Is anyone else from Gainesville?:

:cuc: We will now all imagine that is a happy dancing Gator, not a pickle.

Not yet..we live in Atlanta now, but will probably be moving near Gainesville sometime this fall :D My DH is likely to take a job in Palatka and I probably want to live in the gainesville area for the university stuff. Alot depends on schools and services available for Eli (he needs speech therapy and maybe OT..and maybe a good special needs preschool).

Go Gators!!! We're about 1.5 hours from there. We'll be up there in September for the annual "get the college friends together for a Gator Game weekend."

cool..spring hill is where dh's cousin lives..he'll be happy that it's so close to Gainesville!

Not yet..we live in Atlanta now, but will probably be moving near Gainesville sometime this fall :D My DH is likely to take a job in Palatka and I probably want to live in the gainesville area for the university stuff. Alot depends on schools and services available for Eli (he needs speech therapy and maybe OT..and maybe a good special needs preschool).


My 5 year old goes to Shand Rehab for Kids for OT, PT, and Speech. The people there are very friendly and very good at what they do. Sometimes sitting in the waiting room talking to the other parents is good "mom therapy" too. I don't have any suggestions for special needs pre-schools, though. My son went to a very small "normal" pre-school, but his OT did tell me once that there was special needs pre-school available.
This is going to be small town life after living in Atlanta.

Great information, thanks...I'm RELIEVED to be living more small town, to be honest..the atlanta area is great.. have amazing friends and support here, but we came here from a tiny mountain town in california that we adored (my oldest is still there :D) and miss that, too. I'm not sure where in the area we'll go, but Gainesville is rapidly becoming my first choice. We're thinking we'll rent a while and look casually for houses, so I'm hoping to find a decent rental house that takes cats after he takes the job :D

We'll see what Elijah needs after tuesday...we're thinking right now ST and OT might be enough for outside the home. Hopefully I can find some good homeschooling resources when we get there :D

We rent a house which is walking distance to the Univ., because my boyfriend is a PHD student. The rent isn't bad but I'll tell you, it did take some getting used to. I lived most of my life in the midwest and this enviornment is really different. There are few sidewalks (although almost no cars in our neighborhood). There are giant bugs that I had never seen before (banana spiders and palmetto bug, which I still say are huge flying cockroaches).
The negative stuff aside, there is alot of "green space" here. There are nature trails in the middle of town. There is a small, working pioneer farm at one of the nature parks, an art museum, and a natural history museum with a children's activity room- all free. If the weather is too hot to play outdoors there is also a pre-school play area in the mall. Beaches are about 2 hours away, going either East or West. Also Poe Springs is near by, which is a great old fashioned swimming hole with cold water even on the hottest day.
There is a Homeschool group that meets at O2B Kids, but I know someone who dropped out of the group because she felt the other parents had no control over their own children, but were telling her how to parent.
O2B Kids is an indoor play place (costs to get in) where they have extra curricular classes and pre-school. I took Aidan there once to see if he wanted to go to pre-school there, but there were too many children in one room. He got so scared, he did that scared monkey scrammble up my body that little kids do when horrified.
There is a good teachers' supply store here and the library has a used book sale that fills a large warehouse twice a year.