New year, new changes?

We rang in our new year with a really sick baby, so things can only go up from there!

I’m pretty excited about this year. Every year for the past 5 years we seem to have some sort of major change: getting married, buying a house, getting a dog, getting pregnant and having a baby, and then this past year of watching Jenson grow into a toddler and Lo making a major job change (which affected us both greatly because we no longer could ride together for work).

We are hopefully going to have some major change again this year…most likely in the form of moving.  We love our house and our neighborhood…but we hate where our neighborhood is located, and we hate how long it takes us to get to and from work because of the crazy traffic.  We are both longing for a little more country…big yard, maybe some woods or fields on a couple of acres.  We started looking at houses last year and haven’t quite found the right combination of house and property that we want.  Well, we potentially found that, but our offer wasn’t accepted – and based on the amount of work that would be required for this 100 year old house, we didn’t want to offer more.  We’ll keep looking.  We don’t think that we’ll have any issue selling our house.  It’s in a desirable school district and is a great house.  In the past several months, most of the houses in our small neighborhood have sold within 30 days of being listed – some within days.  Our house has more desirable specs than the ones that have sold, and we’ve done plenty of repairs and upgrades, so hopefully it isn’t a problem.

Timing is tricky – if we find a house to buy before we sell ours, we should be approved for the new mortgage based on our income and downpayment, and since our house should sell fast, that wouldn’t be a problem.  But we can’t list our house until we have somewhere to live (whether renting or buying), because we may need to move within 30 days or so if it sells right away.  I don’t want to feel rushed to pick a house that we don’t love, so if we decide we just need to get out of here, we’ll probably find somewhere to rent for the time being, and then sell our house.

Depending on where we end up, I may end up staying home to raise kid(s).  It’s something we’ve thought about if we have a second baby anyway, so if moving takes us further away from my job, it makes sense to make that change right away.  And after being home with Jenson for over a week while he was sick, I want that even more than I did before. I can’t say I won’t work in some capacity, but I won’t work in a job that has me away from the house from 7:15a.m. – 5:45 p.m.  I don’t want to miss out on that much of Jenson’s life.  I have a great job and it would be hard to give it up, but I’d give it up for family.  So that’s potentially on the horizon (my supervisor knows that this is my hope eventually, so I don’t feel like I have to be secretive about it).

It’s weird, because as I walk through our house, I don’t want to give it up…it feels like home.  But I know wherever we end up will be even better – especially because I will be home with my babies (currently Boof and Jenson, but hopefully another human baby at some point).  I know that this sort of lifestyle change isn’t for everyone.  I know that some women would hate to stay at home.  I know that we’ll have to be much more aware of our spending and finances.  But I know that it will be amazing.