Saturday, November 4, 2017

Moving On

I sit here and the number of boxes around me continues to grow. Cabinets become empty, trips to resale stores and donations are winding down, dumpsters have been rolled away. It's becoming very real that we're moving.

It's a move we're excited for and have waited a long time for. We've finally found a house in the country and it will be our forever home. But there's something about sitting among all these boxes that makes me sad.

This was our first house together. This is the house we brought each one of our girls home to as their first home. I can still see vividly each spot where we sat them when we arrived home and wondered what to do next. I know each place where they took their first steps. It's been a house of firsts.



I know that it's a house and that a home is what you make it. But for thirteen years, this has been our home. We went from newly weds trying to figure out how to make it all work to a family of six in this house. The walls of this house know stories of success and failure, laughter and tears. This house has celebrated birthdays, graduations, jobs. It's where we've cried tears of loss and tears of joy. Most of all, they've seen lives of love.

We've poured our hearts into this house to make it our own. We've changed windows, floors, and doors, remodeled bathrooms, finished the basement, gutted and remodeled the kitchen/dining/laundry rooms (eight months pregnant with twins doing dishes in a bathtub...yikes!). We made this house our home.

Now it's time to say goodbye.  And for whatever reason, no matter how excited about something you are, goodbyes are hard. I know we'll move and have a whole new series of firsts in our new home, but there's something terribly hard about leaving the home that so many firsts for your family happened.

Perhaps that's it, in this house, we became a family and this house became our home. For that I'll always be thankful and I'll always love this house. We grew up here, Rob and I. We made our family here. We built our life here. So goodbye is hard because I see how far we've come.

Thanks for the lifetime of memories. You'll always hold a piece of my heart and bring a smile to my face. Goodbye 70 Greenbriar Drive.