The End

Well, you know that I am now posting in new job land. I'll talk about that later. What I want to do now is to finish up my Las Cruces posts. This might be boring, but once again, this is more for me than anyone else :0

The day after graduation was Mother's Day and I can barely remember anything...we were so exhausted from all the graduation celebration/last minute visits to important LC places/parents in town/goodbyes/packing/cleaning/etc. I do remember James going up to sing with the primary and ahead of time I thought it would really make me cry, especially considering the imminent move. I didn't cry; I laughed! He just stood up there with a goofy look on his face. I think he sang 2 or 3 words and then the rest of the time he looked around to see what everybody else was doing or looked out at us in the congregation. I was happy :)

Church ended and I proceeded to cry like a baby. I tried to take a route that would involve me seeing the least amount of people possible since I was a wreck. It mostly worked. I cried at various points during the next 4 days...and then some. On Monday some wonderful guys came over and loaded up the truck for us. We had to give away a desk and a chair so that everything else would fit in the truck. Note to self: A sixteen foot truck was not sufficient! Some lovely friends came over and brought food, drinks, snacks, and love. I kept telling everyone to knock it off so that I could stop crying already! Several lovely ladies came over and helped clean out our "darling" student family housing apartment. YOUR NAMES ARE REMEMBERED IN HEAVEN! Seriously, I pretty much think cleaning someone else's oven, fridge, windows, walls, etc qualifies you for heaven. Anyway, we checked out of our apartment at 5pm. And then I cried... probably more from relief this time. Meanwhile, James was living the good life being spoiled by granny and papa. Shopping, movie, lunch out, etc. After check out of the apartment and check in to the hotel we all went out to dinner together and then crashed hard.

The next day, Ben and James left the hotel early in pursuit of green chiles, dry ice and styrofoam ice chests. Yep, we drove across 13 states or whatever it was with 2 coolers full of chile! We were successful! Granny and Papa and James had a flight out of El Paso that morning and I really really really wanted to be HAPPY so that James wouldn't freak out about leaving without us. The tears started leaking out...but at least I wasn't sobbing, yet. As we were saying goodbye in the parking lot, James saw me crying and said in his full-of-himself way, "Mommy, it's ok if you cry. I know you're going to miss me." That just made me laugh and we quickly hastened our goodbyes. They drove away and THEN I started sobbing. Ben put his arm around me and walked me through the hotel lobby where no less than 12 people thought we had just faced some horrible tragedy. The management looked especially concerned.

We went up to our hotel room and I calmed down. We packed up our stuff and headed out. The management looked at me very carefully as we checked out. I think they wanted to make sure they didn't need to call the police or anything. Ben got in the moving truck, I got in the car and we drove away. And then we drove and drove and drove and drove and drove. Although we had to drive by ourselves, the walkie talkies were a LIFESAVER! We drove for 4 days straight. I temporarily suspended my ban of soda to consume large amounts of dr pepper and coke to keep myself awake. I was sooooo happy that our new car has free satellite radio. I did talk on the cell phone a few times to wake myself up. I barely remember most of the trip. That's somewhat scary. I saw the St Louis Arch and drove over the Mississippi and Ohio rivers for the first time. But the awesome part was that we drove over 2500 miles and only saw 20 minutes of rain; we didn't have any car problems; neither of us got a ticket or had an accident; neither or us fell asleep and for the most part all of our directions were accurate and we never got lost. We were very blessed.

We got into new job town at exactly 5pm on Friday night. We checked into our new place and went out to dinner. I think I cried in my pasta. We slept on our air mattresses that night and the next morning several awesome guys from our new church congregation came and helped us unload the truck. We bought some essentials and spent the rest of the day unpacking a bit.

The next day I flew back to Houston to my family's house. I was so happy to see James and sooo happy that my parents kept him alive! We stayed there for another week and then flew back together. James was happy to see that new job town had all his required happy places: McDonald's, Chuck E Cheese, a movie theater, etc. He decided we could stay.