Let’s Do 52! Home
Seven years ago today, A and I moved into this house. So clearly I remember that day. We signed the closing papers and went straight to Home Depot to pick up our blinds and paint. We started moving in immediately. Our first house! What an exciting day!
Maybe buying a house (at that time in 2005) wasn’t all that unusual. Before that we had 3 addresses in New Jersey, and I had 3 different ones in Gainesville. Plus, while at the Air Force Academy, A changed dorm rooms every semester. We moved a combined total of 15 times over the course of 7 years. We relished the idea of staying in one place for a while.
What WAS unusual was that both of us had, prior to college, lived in the same respective homes our entire lives. These days it is practically unheard of for one person to live not only in the same city but the same house from birth to age 18 but both of us did. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why home is so important to us.
Almost every day at one time or another, perhaps in the morning before school or after Allison’s afternoon nap, I go to find Andrew visiting her in her crib. Sometimes I find that he has slipped one of her toys into her crib for her (something I put a stop to for safety reasons) or other times I just hear giggles coming from her room and see the two of them chatting away with Andrew doing everything in his power to make her laugh. It’s these moments that make me sad about leaving this house. This house that is the only one they have ever known in their short years/months of life. This house, where we brought them home from the hospital. This house where so many memories have already been made.
My sadness only goes so far. We’re experiencing definite growing pains here and we can’t wait to move into our forever home. That’s where we’ll make more memories and watch our children grow but there is much to be said for that first house you make together as a family, that first place you achieve all on your own. The first place your children will always call home.