Forever Home

Brandon is leaving the country in a few weeks. I am super nervous and if I think about it too much I begin to sweat profusely and have an anxiety attack, so let's not dwell on it.

Moving on....

In order for him to leave on a jet plane (and I do know when he will be back again) he needed a Passport. Get this. Bran has never flown before. Yes, he's an engineer for an aviation company and he walks in private jets daily and he makes work instructions for people to build the jets, but he has never flown. Unreal, really. Anyway, he's going to fly and he needed a Passport. So I began searching for his birth certificate. I go to our semi-organized filing system of important papers and began digging. Tax papers from years ago, mixed in with the receipt from the deposit to our apartment (our first home together), along with shot records for the girls, and something else I had filed away. Something that makes me smile every time I look at it.

Six years ago I printed off a house plan in the NSU library. I probably should have been in class, but I wasn't. I was looking up house plans and dreaming of our forever home. And last week I found it. I looked at the bottom of the paper and it was printed out November 14, 2002. Cool, huh?

And with that I had to walk down memory lane. Six years ago we lived in a tiny apartment with our one year old babies. Bran drove ten minutes to work and I had just started back to school that August. My sister was still alive and fighting with everything she had to beat her cancer. I lived 15 minutes away from my parents and thought that was too far. Ha!

I remember the day I brought the house plan home to Bran. He loved it too. For some reason I filed it away and every now and then I find it. We still love the layout of the house. It's a very modest home, but seemed like a mansion compared to the apartment we were living in.

I'm always thinking of our forever home. I long for the day when we have an established home for our girls to come home to and eventually bring their families to for the holidays. However, Bran and I have completely different ideas of a forever home.

I want a house on some land. I don't need a lot, but at least three acres. Maybe because that's what my parents live on right now. Three acres, and oh how the girls love to run on those acres. I need a few trees and I have to have a porch with a porch swing so I can watch thunderstorms. Bran, on the other hand, loves the idea of my dream, but he's thinking more along the lines of a huge condo. For you Okies out there, you know the new condos they built at Utica Square? Yeah, that's his dream forever home. And acreage? Ha! He said he would like a square of grass he could cut with some scissors. Oh dear. We have some compromising to make.

For now I will keep dreaming. I will keep trusting God and follow where He leads us. He has always provided our every need - from our tiny apartment, to the house in Oklahoma, and our home here in Arkansas. And eventually, I'm sure we will have our forever home. And who knows? God might be smiling right now because both of our dream homes are far from what He has in store for us.

Oh, and I'm also going to trust that He will protect Bran while he's out of the country. : )