(I started writing this a couple of weeks ago and have been coming back to it since then to try to finish my thoughts. They still feel unresolved, but that is kind of the point of this post.)

Every once in a while, someone will ask me how I like Texas. It's a natural question, since we've been here about eight months now, but I never feel really sure how to answer it. I usually rattle off a list of things that I like about living in Texas and leave it at that. I love being close to our families and the increased contact my kids get to have with their grandparents now that there aren't two plane rides standing between us at all times. Dan's job is working out really well. We have found a vibrant church and been welcomed with open arms by a wonderful group of believers. I like our house. I like HEB grocery stores. Texas has amazing Interstates. I want to kiss whoever invented their frontage road system.

But recently, after I had listed all those great things about Texas, someone asked me a slightly different question - "Does it feel like home yet?" and without thinking about it at all, I said no. No, it really does not. Now that sounds like a way of saying that we're not happy here, but that's not true. We are happy, and yet it does not feel like home to me. I am trying to just be OK living in that tension. Recently I realized that it's not just me who is still working on feeling at home.

Just a few months after we moved here, my brother and sister-in-law moved to a town about 45 minutes away from us. It is surreal. After eight years living without a single family member within 500 miles, we now have several branches of the family nearby, and I cannot get over it. Today, the kids and I drove up to see my brother and his wife and check out their new place. It was really, really fun. We ate lunch in their apartment which is so pretty thanks to my sister-in-law and her excellent taste and impeccable style. (I would give my brother some credit for that, but I saw his bachelor apartments and they were not nearly this cute.) After that we loaded up and went to get sno-cones from a street vendor. You have not lived until you have fed a one year old his first blue sno-cone. Isaac was delirious with joy and sugar. It was hot, and the city was bustling and colorful and when it was over the kids and I went home. No sweat. No security lines. No luggage carousel. It was pretty much my dream come true.

After the kids' naps, we loaded up in the van again and went to meet Dan for dinner. He is helping some of our friends from church pack their moving truck tonight. One of the things our life in Albuquerque prepared us very well for about our new life in Texas was the experience of having a lot of friends who are in the military and are, therefore, always moving. San Antonio isn't Military City USA for nothing, and more than half of the folks we are getting to know now are military and will eventually move away. One of our friends is moving next week. I hadn't been trying to keep that fact from Kate, but it just hadn't come up yet, and while Dan was buckling Kate into her car seat, he told her where he was going later.

As we were driving away, Kate asked me why our friends had to move. I thought she just really wanted to know what their reason for moving was, so I was explaining that their daddy's job is to be a solider, and the military tells them where to move every few years as part of his job. I was expanding on that theme when I heard Kate kind of sniffling.

"But why did we move from Albuquerque? I don't... want... to ... moooooooove! I miss Albuquerque!"

I was completely taken aback. Since we moved, I have definitely had some conversations with Kate where she expressed sadness about the friends she left behind. I have encouraged her to talk about them and stay in touch in the ways that three-year-olds can -- nonsensical Skype conversations and mailing one another crayon drawings festooned with stickers. But it has been a long time since she has said anything about feeling sad about the move. Lately, when she refers to it, it's in a chronological way, like she is just talking about something that happened before we moved or after we moved. So I was shocked to stumble upon so much grief in her heart about it eight months after the fact.

It never ceases to amaze me how these crucial parenting moments come up when you are in the middle of something else and you have to deal with the whole thing while multitasking. In this case, we were zipping along the freeway at 70 miles an hour in rush hour traffic. Not exactly a moment for calm reflection. So I said that frantic mom prayer that I am sure is uttered from the driver's seats of more minivans than mine -- the one that just says "Help! Help! Help!" Then I asked Kate why she was sad, and I tried to shut up and listen to her.

She told me she misses our friends. And that it is hard for her to go to our new church because it is different from our old church. She asked me if I ever moved when I was a little girl and I told her that I moved to different houses but only moved to a new town one time and that was hard. We talked about how when we looked at our new house before our stuff came on the truck, our voices echoed off the tile and they sounded so loud and it made her feel scared. She asked when we would have to move again, so we talked about how we will need to move to a different house in San Antonio in a couple of years, but that we won't go very far away. She asked about what happened to our house in Albuquerque. Apparently, we never really explained that, and she had this sweet little worry in her heart that it was sitting there empty where we left it. I told her that no, some people who needed a home had come to live in it just like we had found our house to live in when we needed a new home in San Antonio.

We talked about it all for the whole drive home, and I was struck by two things: how much Kate's grief about all the change is like my own, and how there are really no easy answers for it. So instead of rushing to point out to her all the reasons the move has been a good thing for us, I just told her that I feel sad about it all sometimes too, and I think it's OK to feel that way.

By the time we got home, she seemed to have talked about it as much as she needed to, and since I needed to go start putting Isaac to bed I left her on the couch watching a movie. Then I walked to Isaac's room and collapsed onto the chair where I nurse him, wrung out by the sadness I had felt coming from Kate about something I thought she was done with. I think that is where I keep going wrong in this whole process. I want to be done feeling conflicted about all of it, and some days I think I am. But my grief about it surfaces at strange moments when I am least expecting it -- and I might need to start letting go of my timeline for how long we're allowed to feel a little weird here, those of us who are three and those of us who are thirty(one).

So that is how I feel about Texas right now.

The next day Kate got up and had a Skype tea party with her good buddy Lily, which did much to cheer her up, as do my Skype un-tea-party chats with Lily's mom, Erika. We are actually planning a trip back to Albuquerque next month, and I am hoping it is helpful for Kate to see that all of our friends are still there and not just on the computer. We look forward to seeing you all!