moving mountains

Tyler and I pride ourselves on not having a lot of things we don't need.  Or, we did, until we saw all our accumulated miscellaneous junk during the packing process.  Three residences, six years, and three children are to blame!  Moving is always a daunting process and it was made terribly loathsome when things were not proceeding favorably with our home purchase.  It's a little bit fun to pack up your things with anticipation of placing them in their special new niches of your new home.  It's pretty sad to pack up your things when there is a very large possibility they will have nowhere to go.  Tyler handled all the heavy lifting and shuttling to the storage unit without complaint and worked so hard to finish the tasks at hand.

When it became pretty clear that we would not be moving into our "dream house", I was heartbroken.  We loved our house in McKinney.  We loved Palmer's preschool where he had made friends.  We loved the downtown square where we lived for several years.  We loved the Heard Museum where we had just gotten an annual pass.  In the process of deciding to buy that house in Lewisville, these things weighed heavily on my mind, but when I pictured our family in that new house 5, 10, 15 years from now. . . those things we loved were easier left behind.  I sobbed over both losing these cherished familiar things and losing the place I had excitedly planned our future in.

The day we moved out of McKinney there was a crushing to do list.  Juggling the kids, packing, moving and cleaning made for the kind of busy where you forget to eat lunch.  If you know me, I don't miss many a meal!  It probably made things easier, though, that it was so busy since there was little time to dwell on how wrong it all felt.  After closing, we came back to get our outdoor cat Vlu and when Tyler suggested to Palmer to say goodbye house, I didn't linger in the moment- I had already cried enough lately.

houseguests

It is funny to see the faces people make when you say you (and your 4 other family people) are living with your parents or in-laws.  These faces say "eeeeek" or "oh my" or "not that, anything but that!". Haha.  We are very fortunate to have relatives that are very accommodating and easy to live with.  No juicy drama to spill here, sorry!  It was a difficult 6 weeks of being without our own home, but much less so thanks to my parents and Tyler's mom.  They let us invade their ordered, quiet abodes with our noise and needs and STUFF, oh the stuff!  A family of 5 needs a lot of it.  We still have a ways to go to thank them properly for doing all they could to ease that stressful period of transition for us.  Grandparent overtime doesn't pay time and a half if you were wondering.  Good thing our little darlings are so darn cute!

a new year in a new place

Yep, we moved!  Christmas seemed like the most chaotic and emotional time to do that sort of thing so it worked out pretty perfectly.  Haha.  If you have no knowledge of the epic house buying/not buying saga we went through Nov-Jan consider yourself fortunate as I could go on FOREVER about how ridiculous it all was.  Here's the short story: 

We found a house in Lewisville that we loved.  Loved.  It was a property like no other with lots of awesome attributes for raising the kids.  We quickly sold our house in McKinney.  Shortly before closing on our purchase, we encountered problems that despite our most generous and intelligent attempts at resolving, could not be overcome.  I blame several people and factors, but mostly the completely unreasonable sellers who had no regard for us getting royally screwed.  So one week before Christmas, instead of being happily settled into our new family home, we were tearfully packing up our old house that we no longer wanted to leave, moving all our things into storage, and going to live with our parents for the indefinite future.  

House hunting and eventually buying the home we are in now was a bittersweet process since we would never have left the place we were in McKinney if not for the lure of the original property that was no longer ours.  I didn't want to move for any house, I wanted to move for THAT house.  There are positives to the lovely house we have now and everyone likes to say it will be for the best.  Maybe it will, but I'm still not over it.  That's ok :)