Home Sweet Home

Three months ago today we moved back into our house. It's been a busy three months, but we are deeply grateful to be home! Home Sweet Home and "Home is Where the Heart is"  have taken on different meanings for us now. The first few weeks home were bliss. Despite all of our belongings being boxes stacked all over the house we were ecstatic to be home. We could feel the stress leave our bodies. We were so much lighter. We still had a ton of work ahead of us to button up our rental, sort out our mail delivery, turn off cable, move garbage and water back to our landlord's name, etc, etc. Twenty one days (and one major concussion) after the moving trucks took our stuff from our rental house to our big house we turned over the keys to our rental, "the little house." And believe it or not it was bittersweet to close the door on that little place. We made so many memories there. That was the place we survived this thing. The boys wanted to buy that house. There for a while they didn't want to return to our "big house." D and I were working our fingers to the bones to get back home and the boys would rather not go back..Oy! It wasn't until later that we discovered the boys didn't want to return to our big house because they thought the men doing the work at our house (painters, contractors, carpet layers, etc) were not going to leave our house after the work was done. For all they knew the people who had been working at the house were going to live there with us after it was done. They thought they were going to have to share our house with them forever. Their minds were put at ease a few weeks after we moved in when they realized just the four of us would be living here.

After we turned in the keys for the little house we regained time in our day. We were no longer going over to the big house every night for two or three hours to work on things. Every night we would eat dinner and we'd all load up and head to the other house to get whatever work we could get done before getting the boys to bed. And on the weekends we'd wake up and head to the big house to work all day long. Honestly, we worked hard and I'm really proud of all of us for doing so much work, but it was completely exhausting. We went on adrenaline for so long that our exhaustion didn't catch up to us until recently. A person can only go so long at this pace and at the stress level. We are fortunate to have most of our neighbors back in their homes in our neighborhood and it's interesting. We have all experienced our share of minor (and some major) health issues that we attribute to the stress of the last ten months.

At one point this summer my goal was to unpack three to four boxes each day. I was also trying to do fun things with the boys to enjoy summer. That proved to be too much, so I finally surrendered. D came home one night and I said "I am surrendering to the boxes. I can't do it all." We only have so much time for summer so I surrendered and enjoyed the boys and made memories....Now that the boys are back in school I've gotten back to unpacking. We still catch ourselves looking for things and we occasionally realize an item was lost in the storm that we'd forgotten about. There are multiple times a day I  have to remind the boys and others that we no longer have an item because we lost it that day.

We are super grateful to be back in our neighborhood to be with our friends and with the kids' friends. We are excited to see the amount of construction that's happening around us because that construction means that the rest of our neighbors and friends will be home soon. However living in an area with this much construction going on at once has proven to be both frustrating and dangerous. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's a minor miracle that we haven't had a collision on our streets and I'm crossing my finger that it won't happen! You just have to build in an extra five to ten minutes any time you leave the house because chances are you're gonna have to wait your turn to weave your way down the streets. Our bus stop has been moved due to the construction which has presented more challenges than I anticipated. We're hoping that's a temporary set up and the bus will get moved back to it's original place.

With all of that said we would not change anything. We are happy to be home and we find ourselves saying "aren't you glad we're not going back to the little house" frequently. We continue to think about all our friends who are not back in their homes. Our hearts go out to them. We try to support them by making food for them, helping them move things when needed, they borrow tools and use our bathroom when needed. We really, really feel for them. So please continue to keep our community in your thoughts and prayers. We've made considerable progress. but we still have ways to go.