Moving and Christmas and everything in between

Oh. My. Goodness. 

We have had a stressful and hectic few weeks!  We are now settling in to our new house in Texas, and it's been, well, a whirlwind.  Since I last wrote, we had our house packed up and moved and we made the 15-ish hour drive from Colorado Springs to the Fort Hood area. 

We did the drive in three legs.  The first stretch was to Amarillo, Texas (via Colorado and a short stint in New Mexico), where Daniel went to his first two years of high school, before moving to Connecticut where we met.  We stayed in a nice suite that night with a hot (and decent) continental breakfast the next morning.  We took a very short tour of Amarillo (each of us still driving one of our cars, and on our phones with each others, so Daniel could tell me what he was showing me) and we saw his high school and the two houses he lived in while they were there.  Then we got back on the road East and South, and made it to the Dallas area around dinner time, where we stayed with Daniel's brother and his family.  Our niece is 15 and we hadn't seen her in about 10 years, and our nephew, who is Lucas' age, we'd never even met before.  (Sad!)  We had a very nice evening and morning spending time with them and getting to know them a little bit better.  It's exciting to think that we're only a few hours away from them now and will, hopefully, have many more chances to see them in the time we're here.  A little before lunch time we got back in the car, to head to Fort Hood.  We decided to stop at our new house to check out the neighborhood and yard before we went to Fort Hood (where we had reserved temporary lodging until our stuff arrived).  Even without keys to see the inside of the house, we were very pleasantly surprised to find our new yard nice and big with the fence all the way around it.  The kids were thrilled to run around and be out of the car for a while.  We walked up the street a few houses to the community center's playground and played for a few more minutes, before walking a bit further (less than a half mile) to the school where Lucas will be enrolled soon. 

All in all, I have to say, we were both quite pleasantly surprised to find the Fort Hood/Killeen area much prettier, as far as topography, and much more built up, as far as shopping/restaurants/entertainment than we were expecting, given the pitifully poor reviews others had given us of Fort Hood.  Frankly, the area itself is much more beautiful, than, say driving through Kansas, with lots of rolling hills and many more trees than I expected.  Based on what others said, I expected a hot wasteland when we got here and it's just not that at all. 

Our new house is about 10 miles East of Fort Hood.  And we are very pleased, so far, with it.  We are not far from some nice areas for shopping and eating out, and the space itself is great for us.  We got our keys on Monday the 16th.  We were told our household goods would be delivered on the 17th, but that didn't happen because of a delay with another delivery.  So, we got our things on the 18th.  We slept in our new home that night, despite the fact that we had very little settled at that point.  We've since gotten bedrooms, kitchen, and our living room/family room mostly settled.  We still have lots of boxes to unpack, but they are being taken care of slowly, in between all the regular "jobs" of keeping our family functioning and happy.  Oh, and Daniel's already been at work sort of part-time since we got here and conducted a piece at the 1st Cavalry Band's Christmas/Holiday concert.  (Yeah.  We jumped right in.  All in.) 

We finally got our Christmas tree out yesterday and decorated it in the morning.  We had a few presents for the kids (thanks to Wal-Mart and a few family members who sent things to the new address) and I put the babies' gifts under the tree unwrapped.  I hid Lucas' gifts around the house and gave him clues about where to find them, since we didn't have time to get them wrapped.  He actually had lots of fun with the game, and we're thinking we may make that a tradition now. 

There's so much I could write about how I'm feeling right now, but I think we'd be getting into serious rambling territory.  Suffice it to say, we're all feeling the stress of the transition, but doing our best to be happy and kind and festive despite it.  Moving at Christmas time is hard, plain and simple, but we're making it through and getting close to feeling like we can come out of our own space to start getting involved in things around us. 

And now, I have Christmas shopping to do and packages to mail and generally just to do December over again.  *grin*  We'll be sending out New Year's letters this year, too, instead of Christmas cards.  But, a little bit late, Merry Christmas!