Our Changing Life

We sold our home at the beginning of September. After our son moved out into his own place, we decided that we no longer needed a 6-bedroom home with a large yard. It was very, very difficult, especially for me, to leave our home of almost 36 years. We will miss it and especially miss our neighbors and friends. We will, of course, keep in contact with them, but unfortunately it always happens that the closeness is lost in the change.

We had many memories in our home, both good and bad, but primarily they were wonderful times.

As we finished our mission at the end of August, we also were finished with major upgrades in our home, prior to selling it. We had some help from friends in the ward, who provided much needed professional help, especially in upgrading our bathrooms. We love Kenny and Brien and appreciate their wonderful help in this. There were many others who helped and we appreciate them as well.

As we finished the mission, we also found it difficult to be less involved with those special people we came to know and love in our missionary service. We are continuing to keep connected with many of them and will do so in the future. We cannot cut off the love we had developed for them, but, again, the choice closeness will be unfortunately lost as well with them. We pray that the Lord will continue to bless them, and have already seen that He is still blessing many of them.

As we worked towards selling our home, we, of course, started working towards a new place to live and settled on a new home construction of a town house in the Daybreak community of Garden Park, in South Jordan. The home was not scheduled for completion until mid-October, so we planned to take a break after our mission was completed to travel for those 6 weeks. We are now back from that trip and are still waiting for the completion of our new home. It should be finished in the middle of next week. We have already gotten connected with our new ward and have already been extended calls in the ward.

Our trip that we just completed was simply amazing in many ways. Some days, we went to bed wondering how we could have had such incredible experiences, and found that the next day was the same or better! We visited our son and his family in Maryland and our daughter and her family in New York. On the way there, we visited many temples. From New York, we flew to Europe and visited our people in Ravensburg and then went up through Germany and into Denmark, finally returning to Hamburg, Germany and flying home, then visiting family for yet another week before traveling home.

The upcoming blog entries will describe that trip and show pictures. We have had many people ask about the trip, so we are sharing it in this manner. Also, some of our visits in Germany and Denmark was for the purpose of seeing the places where our ancestors lived, so some of these blog posts will be very specific concerning these family lines, so they may have a different audience of interest.

As we get settled in our new home, hopefully soon, we are also starting to fill out mission papers for our next mission, hopefully to begin next spring. We will keep you posted.

Thanks for all the wonderful times we have had with many of you. We love you all.