This is the place...

Jeff had spent the previous couple of months driving through the neighborhoods surrounding Corona del Sol High School. That is the area we moved from and we wanted to try and put Chad in the school he would have gone to had we not moved away. These were the kids he started 1st grade with and went to school with until 8th Grade. We felt like since we were moving him his Junior year of high school, the least we could do was make it as painless as possible by making sure he would already know people. This proved to be much harder than we thought it would. At first, Jeff just concentrated his efforts on our old ward boundaries - but then after a futile couple of months, he expanded to the surrounding area. He found othing really worth the money these people wanted. Truly, I'm amazed at how people live sometimes. I'm even more amazed at what people think is aesthetically pleasing or comfortable. I guess that's why it's called "personal choice", right? Well, none of the few available houses were what we really wanted to live in, so we decided after much prayer and research on the schools in the valley to go out to Gilbert and look in the Highland High School boundaries.
We started at he south end of the boundary line and just started driving. Up and down streets, through neighborhoods. We did this after work so our time was limited. By Friday night we had made it to the northern part of the school boundaries and had driven through what we thought was most of the neighborhood. We were literally on our way out of the subdivision, when Jeff turned to his right and there on the corner was a "For Rent" sign in a cute medium sized house. Could we be so lucky? We called the number on the sign and the man told us that the owners were there and we should just knock on the door and ask to see the house. We felt a little funny doing that, but we did. The house was great - the owners were great - we knew this was the place. We signed the lease the following Monday and moved in that weekend - well, moved in is relative. We had nothing to move in. We didn't even have a bed! So it took a week or so to gather enough stuff to be able to actually "live" in the house, but we did eventually. We were in the house about 3 - 4 weeks before Jeff went to Oregon and brough down our first 2 trucks of belongings. It was an interesting time - living in 2400 square feet with nothing but TV trays, a computer (Jeff needs that to work) and a bed. No TV, no couches or chairs - we even had to borrow towels from my mom! When Chad came down from Oregon, we had to buy him an air mattress so he would have something to sleep on. Crazy. It was like honeymoon at first - sort of. It got old though after a while. By the time our stuff got here the end of July, we were all ready!