Why Pennsylvania

Good question. To be honest, we are not really sure. It kind of started about four years ago. We lived next door to a crazy lady (no really, she was crazy) but I got to know her pretty well. She scared me a little at first because she did really strange and unusual things. (She showed up at her next door neighbor's house without clothes-that kind of crazy) Anyway, she had cancer and was really very sick and she lived alone. I would help her with odd jobs at her home, and helped her pack when she moved out. One day before she moved, she came over to talk to me about something, a footstool I think. Anyway, we somehow got on the subject of where she is from. She said she was from a town called Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. She described the town, and the home she owned and said that it was for rent. I had never heard of Bethlehem, PA so when she left two hours later I googled it. It was a cute little town and Dan and I began talking about how fun it would be to move away for a while for a little adventure. I grew up air force so after being in one place for more than 3 years I would always get the itch to move. Well, we kind of stopped talking about it, but it never left our minds. We were always thinking about it. So in Sept of 2006 Dan and I decided to take a trip to Pittsburgh, it didn't seem as far away as Bethlehem, plus Bethlehem is a small college town, and there really weren't very many jobs or anything. So grandma and grandpa Lawlor watched our kids (0f course two days before we left Zach was diagnosed with pneumonia) and we flew to Pittsburgh for a few days. We had a fun trip, and now that we have a GPS we think our trip would have been a lot more fun for us if we had one back then. We saw some beautiful country, some scary parts of the city, it was just different for us. Dan grew up in AZ and served his mission in Idaho. So this was something new and exciting. One of the funnest things that we did was go to Punxsutawney. (Groundhog Day!) The festival there is HUGE and people come from all over the world. It was very quiet when we were there though. (We are nerds, what can I say. We went all over that town so we could find the diner and the hotel ect... from the movie. We found out when we got home it was actually filmed somewhere outside of Chicago-the area where they have the festival in Punxy was too small for filming. We laughed so hard!) Still a cool place to see. Anyway, we left there not really feeling good about Pittsburgh, but still wanting our adventure. About a year ago maybe longer, my brother Corey talked to Dan about a job in Philadelphia, but nothing really came from it then. When Dan took his job with the charter school, neither one of us felt very good about it. In fact it took us a long time to tell anyone. We were desparate for a better paying job/career-we had been searching for so long. When you get that feeling that you shouldn't do something, no matter how right and perfect it seems, you should listen to it! Let's just say if certain people had been a little nicer, that experience would have gone very differently. Which was also the weirdest part. Dan did really well at that job, despite hardly any training. The kids loved him, and the parents seemed ok with him too. In fact, it was kind of the oddest thing that it didn't work out. All the pieces were there. Dan "quit" at the end of October, (someday I will blog about our miraculous two Decembers-in a row, but those things are almost too sacred to Blog about right now. I really can't talk about those events without a lot of tears. I will say again, prayers are answered and miracles happen.) back to the story... right after Dan "quit"-with no job prospects-very scary, Corey said that he got a call wondering if Dan was still interested in the job. There were some concerns that we voiced knowing that there was another person interested in the job, but were reassured that the other person interested was actually pursuing another company. We were so excited that Linda (the owner of the company) thought of Dan at this particular time, that Dan had just quit his job, if he hadn't and things had gone well, we wouldn't be here. And our house had just "sold". So we jumped. It took until the end of January to get offical word, and our dream was starting to come together. There were still a lot of things stacked against us, but at the same time it started to flow. But we also know there is opposition in all things, and we all have to go through trials. We knew it wouldn't be easy, but we also knew this was were we needed to be. So here we are. Bethlahem is about an hour or so north of us.