Check Out My New Blog....

I started a new site to document our journey:  martisnewadventures.blogspot.com
Here is the first post.....

Our future house in the West Antelope Valley, CA

We're in escrow on this fabulous white house pictured above.....and everyone we know thinks we're nuts! 

View from our window in San Diego, CA

I need to take a few steps back for this all to make sense.  Currently we live in a fabulous house, on a quarter acre lot, with an amazing view, 5 minutes from downtown San Diego.  We have a giant picture window that looks over San Diego Bay to Coronado Island and to Mexico beyond.  We have a great yard with room for our trampoline & play structure with plenty of room for a large garden.  A small bay beach is right down the street.  Life is pretty good.

Max watering our yard, downtown San Diego in the back.

The main problem with our situation is that Larry, my husband, has been commuting to Kern County for the past few years.  Larry is a contractor whose role has morphed from mainly working from home to having to be on site with his customer....who happens to be 3-4 hours away.  In the past few years, he's gone from mostly being here with Max and me to traveling to a hotel in Bakersfield on Sunday...then driving to the oil fields an hour each way to work....returning exhausted on Thursday nights.  The separation simply isn't working for our family.

Max with his aide since KG, Alma, and pals Carlos & Caden.

The decision to move closer to Kern County wasn't an easy one.  We've been renting this amazing place for 8 years.  Our son, Max, has Down syndrome.  The services he receives at our neighborhood school are extraordinary.  Cabrillo is a small K-4 school with a few hundred kids...Max knows everyone and everyone knows Max.  He's in a regular class with the same kids he's been with since Kindergarten.  He has friends from school and connections made through the special needs community here in San Diego.  Like I said, life is good.

Max plays Miracle League baseball.

When you have a child with special needs, you're always looking towards the future.  Although life in San Diego is great, is it what's best for Max long term?  Although his school placement is ideal now, when he enters 5th grade, the situation will not be optimum.  What will Max do in High School and beyond?  When you start asking the BIG questions, your path leads in a different direction.

We need to set Max up for success long term.  We also need a better (hard to quantify better when you live in San Diego where we live) quality of life as a family.  The solution seemed to be moving towards Bakersfield.  The main problem with that is the air quality.  You simply do not move a medically fragile child to a place where he can't breathe the air.

So we spent a few months looking for someplace close enough for Larry to commute to work, but that had air you can breathe.  We looked in the Cuyama Valley, Lebec, Lockwood Valley,  Frazier Park and the West Antelope Valley.  Although they all had great attributes, the West Antelope Valley ended up being the best fit.

In the 'yard' with the Tehachapi Mountains in the background. 

We've looked at a lot of houses...some fabulous and some lacking.  We lost out on the house we thought was THE house, only to have the white house pictured at the top fall right into our plans.  Our plans to set Max up for the future...to have a nice place to live with enough acreage to grow some sort of 'low maintenance'  crop on the land. 

It looks like we found our solution.  Join us for future updates to our home, land, Max's life and our further adventures n the Antelope Valley!

Cheers~
Marti