A New Normal

There I sat looking around the blank, off-white walls, naked of photos & wall decor mostly packed up. A house that we called home for the last three years. It was the longest we’d lived in a rental and our least favorite home we lived in throughout the last eight years. We had been desiring to leave the noisy neighborhood I’d never dare go walking after dark in alone. The house with the ugly, uneven tile throughout the main level that I’d cursed many times in the last three years, along with the chinsey repairs the old tenants made that we needed to fix correctly through the years. Oh how badly we have wanted a different home and we decided when we moved to that rental we wouldn’t move again until we purchased a home.

I thought about how different our life would become at the end of the week when we walked away from the closing table that Friday morning as home owners. Our dreams falling into place after our recent hunt for a home over the last two years. Change was in full force, a new, much smaller town 40 minutes northeast of our current house. New neighbors, a home off the beaten path accompanied by a quiet neighborhood when I’d imagine everyone knows everyone’s name. The house is larger, a home we to really build our family and thrive. A large yard for A –and any future kiddos – to run freely, with a plenty of space for a garden and the chickens I’ve been wanting. A real place to call home.

Even with the excitement of our dreams falling into place there was a bittersweetness that danced across my excitement. The bittersweetness of what the walls of that home held of our family. The laughter and the tears, the day we found out we were pregnant after all the time trying, the first 20 months of A’s childhood. The home we really started our family in and as much as I’ve never liked the house, I loved the memories we built within it.

But it was time for something bigger. The kind of bigger we have been waiting for and the patience has paid off. The days of constant packing, and our upcoming move and renovations would soon be so incredibly worth it and the next chapter would be just beginning and I was ready for it.

Now I sit here, in this new home we call ours, the house that’s now what we call home. Everything falls into place a little bit more every day. A town that’s 364 acres total and has under 1200 people, and elementary school kids knock on your door to raise money for their fun day fundraiser so they can meet their goal so they can raise pigs. It’s a big change from Denver, totaling 2,989,938 people, and our old neighborhood 16,852 people &5.7 sq miles, but the change is a welcomed one. It reminds me a bit more of Kansas.

The halls are filled with toddler scampers and puppy pause running through the house, all day every day. That air is filled with “If you’re happy and you know it” sounding from toddler channel on Pandora. The fall breeze is with swing inthrough the storm door and the back sliding door. Aspen trees out the front door or the foundation of imaginative adventures and the back quarter acre is an open playground for puppies and children.

This place is the new beginning of this next chapter and we are jampacking it full of memories big and small. It’s funny how life just begins to feel normal so quickly when you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. The bittersweetness of change is gone, the struggle of renovations and moving is a distant memory and the joy of our family in this home fills my heart to the brim.

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Love Fall as much as I do? You won’t want to miss this giveaway I joined in on over at Alyson M! Check it out.