Season of Change

The last two months have been full of change for our little family unit and our circle of friends and family. Vivian's sister graduated from high school, Harper has graduated from crawling, Ellie started a gymnastics class, we sold our house, we bought a new house, friends and family have new little ones, I had to replace two tires on my car ... the list goes on and on. All of the changes are part of the reason that our blogging has been so sparse, or, more appropriately, non-existent. Each time I start formulating a post in my head on a particular event, I become paralyzed by the realization that there are 32 other things that need mentioning too. I start agonizing over priority and what would make for the best flow from one post to the next. To use a word that Ellie used the other day: It's exasperating.

So, I'm going to throw the blogging style guide out the window (as if there were a style guide, or window for that matter) and just get to it. After all, we can only take so much hounding. Oh and hounding there has been. To break it down, I'd say: 30% via email, 50% via phone, and ~20% via blog comment (margin of error: +/- 8%). I can safely say that we had no face-to-face confrontations over our bloglessness postlessness. I attribute the lack of in-person houndings to the fact that "the Nine" primarily live out of state.

So today's post will cover our recent change in real estate status. This has been one of the main post requests from you all, but in no way does it make it the most important, I mean, let's be serious, Harper is walking. That's big news. The house is big news too, but Vivian can attest to the fact that I hate choosing favorites in anything, so, just to be clear, I have no favorites. Chronologically speaking, the house purchase happened before everything else that we haven't blogged about so I suppose a post about it should be first.


Most of you know that we've been planning on moving up to a slightly larger house ever since Harper was born. We had had our house listed, and after a slow start over the holidays, had several showings in the spring and subsequently an offer (yes, you've guessed it, that is the real estate selling process in a nutshell). We actually closed on the sale of our house while we were on vacation in Florida. That was weird. Viv and I kept joking that we were leaving for Disney World as homeless folk. Two weeks later, we closed on our new home.

We've been really happy in this new house and in the neighborhood as well. We met more neighbors the first weekend than we had ever met in our old neighborhood. A lot of that can be attributed to the great sense of community that's developed in this neighborhood. At the same time, moving in and getting comfortable has been a bit trying. When Viv and I moved into our first house, it was just the two of us, and painting rooms, unpacking boxes, and buying furniture were easy tasks to accomplish when you only have to coordinate with your spouse. At our first house, we had almost every room painted within the first week of living there. With kids, forget about it. The around-the-house-project action is a bit slower with kids. For this reason, you'll probably only find photos of the finished rooms in this post.

Altogether, we've gained a bedroom with this house as well as a formal living room and dining room, and a dedicated office. We used to joke that those "formal" rooms were sort of useless but after five years in a house without them, I'd say we were, at least partially, mistaken. In our old house it was especially obvious when entertaining more than two guests. Now we have some room to spread out after dinner, or, when our families visit, there's room for everyone to sit. We opted to have the girls share a bedroom so that we could give them a dedicated playroom while still keeping a guest bedroom. The girls seem to like the arrangement. The other night they sounded like they were taking turns making sounds to each other.

One of the most exciting aspects of the house is that it is built green and has a lot of energy conservation technology built in. From utilizing sustainable woods, low E windows, an in-line water heater, and compact fluorescent lights, the house was built to minimize its impact on the environment and save on resource usage. It even has a solar array built into the roof which will offset some of our electricity usage. In the past, Vivian and I haven't been the biggest environmentalists. We both agree that the human race is greatly impacting our planet and believe that, as a society, we need to keep pushing for changes in how we use resources to try to lessen this impact, but Viv and I have been slow to change our own ways. Although I can say that I've always been a stickler about turning out lights in rooms we're not in, this house has spurred us to do more (at least around the house). We've started recycling, carpooling, and I'm more conscious about how much water I'm using.

With each day, another project gets completed or another decoration gets hung, and this house feels more and more like our new home.