Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Day 9

Look at me, following through for 9 days! Way to go, Wendy. :)

Today was therapy day. I love therapy. It clears my head and for someone who always has a million things going on in her head, that says a lot.

So the blogher writing prompt for the day is this: When was the first time that you realized that your home was not like other peoples home?

Hmmm....I'm pondering the question and I'm not sure I understand it. Everyone's home is different, right? I think I realized that the first time I went to someone's house that wasn't mine, lol.

Ok, so I don't like the question very much, but I guess I can do a general blog post about home.

I grew up in the same house from the time I was four until I got married. My wedding reception was in the backyard. I loved that house. I loved the neighborhood, I loved the neighbors, I loved growing up there. It was a great neighborhood with tons of kids, where everyone knew each other. We played in the street and wandered in and out of each others houses during the summer when I was a kid.

Three months after I got married my mom got remarried and sold the house. It happened really suddenly and I was devastated when she sold that house. I had gone through a lot of change and upheaval and loss over the past couple of years with my dad dying and some other things in my life and it was just one more loss that took me a while to process. I struggle with change and after a lifetime of everything being the same, the years between 20 and 22 were just one big change after another. Some good changes, some terrible changes, but just a lot of change.

So it's no big surprise that in my adult life I have not been someone that likes to move or make major changes, especially to our living situation. Shawn and I have been married for 14 years and we've moved four times, and quite possibly will not move again until our children are grown and married. We lived in two different apartments while he was going to school and then we built a cute little starter home after he graduated that we lived in for three years and then we bought this home, which we intend to be our "forever" home. My goal was to find a house that we could comfortably raise our family in before our oldest child started Kindergarten and we managed to do that. We moved here when Josh was four and Matthew was one.

We bought our current house from my aunt and uncle. We originally moved to this city so that Shawn could complete a year of internships for college and when we came here for a weekend to look for apartments my aunt and uncle offered to let us stay at their house (this house) while we looked for a place to live. I had never been here until then.

The first time we walked into this house I gasped. We were broke college students at the time but this was my dream house. I don't know what it was specifically but it was weird, it just felt like my house. I remember laying in bed with Shawn in the guest room in the basement that night and telling him that this was the house I wanted to live in someday. And then we laughed because we were broke college students who couldn't afford penny candy, let alone a house.

When Shawn graduated we ended up building a house about a mile from this house and we used to come over here and visit my aunt and uncle all the time. We had Thanksgiving dinner here, we celebrated the fourth of July here...I loved coming to visit my aunt and uncle and I still loved their house. Shawn and I still whispered to each other that if they ever moved we were going to buy their house.

And then one day my aunt called and told me that they were moving. And suddenly so were we! Thirty days later we had sold our house and moved a mile down the road to this house.

I love that we have a history with this house. I have pictures of Josh as a baby in this house, when it still belonged to my aunt and uncle. Every now and then Shawn and I sleep in the basement spare room and giggle about the night we slept there and declared that this was the house we wanted to buy someday and how it felt like such an impossible dream.

So this is it, this is home. This is the house my kids will be talking about when they're all grown up. This is where they'll make their memories.

Home means stability to me. It's a soft place to land where the people around you support you and care about you and love you, warts and all. Our home is happy. We laugh and celebrate here. Friends are welcome here. There is lots of love here.

So there is my story about home. I'm nine days into my month of blogging. Let's see how long I can keep it up, lol!

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