Thoughts on Moving - A Very Long Ramble

Why yes, I am still around. I'm sure you were wondering, weren't you? I've saved up all my babbling for the past month, and am about to release it right now. Are you ready? And.... go!!!!

Ok, so you know that we moved. Marquis and I are pretty good at moving, we've done it A LOT. There always seems to be a good reason. In fact, just because I'm a crazy list person, here is a list for you:

1. May 1999 - Newlywed us's moved into our first home, a teeny bitty basement apartment. I'm talking super teeny, the kitchen was pretty much just a hallway with some cupboards on one side and a small oven/stove. It had the cutest little dishwasher, less than half the normal size of a regular dishwasher, so probably about a foot wide? I have to admit that I didn't think it was so cute on those days when there were a lot of dishes. It was the perfect little home for us except for one thing, there was just one bedroom, so when CG was there we pulled her crib mattress out of the closet and she slept on the floor right outside our room. Back then her mom still lived in Utah, so we pulled this mattress trick every other weekend. Not handy, we needed more room!

2. May 2000 - We moved into Marquis's parent's house. The 'rents had decided to go galavanting around the planet before serving a mission for our church and needed someone to hold down the fort at home. We needed more room. Win-win!

3. About May or so of 2003 - The parents came home and needed their space back. We moved into a house that had been purchased by family to be fixed up and then sold again. Having people living there was supposed to help keep cost down on the insurance, and we could help fix up the house at the same time.

4. About January of 2004 - Fixer-upper sold! We moved into an apartment pretty much right across the street from the school CG attended, making it super easy for me to help out over at the school, pick her up afterward and take her to swimming or wherever she needed to go, or whatever else I needed to do to help out. Then, during the summer we lived there, CG's mom moved with her to California. We also had a fire that was totally preventable if the maintenance people listened to our concerns. Awesome. For some reason we didn't want to stay there any more.

5. January of 2005 - We moved to the cutest new apartment that we loved. If you fell off the back balcony you would fall right into a park. This was great on the 4th of July because we could go right over and join in the festivities, and then watch the fireworks right from our patio. We loved this little place!

6. August 2005 - Marquis's work asked him to move to California, right close to where CG was living. We jumped at the chance, of course! I went to Southern California to begin training for the job I'd be transferring to at the airline I worked for at the time and we let our apartment managers know we'd be moving out. Three days before the move was to take place we received word that his work had decided to close their office there, and that 6 months after we moved Marquis would have to find another job. We were told we could still move there if we wanted and he'd still have a job for that 6 months, or he could stay in Utah and have a job indefinitely. Moving to a place that crazy expensive without a steady job was just too scary for us, but our apartment had already been leased to someone else, so Marquis had 3 days to find a us new place to live while I was still in California finishing the training that I now wouldn't even need. Thankfully he found the cutest little house to rent. My friends called it the cabin house because it felt just like a little cabin in the woods, while somehow still being in the middle of the city. Super cute!

7. August 2006 - We decided it was about darn time we pretended to be grown ups and bought our very own house. Our lease was up, so we enlisted a real estate agent friend and soon found a cute little townhouse. We have many good memories at this little townhouse  not the least of which is that this is where we finally were blessed with a perfect little baby of our own.

8. February 2009 - We were really, really missing our CG. It was just too hard to see her go each time, to have Sweetheart missing out on so much time with her big sister, so we decided to just go for it and move to California, for real this time. Ha! Funny. We put the house on the market and it sold fairly quickly. We moved into a "temporary" itty bitty two bedroom apartment. We left most of our things in boxes because of the temporariness of the situation. Or so we thought. Unfortunately right at that moment the job market got really, really bad, especially in California, and besides a few interviews, we didn't get very far. 

9. February 2010 - I had had it up to my ears with itty bitty apartment and living out of boxes, especially since I had started working at home full time and was cooped up in that teeny space all day. We also had recently discovered that Princess was on the way and the thought of changing doctors in the middle of a pregnancy if we did move to California, or the thought of bringing a baby home to that tiny place was just too much for a crazy hormonal pregnant lady to handle. I informed Marquis that we were finding a bigger place to live and fast! And that we would be there at least a year so I could have my same amazing doctor. After that we could revisit moving to California. Marquis agreed, and we found our last home, the one we just moved from last month. We loved that place! There is nothing that could have been more perfect at that moment in time for our little family. Not long after we moved in Marquis started school. If he was going to find a good job in California (or a better job anywhere!), he needed more schooling, so it had to be done. Because we didn't want to interrupt his school, we stayed longer than the year we intended. 

10. Now - We still hate being so far from CG, but she is going to be 18 in a year and a few months. She will graduate shortly after that and then will be off, to college and real life, and who knows where that will be. It doesn't make sense to move to California at this point. We don't want to raise our little girls there and would have moved back here eventually anyway when CG went to college even if it had worked out to move there. With all of that in mind, we have decided it would be stupid to not take advantage of the super low interest rates right now, and so we are buying a house here. For the houses we've been looking at we will end up with a house payment less than we were previously paying in rent. You can't beat that! 

So we have moved ten times in 13 years of marriage. Yikes, that a lot! I'm ready to throw down some roots and just stay for the rest of our lives. But here is the super scary, weird part. When I was 19 I decided I had had enough of the teeny little town where I grew up. I had a fancy new job at an airline in the "big city," and so I said goodbye with the intention of never, ever coming back. We've been looking at houses since May of this year, and we started out looking not far from where we had been living. Then we started talking about moving in with my brother and his wife, who live not in the town where I grew up, but in the next town over where I went to high school.  That is the town where I had my first job and where a lot of my friends lived. It is also where not only this one brother lives, but I have another brother who lives there with his family and also a sister with her hubby. My third brother is in college not far away, and my parents still live in the same house where I grew up. As I was thinking how nice it would be to live near them, even if temporarily, I looked online at a few houses nearby just out of curiosity. The next thing I knew we had our real estate agent driving clear down there to show us houses and we suddenly we had offers in on a couple of short sales. And I was left wondering, what in the world just happened? 

We are still looking and trying to figure out our next steps, but I just can't get over the fact that I'm back here. So many things are very different; the Jr. High I went to is now double the size it was, there are now a whole handful of stoplights in a town that barely had it's first stoplight right before I left, the giant field out by the freeway entrance has now sprouted a giant Walmart with a strip mall and a smattering of fast food places have sprung up around it. So many things are the same, though, and as I drive around the place is saturated with memories. As I walk Sweetheart to preschool (more on this later) I pass by the street where my two best high school friends grew up side by side. We got into a lot of trouble on that street and in the surrounding streets. The place where I had my first job is still there, except although the building looks the same on the outside, it's now the library instead of a pizza place. 

Weird, weird, weird! I can't believe I'm back. And yet at the same time it's so good to be back. Despite being gone for 14 years, there is the home feeling here. And as I see my little girls becoming better and better friends with their cousins and thriving in this teeny town, I am so glad that we have made this move!