Well, the tedious and somewhat overwhelming process of beginning to move cross-country has begun again.  It seems like just a few months ago that we were going through this in Portland, wondering what Miami would be like and if we would maybe just want to stay there forever.  Sadly, it turns out that wisdom (and the hand of God?) are taking us back to the soggy northwest.  Being pregnant complicates our otherwise footloose existence and necessitates Henry having a lucrative enough job for me to stay home or some sort of trustworthy child-care situation available for Cora… Miami is expensive, I refuse to do the Miami day-care thing, and my parents are conveniently located in a city that we are nuts about.  After several months of looking for jobs in both places and turning down an offer in San Antonio that just didn’t feel quite right, it has become apparent that the job he wants is available in Portland (albeit for less money than we can really live comfortably on).  Furthermore, I am pretty homesick for being a nurse outside of the medicare fraud system that seems to exist here in south florida… which is probably a story for another post.

In any case, we are beginning to collect boxes and get rid of extraneous junk, and I have returned to my obsessive relationship with Craigslist.  And we are facing the very sad prospect of saying goodbye to some great friends we have made here.  I met Kate and Omar in the ER at Children’s last fall when they brought Asher (their 2-month old) in for some troubling high-volume vomiting… luckily, Asher turned out to be fine, and after walking them to ultrasound it dawned on me that Omar was one of the pastors at our (rather large) church.  And Kate had a Patagonia diaper bag, which wasn’t something I thought existed in Miami.  We got talking, figured out that we lived in the same neighborhood, and decided to be friends.  And have been ever since.

The thing that makes it really difficult (aside from the fact that we have one of those rare and magical 4-way couple relationships where all of us get along like peas and carrots) is that they are just about to start the project of planting a new PCA church next to downtown Miami… this is something Miami desperately needs, and they are the perfect folks to do it.  And they need people to stick around and help them get the thing established, which is exactly the kind of thing we would love to do, but it seems like the aforementioned hand of God is taking us back to Portland.  I think we’re all sort of waiting for some sort of miraculous job offer to come down the pipe for Henry that would allow us to stay here, but it just isn’t happening.  …anyway, we are packing up the boxes and beginning the process of saying goodbye.

Part of the process was the purchase of 2 goldfish (a fat one and a skinny one) to give to Kate and Omar’s 2 boys.  We named them Jeff and Abbie (and yes, the fat one is Abbie) and Henry declared them to be “transitional objects,” which I thought was hysterical.  Below is Elisha’s reaction to the new fish, which I think will really confuse him for the next few weeks before we leave town.