Moving Forward

Can I tell you how good it felt to hit the “publish” button after my last post! The pressure of
posting and the guilt of not having posted in two years had sat so heavily on my shoulders that it just froze me. Yes, the pressure was pressure that I had put on myself and the guilt was also
self-induced. Perhaps there was a level of fear that others would be upset about me being MIA for so long. Or the inability to conceptualize what life has been like for the last two years and why I’ve had such little time to sit and write, no matter how much I had desired too. Or the guilt that I’ve missed capturing so many memories of my family, why should I start writing now? Yes, all very lame excuses and I really don’t like excuses…they are just a waste of time.

So onward I trek.

Last summer was a turning point for us. We had decided to get out of the concrete jungle and move north about two hours, which would be half way from family and half way from the Lake. We had packed up most of our belongings and moved our entire lives into a storage unit. We attempted to put our house on the market, but never got there because we had major termite damage that had to be repaired. A few months later and a whole lot less cash in our pockets, the construction work was finally done. But by then, the housing market had dropped again, my mom was diagnosed with Breast Cancer, Vanessa was starting Kindergarten and Katelyn was entering 2nd grade, and Bill’s travel schedule was just crazy. So we decided to put it off until Spring/Summer 2012 and just focus on being a family.

Life was feeling good and, although life with three busy kids is full of adventures, we were starting to get back into our groove of things. I was busy at the girls’ school, especially being a room mom in Vanessa’s class, still active on the Board of Directors at our preschool, raising our children and supporting my wonderful husband. Then we got thrown another curve ball at the beginning of this year, not a bad one, but not one that we had expected. A neighbor of my parents had died and the wife was moving. She lives in the house that we had always talked about living in and in a corner of a cul-de-sac like we had preferred.

Fast-forward till now, our house is sale pending and we are in escrow on our new home. We are very hopeful that everything will happen smoothly, as so far it has all happened incredibly fast and incredibly effortlessly. Not that getting my house ready to be put on the market didn’t come
without much effort, but this time, it feels right and there are no major hurdles to jump over.
I am really excited about what this house has to offer our family. I’m on design web sites daily
coming up with ideas on how to make this cookie-cutter house a home with character for our family. I’m excited to be able to open the back door and let the girls run and play. I’m looking forward to being able to push Paige in a swing in our own backyard. I’m very glad that we’ll no longer have the feeling that we are living on top of each other. I’m looking forward to
making so many more memories as a family.