Winds of Change

You may remember when we were selling a house, buying a house, getting re-approved for adoption in Colorado because Asher was on his way in a few weeks, I was finishing my dissertation and graduating, and I was starting a new job. Yeah, crazy. Why would someone do all that? Well, life throws it at you and you react, making you focus on the most important things and strip anything unnecessary out of your life until you can catch your breath.

So, here we are, and it's happening again.

As you know, the week after Christmas, we went to Korea to pick up Tyson and bring him home to join our family. What we haven't really told many people are all the other changes that are going on. I had to keep some things on the down-low because of some sensitive timing, so sometimes only a few of our family members knew what was going on.

I have a new job. And we are moving.

I have been happy with the work I have been doing, but a little discouraged by the way the company was run, because there were issues that directly affected me and my paycheck. I admit that I did send out a few feeler resumes and was contacted by two recruiters over the past year or two, but was going to stick it out and see how the next few years progressed. I was discussing with a coworker how it's much easier to make changes when they are presented to you rather than taking that leap of seeking for those changes for yourself.

The next day, a recruiter called me, asking if I was interested in discussing a job. It was also the same day that Tyson's application for exit permission was submitted to the Korean government.

I would like to back up a few years to give a little context to our lives. As I was finishing my undergraduate degree in Salt Lake and had desires for graduate school, I realized that in engineering, I could be 'paid' (tuition, fees, and a modest stipend) to go to graduate school. I decided I would go through the top 10 engineering graduate schools and apply to some that interested me. This isn't meant to brag, but I got into MIT, Stanford, and Texas, which were the schools I applied to. I was sure I would go to Stanford. I thought it would be fun to go to MIT and live in Boston for a few year. Texas was ok, but an afterthought as #10 or #11 in the rankings. Each gave me varying degrees of financial offers, but through many factors (I won't go in to the longer story), I felt really good about Texas. While there, I received an excellent education, met my future boss at a seminar he gave, and of course, we adopted Riley and Asher.

I was set on two kids. We had a girl. We had a boy. Happy dad. And then I was compelled to think and feel that our family was not complete. I remember the date Becca and I were on, walking around an outdoor mall, when I told her (I know she was hoping I would change my mind at some point). Just a little while earlier, she had met a woman at a park with an Asian child and she asked if she was adopted. She was (adopted from Korea), and the connection was eventually made to our agency that brought us Tyson.

Back to the present. The prospective job interested me. The work was compelling, the company seemed well run, the opportunities seemed to be numerous for professional growth, the compensation was fair and better, but I was scared to tell Becca because it most likely meant we would need to move. And we didn't want to move and leave our friends and a wonderful community. The job was located in downtown Denver, but with a 1+ hour commute each way, it would be too much to remain in Fort Collins. The process of interviews and exploring the opportunity was relatively slow. At the time, it was a little frustrating. But in the end, it worked out pretty well with the delays in Tyson's exit permission. It was also good because the initial flattery of being recruited wore off and we could make a decision based on what was best.

I received an offer the same day we got travel permission to pick up Tyson.

I was already slated for 5 weeks of leave to bring Tyson home and be with my family during this time of transition. The timing was tricky, but I accepted the job and later resigned from my previous one.

I was ok with commuting for a few months as we put things in order, got the house ready, and put it on the market in the spring, when the real estate market is usually more robust. But we talked to our agent and he encouraged us to put our house on the market earlier than later so that we wouldn't have much competition when there were buyers out there that weren't finding what they wanted.

We put our house on the market last Monday and by Friday night we had had 10 showings, 2 offers, and were under contract at listing price.

We were working with an agent in Denver and looking through houses online. We went down Saturday and viewed 8 houses. Our favorite 3 online were still our favorite three, and feeling like we were on House Hunters, we made an offer. It was countered, and we accepted.

Everything seems to be going pretty fast, but it also feels right. It feels like we are being guided (pushed?) to the next chapter of our life. We hope it's for something positive, whether that's to protect me from being on the road too much, protecting us from a layoff, or just a blessing in our lives. But we also realize it could be for other reasons. We sometimes wonder why this is how our life is - a flurry of activity and changes, then a relative calm. In these times, I am often comforted by the words of a hymn which say, "Peace, be still." It would be nice to have foresight as clear as hindsight, but we move forward with faith.