Background on my we moved...

Some friends who I sent the blog to didn't know the details of why we moved to Rolla and what we are going to do here so I thought I would give some background.

Todd is enrolled at the University of Missouri - Rolla and starts summer school the middle of June and he'll be full-time in the fall. He has about two years of school work to finish a second bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering. He's been taking one class at a time for the past 5 years in preparation for his junior year. Todd has always wanted to do his last two years of the degree together - which made a lot of sense to me. We finally arrived at the time where he was ready for his junior year so to Rolla we go. This is a great school for engineering in a great small town which all equals more affordable for the family and a great degree! www.umr.edu if you want to know more - the name of the school will be changing in January to Missouri University of Science and Technology.

When we went to Iowa (July of 2006), our default plan was to spend about a year there and then come to Rolla. We were open to that changing but after our time there we didn't have any compelling reason for us not to pursue Todd finishing this degree. If you have ever spent much time around Todd, most of you know that he is an engineer, he just didn't have a degree to be able to get a job doing that. He doesn't want a job that requires him to sit in a cube all day everyday. Civil engineering seems like it will provide that type of opportunity versus mechanical or electrical which both interest him as well.

Our year in Iowa City was really good. I loved being able to spend more time with the boys. Todd was right, that I did want to spend some more time with the boys before they got too big. Cerner offered me a part-time position so I have been working two days a week since the middle of August. The two days a week was a great amount of work - enough for me to feel like I'm keeping my finger in the professional world, but yet spending the majority of my time with the boys.

For now, I will continue to work 16 hours a week. In the current position that I have I will no longer have a job at the end of the year. There are some other opportunities out there that I may be able to take advantage of but I would have to do some travel. Right now we are about two hours from the St. Louis airport so I would be driving there to fly out...

Another huge decision in the last year is about Andrew's schooling. I am pretty sure that we are going to home school starting as soon as next month. He's been reading now for almost two years and reads really quite well. We know that he reads everything because of the questions that he asks...like today he asked me who's 28th anniversary it was? We had to ask him where he read that - and it was on my shirt for a run that I did. Based on what I have observed in the kindergarten's he will be bored. The kindergarten teachers have to get all of the kids to the same place, but because he reads well, he knows the letters, sounds, numbers and he's read a ton of what is typically learned in kindergarten. I didn't really think that it was a real option for me but I've done a lot of reading online and we're going to go for it. We will have to find somewhere for the boys to go for the hours that I will be working but we can do everything in a few days that we need to. I'm going to stick mostly with kindergarten type material (with 3rd grade readers) so that John Lewis can pretty much be involved as well, JL's not quite ready to read yet, but he's getting there. I don't want to start Andrew too far ahead of JL so I have to be doing all different subjects for both of them.

I think that about summarizes it for now...thanks for reading!