Life is a Journey

Wow, what a year!! Where do I start, well, perhaps at the beginning….Just a year and a bit ago, we were settling into our newly purchased home in Bad Homburg, Germany. We had big plans for making our lovely Altstadt home even more lovely. Ben was commuting to London three days a week, while we were busy at home with school, church and community. Then, out of left field, came a real surprise. In mid-October 2007, we learned that Jack had a hand-writing difficulty that was slowing him down at school. He was in the second grade at a wonderful bi-lingual school that had a very challenging curriculum, but it wasn’t the right place for him.

After reviewing our options, looking at schools in the UK and the US, we made the momentous decision (momentous for us after living almost 12 years abroad) to up stakes and move back to the US. We had two criteria for choosing a destination in the US 1) a great school for Jack and 2) an east coast location to keep the rellies happy. On October 31, 2007, Jack had his last day at school. We took a week to plan December school visits, choose a mover, find an estate agent to manage our German house, and generally prepare for the move. Then we went on holiday… After a family vote, we decided to drive from Frankfurt to Venice…we had just read the Magic Treehouse story about Jack and Annie’s latest adventure in Venice, so decided that would be the perfect place for us to explore. We rented a lovely apartment in Venice and let ourselves wander until we were utterly lost every day. We followed every clue in the Jack and Annie story and worked our way right to the end of the adventure. We ate lots of pizza and pasta, enjoyed gondola rides, let Jack drive a water taxi to Murano and back, and totally let the children be our guides. We had a very restful holiday. We then drove home through Austria where we visited our dear friends, Clair and Rainer and played in the snow, then on to Munich where we visited Jason, Lili and Constantine for Thanksgiving, before rushing home to start our next big adventure.

On December 4th, Ben flew to Charlotte, NC with Jack and Sara. Sara stayed with my Mom, while Ben and Jack visited two schools in South Carolina. They chose Trident Academy in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina…. both schools were among the 10 schools in the US that offer a very special program for children with learning difficulties. Ben then flew straight back to Frankfurt, hoped on a train, took a taxi and arrived at 10pm at the hospital where I was preparing to have my third back surgery the next morning at 6:00am. My very dear friend, Margarethe, had driven me the 4 1/2 hours to the hospital in Bogen, helped me get checked in and navigate the German (Bavarian, actually - it’s a completely different language!) It’s a wonder I didn’t sign up to have my knee caps removed… At any rate, I had a total disc replacement and now am the bionic woman… all the result of twisting/straining my back to pick up a baby bottle 3 years earlier!!! Just so that you don’t think we are totally insane, we had the surgery date planned before we even dreamed of moving and I didn’t want to start the whole process over in a different country. So…. we planned our departure exactly according to the doctor’s orders, arriving December 21st with just enough time to enjoy Christmas before getting Jack started in a new school.

On January 3, 2008 Jack started school at Trident Academy. He had an excellent spring term. His teachers were very pleased and he has now had an even better fall 2008 term. We already knew that he was brilliant, but then we are a little biased!! His teachers also say that he is a very special boy and he is quickly catching up on the reading, writing and arithmetic that he had fallen behind in. In spite of how it sounds, our lives do not revolve around Jack. This whole adventure has been a step by step process … we started with the most pressing need first, then worked our way down the list. While Ben was flitting between schools and hospital rooms, he was also finding a house for us to rent while we waited on our container to arrive from Germany. He found a charming furnished house on Sullivan’s Island that we rented for two months while we looked for a house to buy. After a couple false starts, we realized we would need a bit more time to find a house, so rented a second furnished house on Sullivan’s Island for a month. Still no luck buying a house, but our container had arrived, so after wrestling our container free from US Customs and paying dearly for the pleasure, we rented an empty house on Isle of Palms for 6 months…. still determined to buy a house. Oh, did I mention that Ben had also been looking for a job since January 1, 2008. He had decided to accept an exit offer from HP and look for work with a different company.

This story has a very happy ending…. well, not really an ending, just a new chapter. Ben took a job in July with Intergraph Corporation, the very company that we moved to Australia with in 1996. We enjoyed a wonderful summer at the beach, then found a house that was perfect for our family and bought it, got Sara into a fantastic kindergarten program at our church and have fallen in love with our new “home town”. We joined a Presbyterian church in Mount Pleasant and have just returned from our first mission trip. Ben and I spent 9 days in Nicaragua learning just how blessed we are among many other things. I am getting ready to start teaching ESL again and really looking forward to putting my mind back in gear!

We are all well, happy and very content to be experiencing the joys of being an American through our children’s eyes. They (nor we, for that matter) had any idea how many “turkey” songs there are or how neat it is to celebrate the 4th of July with parades, flags and ice cream.

We want to thank all of you that have supported us over the past year with your prayers, hugs and good wishes. We are so thankful for Jack and Sara, for their never-ending smiles and laughter. We are especially thankful that God has carried us through the tough times when we were truly not sure which way to turn. We were never worried, really, just curious, always confident that God had a plan in mind for us.

So, big hugs from the Bealls to each of you!! And, if you find yourselves in our neck of the woods, please drop by for a visit.

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