Friday we part with our homeschooling materials and all our hard work. It feels weird to have it all boxed up, never to be seen again. I now have a bankers box neatly organized with all our work, and maybe they will see and and say, "we only need a sample of the work completed, not all the work", but I found it impossible to pick out only a sample of the work. So, they are getting the whole shebang. I didn't realize until today just how much work we had completed over the year! Now I understand how we were so busy each day! On Friday Russell and I are taking our box of binders, folders, notebooks and papers downtown to the school office.

On another note...

We are preparing for a change.

A pretty big change. (NO! There are no new additions coming into our family! Stop thinking that right now!)

We feel we must leave this area we have been living in.

Over the course of the 2 years we have been living in this house we have always been aware that this is a less than desirable neighborhood. We chose to live here though because we had been told by several people that the neighborhood was changing and it was becoming safer and cleaner. For the first year we believed this. Sure we would hear an occasional fight, or hear a distant gun shot, but we were hopeful that good things were going to happen here. We have good neighbors who made us also believe that the neighborhood was changing for the better.

When my sister was visiting last week, we were sitting in the living room one evening when we heard the sound of fireworks going off. My sister jumped, and thought that it was gun shots. We laughed and assured her that it was not, and that if it was gun shots she would be able to tell the difference, but there was nothing to be worried about. Not 1 hour later we heard 5-6 VERY loud pops accompanied by squealing tires. My sister once again jumped, and this time with good reason. On the corner, just one house away, someone was shooting at someone. The neighbors saw the car and someone running, but that's the last we heard. Since this incident we have heard several more shots at night, and one of the neighbors has told us of a new gang that moved in across the street from her that is rowdy and dealing drugs heavily.

No more sugar coating. I'll explain it like it is...

For 2 years we have been putting up with, and witnessing, some pretty crazy things. On any given day I can watch a drug deal from my kitchen window. I have had to stop and wait behind a car who was stopped in the middle of the road finishing a deal. I watched a deal go down right in front of our house in the middle of the day (this was the most shocking to me because it was the first time that I had seen drugs in close proximity to me. I know, how naive of me, but honestly I had never seen baggies of white stuff and baggies of green stuff, except on TV, until this day. Not something I want to see from my living room window.) We have listened to fights, loud parties, and squealing tires. Let us also not forget the car bomb. I know not to buy pizza from Dominos because the Domino delivery guy is not selling pizza. I watch him park his car on the next street down from us and people come to his window. Things get passed through the window...and I've never once seen a pizza box passed through the window. I know what you're thinking...call the cops. Call the tip line. THE COPS ARE NO GOOD HERE! They know this area is bad, but they don't do anything about it. I even watched as a police car pulled over the Domino delivery guy one night at around 1:30am in front of the house. I'm fairly certain that no ticket was given out. No lights. No sirens. Hmmmm.....

It's funny, but even with all the stuff that goes on here I would not say that I feel "unsafe". I get very angry and annoyed that these things happen close to me and my family, but I have never been afraid here. I still walk to the library and allow the boys to play outside (with supervision). I hope everyone knows that we would not put our children in danger. I have never thought that they were in danger or we were putting them in harms way. But, in recent days/weeks we have been feeling uneasy about living here. The "activity" seems to be picking up and so we are leaving. We have realized that we don't have to stay here. There are neighborhoods out there where this stuff doesn't happen. The world is our oyster! And boy, I love oysters.

Where are we going? We are preparing to check some options...Stay tuned.