This is a Christmas-newsletter-type post for anyone who wants to know what’s really going on in our lives right now, and for anyone who (like my dear friend Wanderer) has noticed the random nature of my blog topics of late. I do apologise. Feel free to skip this and come back on Thursday if you prefer, when I’ll (hopefully) have something interesting to say.

Or keep reading…

When my dad died in December last year we inherited a decent sum of money from him. This isn’t something we’d fully been expecting, considering he’d been on a pension since 1985, but stranger things have happened. And no, inheriting a decent sum of money doesn’t really make up for losing my dad, who’d only just moved back to our state after a 20 year absence.

So we’ve got money, and for the first time in our married life we can make choices based on what we want/feel is right, not on our financial limitations. We’re putting down carpet in our house for the first time (yes, believe it, the place gets COLD in winter!), and we’re upgrading the kitchen (if you’ve been here you’d know why. It has issues). We were already in process of purchasing a parcel of land and a garage from our next door neighbours, although the original plan for that was to build a granny flat for Dad, who no longer needs it. Any of you who have ever had to deal with council requirements for things like this in Australia (I can’t comment on elsewhere…hopefully it’s EASIER!) will know how hard it is. And, because we can, and because it feels like the right thing to do, we’re packing up the kids and going on a 2-month family vacation to the US and Canada, where I’ll also get to attend the American Christian Fiction Writer’s Conference in Indianapolis, and pitch my work to people who may…MAY just be interested in publishing it.

Yay. All this and a holiday to boot. We are blessed, incredibly blessed. We know this. There’s no way we’d complain about anything right now. No. Way.

So, I don’t like to talk about the huge amount of furniture I have to move and the difficulty in throwing things out and wondering whether it’s wrong that I’m adding to landfill with children’s toys I’d meant to fix or find the missing pieces for and now I have to get them out of the house…NOW…because the carpet people are coming. And how we’ll live with all our furniture stuck in a kitchen for a day or two, when there are still children who need school lunches and meals to be cooked…and doing it all again when we rip out the kitchen window, and a few weeks later the kitchen benches and stove for a week, it’ll be too late to worry about landfill then…and I need to book the tickets to the US, but first I need to finalise the dates, and make sure there’s somewhere appropriate for us to stay in each place, and convince the kids that yes, they may all be sharing a queen-size bed for a week, three of them together, and that’s just okay. I don’t want to talk about it because, really, this is seriously first-world rich-people problems, and I’m so grateful to have carpet and so incredibly grateful to have a new kitchen and so UNBELIEVABLY grateful to have a family holiday overseas, let alone the chance to pursue my dream of becoming a published author, and my husband’s dream of stepping into business full-time, and…

It’s all so good. So SO good. So good that I don’t want to even mention how incredibly stressful it all is right now.

We. Will. Get. Through. It. It. Is. ALL. GOOD.

But please forgive me if I drop the ball a little bit sometimes, or if I get a bit random in my blog posts, or take a while to reply. A change is as good as a holiday…change of any sort–including holidays–rates on the stress scale.

I’ll talk to you soon. I promise. I just can’t promise to make a lot of sense!