were going through.

I had resigned my position as a teacher in a district completely disconnected with the district we had been dealing with, fully expecting that we would be moving on by the fall and that we would not have to deal with these people again. Thankfully, we would be leaving the first grade and moving on to the second grade with Chase. You see, Chase was placed in the classroom of the wife of the superintendent of schools the year before, and any other placement would be an upgrade.

You see, this placement placed us in a place where we would be constantly looking for the enemy. We had gone into enemy territory. What we didn't know was that this teacher was completely unbalanced. Even though her husband was the superintendent of the system, she was soaring through an unbalanced place that no one else could see. (I would later find out that she was found crouching in the corner of her classroom, when she was in charge of a classroom of first-graders...she was rocking back and forth in the corner of her room...she was never called on it, because her husband was the superintendent of schools, something you can obviously get away with when your husband is a member of the hierarchy of the school system. I certainly hope that this woman is no longer a part of any public school system.) We tried to get through this year, and I think that we did an okay job of it. After all, we emerged with our daughter, and she seemed to have survived it okay.

We had been through so much that year. We tried to get the school system to give Chase the services she deserved, and we were met with the school system's might at every step. They had no desire to meet with us and to help with any kind of therapies or help with our child's disabilities. We had been through numerous and numerous hours of meetings with school officials before this time, with the superintendent at the "helm," and we felt that we could endure anything that the school system could throw at us at this point.

We had seen this school system face meetings with the people who came to help us with our struggles with the school system. We had not enough resources at this time to hire private resources to help us with our struggles, so we were fortunate to come into contact with a group of people who had made it their mission to help people who come into contact with school systems who make it difficult to get their children into regular education situations. They were remarkable. We had an educational specialist who was wonderful and would talk with us whenever we had the need; we had another educational specialist who had physical disabilities that would come into play later; we had a lawyer who was blind and made one of our ARD meetings so priceless that we have never been able to tell him how much we appreciate it.

Our 24-hour meeting was such a laborious endeavor for us. Even though we were both educators, we didn't have any idea of how to deal with this bureaucracy. We felt so inadequate, but we had the support from our group that we had enlisted. They were wonderful. We didn't ever have to pay anything for their services (they were a non-profit group, and they were sent from God, as far as we were concerned), and we got to witness the other people in the room make fools of themselves (which was absolutely priceless, when we needed every little bit of entertainment that we could get). You see, our lawyer (who was blind), was able to name everyone in the room (which was about 20 people) after one introduction, and our supporter (who was physically disabled, and he knew that the school system had not made the mandatory changes to the physical campus), and he put the whole school system in its place when he pointed out the indiscretions in the system, and about the physical outlay of the system that had not been corrected and clearly violated the policy that had been passed by the government. You see, he could not pick up his feet high enough to get to our meeting without the help of his friend (our blind lawyer) to get him over the curbs.

We weren't pleased to be continuing our experience in this school system, but we knew that our daughter wouldn't be placed in the classroom of any relative of anyone related to the hierarchy of the system we had been dealing with for such a long time.

Okay, enough of these memories for now...it is so hard to revisit hard times.

Okay, so I left you with us in a pop-up camper and through traveling. Now, don't get me wrong...our camper was nice. We had indoor plumbing, complete with a shower, plenty of room for all of us to sleep (even when we had our niece), a refrigerator/freezer, a nice heater, a great air conditioner (which was nice in the 100+ degrees that summer in Utah), a place to cook, and room to put everything that wasn't in storage. We even had a TV with a VCR (this was pre-DVD). We had a nice set-up for the traveling summer...we were ill-prepared to spend the fall and upcoming winter in the Texas Panhandle. We had been through a Halloween in six inches of snow, and we knew how cold it could get and how quickly it could get that way. My mom used to call it a "Blue Norther," and it could turn you "blue" in a hurry. We did have a great heater, but we had a tent on either end of this camper. I didn't think that the heater could keep up with temperatures dipping below freezing and staying there.

We also had the problem that all of our things were in storage...this was supposed to be a short-term arrangement. All of our winter clothes, coats, hats, boots, just about anything we would need for the slightest change of season were in boxes, and the boxes were stacked twelve feet high in the storage unit. Planning ahead was going to be a major problem.

The most pressing emotional moment would come with the beginning of the school year. We had planned on seeing the town in our rear-view mirror in August, and that didn't happen. We would have to deal with the school system for at least a few more months, and that was not an attractive prospect. We had been through the loop with these small-town, closed-minded people as long as we cared to. We felt defeated. We had been through the legal system, and we didn't feel like anything else that we did would make a difference. We had been able to obtain some excellent support through a non-profit advocacy group, and my parents had been our lifeline through the whole ordeal. Their support was unwavering, and I will forever be grateful to them for that. They loved us and our children through that time, and my children have wonderful memories of their grandparents (they have both since passed away). As painful and difficult as those times were for us, I feel like God put us there, knowing that the experience would enrich our lives (isn't that strange?) and to enrich the lives of our children, who would not feel the strain of the experience too much.

Our oldest daughter does remember some about the experience, though the things that she remembers are the social workers trying to talk her into saying something guilt-inducing about her parents or her grandparents. I remember them taking her aside without our knowledge and interrogating her. I believe now that adults can coerce children into saying something if their efforts are intense enough and last for a long enough period of time. I have seen that process, and it is one of my great regrets in life that my daughter had to go through it. I know that there are children out there who need help, and I would be the first one to protect a child. I saw children when I was teaching, and I made reports more than once. I, however, never made a fraudulent report with a spirit of malice, and for that, I am proud. I always had the best interests of the children at heart. I hate that my oldest daughter had to go through that process, to hear suggestions about which she had no clue, and the years, really, that we spent trying to heal the things that she endured during that time. I think, in a way, that her life was "colored" by that experience. It certainly soured us as parents, and it made all of our dealings with public school officials suspect from that point forward. We always went into ARD meetings after that with a certain sense of suspicion and certainly with an attitude of reservation.

It has been a stressful thing for fifteen years now, and we are about to come to the end of our relationship with the public school system. That is jumping way forward in the story, and we will get there eventually.

So, when I left you, we were ready to leave my hometown. It was an exciting time for us. We were so excited that we sold our house at the drop of a hat. We had a friend come to our door and say that he heard that we were interested in selling our house. We told him that we were, and told him a price off the top of our head that we thought was high. He said that our price was fine with him, and when would we be able to move out of our house? We weren't really prepared to sell, but we told him a time, and we had to get ready to move. We started to get things together and to prepare to move, even though we didn't know what we were going to do when we vacated our home. We proceeded to buy a pop-up trailer, and we moved out of our home. It was one of the things that we have done that made no sense, but we were excited to move on. After all that we had been through, it was an incredibly liberating thing that we could do to say that we were in control of our lives and that we could do something to make sure that our family could have fun and not be affected by the school system that had abused us for such a long time. We were going to get away from the stress that we had endured for so long, and we were going to move on to a dream that we had no idea that we had had for so long.

We moved out of our home, and we put the majority or our belongings into storage. We thought that we would be moving on in a few months, and we prepared to have things in storage for three or four months, tops. Unfortunately, our things would be in storage until January. We proceeded to travel for the summer. We took on a passenger, our niece, who would travel with us for the summer. We now had not three girls, but four, who would be our family for the summer.

It was one of the best summers of our lives. We traveled throughout Colorado and Utah, and we saw the most beautiful national parks that we had ever seen. We started out in the parks of Utah, and we realized that the Mormans were wise when they chose Utah as their "mother-land." As far as we can see, the national parks in Utah are the most beautiful in the country. If you want to see the handiwork of God, go to Zion National Park. The sheer cliffs are stunning. We had to drive through a high mountain, and the road was forged through the mountain. We zigzagged through the mountain, and we got to see views at every u-turn. There were little windows at every turn, and the views were spectacular at every turn. I don't know how we made it through the switchbacks with our mini-van pulling a pop-up camper, but we did. Zion was waiting for us, beckoning us to join in and have a special pleasure in the waters that were flowing from the mountains and the springs. Seeing all of this beauty, we were ready to camp. We set up camp and proceeded to go to the river to play in the water. The girls had such a good time playing in the water. Water, you see, is a rare and precious commodity in Texas. Water is such a fun thing to ponder when living in such an arid area, something that we long for, and when we find it, we go hog-wild in our efforts to play in it. So, we found a great swimming "hole," and the girls were thrilled to go in to play. They splashed and swam around, and they even found a waterfall to stand under. It was such a wonderful and unexpected pleasure, and the girls had such a good time splashing around and splashing each other.

We had our dachshunds with us, and when we set up camp, we had to tether them to keep them from wandering. We didn't realize that being in Utah would cause us to have a reason to defend our faith, but defend it we did. It was immediately assumed that we were LDS, because we had four children (all girls) traveling with us. Yes, we did have lots of kids with us, but we were not LDS. When the other folks in the campgrounds found this out, we were immediately left alone, and we had plenty of privacy...as much privacy as you can have when you have four girls under the age of eight!! We found this scenario to be true at every campground where we camped. It really was kind of nice, because we had the chance to have quality time with all of the girls, without fear of being interrupted by others who were camping. My niece got homesick about halfway through the trip, and we had to make special efforts to make her feel more at home, but the trip was a great success, all in all. We saw most of the national parks in Utah, and it is such a beautiful state. The Mormans sure knew what they were doing when they claimed the territory that would become Utah. It is the most diverse and the most beautiful state in our nation. If you have not been to Utah to see its parks, run, don't walk, to see the beauty. It makes it abundantly clear that God did have a plan, and he made some beautiful sights for us to see.

We traveled through Utah, went into Colorado, and traveled through New Mexico before we returned our niece to her family in Texas.

We had no idea that we would not be moving in August, but we didn't move until January. This left us with quite a dilemna. We had all of our belongings in storage, we had no house to live in, our kids needed to start a new school year, and our plans were in limbo! We had no idea what we were supposed to do when the fall arrived and the start of the school year arrived. We decided to roll with the punches and wait to see what happened with Dad's job in the fall. We had no idea that we would be "living" in the pop-up camper for an extended period of time, and it would be VERY cold before we were finished with this living arrangement.

A funny aside that I remember about our time in my hometown...

The girls stayed with Mary Beth when their dad and I were teaching.

One day Mary Beth was trying to get all of "her" kids to put their shoes on to get ready to go to pick up the after-school kids. She looked at Callie and told her that her shoes were on the wrong feet. Callie pondered this and finally said to Mary Beth, "No, these are my feet." Her shoes weren't on the wrong feet...they were on her feet where they belonged!!

This was one of my dad's favorite stories. He told it to anyone who would listen. He got such a kick out of his grandkids and loved them all so much.