Colorado

We arrived in Colorado around 2 1/2 weeks ago. It is hard to believe it has only been that amount of time! We have moved into a home we are renting for the year. It is a fantastic place! The neighborhood is great...we have very friendly neighbors...some times I think the kids have time clock that goes off and makes them knock at our door every meal time! But we are happy that the kids have friends to play with. The older two are still short on friendships, so we hope that they will meet some neat kids soon. The house has a partial basement and is a two story house. We can see the mountains from our house. We are close to a grocery story, Papa Murphy's, the YMCA, the kids' schools, and parks. And our bank is in our grocery store! Kris' work is about three miles from our home. So we have a lot to be thankful for!

I still miss my friends from Wisconsin and that feeling of fitting in. I miss the Wisconsin culture of cheese curds, custard, bbq's with friends, the Green Bay Packers, and that feeling of celebration over summer. (It is such a short season there.) My experience to this point is that Wisconsinites are the most open to friendships of any place I have ever lived...and I have lived all over the US and across the globe. Some places are friendly on the surface, but when it comes to deeper relationships, you can't break through if you haven't lived there your whole life.

Colorado Springs is a very migrant community with several military bases along the perimeter of the city. It should mean that people are more open to friendships, but some times in migrant communities, people just get tired of befriending new people. It was like that for us in the mission's community in the Philippines. In fact, at one point right after we had arrived in the country a lady told me that she didn't bother to befriend anyone who was not going to be there longer than two years. She then turned to me and asked, "So how long are you going to be here?"

My impression of the culture of this area so far is that people are nice, people love the outdoors, sports, and think of themselves as green. (However, I find it ironic that no one here has a clothes line in their back yard.) If you are a military person, there is a community here for you. There are a number of retired military personnel living here, and just like when I meet a fellow missionary, you can sense an immediate connection between people who have served in the military.

My wrong assumptions of what Colorado would be like...I thought we would be living in a much more rural location. I thought that my kids would be attending a smaller public school. I had no idea that they would be attending four different schools. I thought that the kids my kids would be interacting with would be country kids. And I thought that we would be living in an area with a much more Western flavor. That doesn't mean this is bad, I just had some wrong assumptions.

So it remains to be seen if we can integrate into our new environment.