What I'll be sad to leave behind...

If we do end up moving in the near future (I am so very superstitious and paranoid about the universe, I'm afraid to assume that we will, in fact, be moving until we do, in fact, move. So please excuse me, but I'll be speaking in nothing but hypotheticals for the foreseeable future...), there are a few things about the house that I'll miss. I mean, it's hard NOT to miss the place where you brought your babies home for the first time. Especially when you put so much planning and effort into that place...

This nursery is by far, my favorite room in the house. We did the shelf around the room on our own, pulled from a site that Steve found online, using basically these exact colors of light blue and green. Even though we knew Brigid was going to be a girl when we were planning this room, I was in the denial stage of 'I don't want my baby wearing nothing but pink. I want greens and yellows and I WILL NOT GIVE IN TO GENDER STEREOTYPES!!!' And I didn't. Until my daughter learned to speak for herself, and then, well...

Might I introduce you to the room she helped us design, once we decided that letting her pick out her own 'big girl bedroom' might be a good way to help her come to terms with the new baby?

There is pink in this room. Lots and lots and LOTS of pink. And a princess chandelier, just for good measure. I don't mind, though...I actually kind of love this room more than I expected to. I think it's the blue, particularly the Tiffany blue of the accent wall. I don't know many people who hate the sight of Tiffany blue, you know?

Ideally, I'd like to just pick up the 2nd floor of my house and move it to a new location, which is not at all unreasonable, I don't think. Now, I just need to figure out who I talk to about making that happen...

(Caitlin's furniture, which was Brigid's furniture before her, came from a baby boutique north of Atlanta, whose name I don't remember, except for the glider. The glider came from Babies R' Us. Brigid's furniture all came from IKEA, including the chandelier and the little pink chair, although it was a 'natural' color until we spray painted it pink. The comforter and curtains, we picked up from the Pottery Barn outlet.)

Moving

I know this is my fault, because I am the driving force behind wanting to move someplace new, but I am SO TIRED of spending time working on a house that I don't want to live in anymore. The painting and planting and floor redoing and packing and decluttering and OMG MAKE IT STOP. Please. Just make it stop.

I have a room full of boxes and furniture that need to be taken for storage, because it's not stuff that we're getting rid of, it's just decorative stuff that's making the house look too full, and the house can't look too full when you're showing it to prospective buyers. I have a deck that needs to be painted if it will ever, for the love of all that is good, stop raining for more than six hours at a time. I have a yard that needs pavers laid, pine straw spread, and bushes trimmed, if it wasn't a thousand degrees out, in those six hours when it wasn't raining. I have a basement to organize, a master bedroom to clean out, an almost 4-year old's room to declutter, if I could just stop doing laundry and dishes and watching my kids for a good 48-hour period so I could make some actual progress. I have a garage to clean out. And carpets and windows that need to be cleaned. And doors and windowsills that need to be painted. And maybe a bathroom tile that needs to be fixed.

And that's all before we go through the process of listing and showing the house, and then hopefully selling and packing up the house.

And all of a sudden, I'm starting to remember why I said I never wanted to move again when we were moving into the house we currently live in. I'm going to record one of those video diaries of these next few weeks, to keep in a safety deposit box, so in the event that I start to get the itch to move again after this whole ordeal is over, Steve can force me to watch it on repeat until it kills that itch dead.

It's the least I can do after putting him through all of this, right?

We made a decision! Sort of!

We had a realtor over to our house last night, and we walked through the whole place with her, and she pointed out what we did and did not need to fix before we put our house on the market, and we told her we'd have everything ready to go by September 1st, and she said we'd list the house after that. Then she left, and I started crying.

Because all of a sudden it hit me that even though I am the driving force behind all of this, even though this is what I want for the family, if everything goes according to plan, we could be out of the house before the holiday season. And if it only goes partially according to plan, we might not be in a new house before the end of the year. Suddenly, I'm facing no decorating for Halloween or Christmas, no trick-or-treating with the neighbors, none of the fun things that I look forward to the other eight months of the year (because my holiday season starts in September, of course). And even though I know it will all be better in the long run, a lost holiday season makes me sad, because I'm up against the clock already on having kids young enough to fully enjoy the magic behind my favorite time of year, and I don't really want to waste any of the time I have.

I tried to explain all of this to Steve, and he basically looked at me like I'm nuts, which...he does have a point. I feel kind of nuts right now, and I'm more or less banking on feeling this way until the process is settled one way or the other. Either we'll sell the house within the 30-days-on-the-market time frame our realtor has set out for us, and I'll deal with whatever comes our way after that, or we won't sell our house in 30 days, and we'll pull it off of the market until spring. Whatever happens, we will be fine. Everything will be fine.

I just wish we were to the 'fine' part already...