*WARNING: If you are easily offended by fracking opinions, or feel you could not respectfully appreciate someone's opinion on the matter, please stop reading now!* Thank you! :o)

*The statements made is in post are MY thoughts and opinions.  You are free to disagree, and I won't hold it against you.  However, in the words of many mothers, if you don't have something nice, or positively constructive to say, I don't want to hear it.*

My head hurts.  It's spinning.  This year has been crazy, and apparently I was sorely mistaken if I thought things would ever reach "normal" around here.  Let's recap, shall we?

Since July 2011 the following life changes have occured:
- We packed up our home in VA (while I was 9 mos pregnant).
- Husband and brother-in-law drove the truck up to our new home in PA while our son and I went to NoVa to stay with my mother, where our daughter would be born, one week later.
- Husband drives to NoVa to be there for the birth of our daughter, then goes back to PA a week later.
- Two weeks after daughter's birth, my mother, our children and I drive to PA.
- A week after arriving, husband starts his new job.
- A week and a half after arriving, our son starts kindergarten.
- 8 weeks after daughter's birth, we come to the realization that there is no acceptable child care here - I have a new career: stay-at-home mom!
- October 2011 - we learn about "fracking" and how it will be affecting this area.
- March 2012 - our school board votes in favor of looking at leasing school property (including the campus here in town where our son goes to school) to the gas companies for "fracking" purposes.  Much concern, debate, speculation and somewhat restrained (depending on who you talk to) panic ensues.

I feel I need to make myself clear: fracking scares the bejeepers out of me.  I don't like it, I don't condone it, I think there are too many hazardous "what ifs" that go with it.  I don't know the future.  If you can, without a shadow of a doubt, promise me that there will be no environmental or health repercussions from fracking, then go and get the damn gas.  Until then, stop hurting the land and people.  I am not a confrontational person.  I don't care for politics.  I don't consider myself a particularly religious person, but I do pray.  Therefore, what I am about to say is pretty much out of character.  If you have leased your land, that was your choice and I hope you seriously prayed about it and considered current and future implications fracking will have on your land and the land/people around you.  I know people who have leased their land.  Do I not associate myself with them? No!  What kind of a friend would that be?  But friends don't always have to agree.  We can agree to disagree and just not bring it up when we're spending time with each other.  In the end, if this all works out and no one or thing gets hurt, then I will gladly eat my speculative words.  I don't want anything bad to happen to anyone.  But, as my husband stated before we got pregnant, knowing he might need to find a job and we might end up having to move when I was due: we can't live our lives on "what ifs".  I don't know if staying around to find out what could happen is something I'm willing to risk my children's, or mine and my husband's, health on.  I guess only time will tell.  I'll just keep on praying.

Oh, and for the record: I don't think any public school lands should be leased.  It shouldn't even be an option.  There is too much at stake and I don't think it is right for any one person, or group for that matter, to make potentially detrimental decisions about the health and welfare of another person's child/children in a public educational setting.  Most people do not have the means or options to pull their children from public education and send them to a private school, or home school them if they do not like what is happening in the public school.  If it could even remotely be potentially dangerous to  children in a public setting, it should not even be considered.