What's important?

Before I start this post, once again, I just wanted to vent. I was forced to upgrade to the new version of Blogger this morning. I hate change. I typed out this post and hit "save as draft", when I went in to edit it, it was all gone! Eaten by this supposedly great new version of Blogger...Grrrrr!

Since Paul and I are trying to get our long-term goals hammered out we have been forced to think about what's important.

My previous comment that we wanted to move away from CA sparked an email from a friend who thought we were over the desire to leave. We thought we were over it too! Our friends are important to us, they are the family we weren't given by blood. But is that enough to make us stay in a place where we just aren't happy? The financial strain of living here is wearing, it will inevitably lead to burn out. We may be close (relatively speaking) to our friends but what good does that do when we can't afford to visit or join in on outings? Since we have been here our visits to church and our friends, which are one inextricably combined, have gone from weekly to once a month. We've gone from enjoying lunch out after church to no longer being able to do that. I'm glad that our friends have the opportunity to go out and enjoy the company of others, but we cannot. Paul and I live in a completely different reality. We are in a different part of our life (most of our friends are older) and we have chosen to have children. We have chosen to give up financial security to give the kids the security of having a parent at home to guide their education. I have chosen to embrace my vocation as a wife and mother in a traditional, some might say archaic, manner. Because we live in this other universe, we just don't have the means to participate in much else.

So once again this brings me back to wondering if staying here strictly to be near friends is an option? I can't say I have a hard and fast answer but the longer we are here the more I think it's not a good option. So that makes me wonder what is important? Everyone has different needs to consider. For us we know one thing that we cannot ignore, homeschooling laws. Wherever we move must have, what we consider, decent laws. That rules out at least 1/2 of the states, I can live with that. The other things we have thought about are: affordability, zoning restrictions, taxes, weather, and gun laws. I'm sure there are more but that's what comes to mind right now. California pretty much falls short on every one of our concerns, except for the homeschooling laws.

Luckily we don't have to make any hard decisions right now, even if we wanted to we can't move for some time. But being the planner that I am, I can't just ignore what I know is coming. Eventually we will be forced to make a decision on where to go next. If I'm lucky maybe our friends will want to follow us.