We are moving this week. Chip and I have often looked at each other over the last couple of months and said "are we really doing this?" While I am thrilled with the newness and excitement of the new house just across town, I am devastated that we are leaving our current home. I cried a few nights ago taking baby photos off the wall. Strange, since I will most likely put them up at the new house. It will just be a new wall, that's all. Right?
But no. Not right. The reason I cried over those baby pictures is because those pictures happened HERE. In THIS house. Not in the new house. We no longer have the ability to look at those photos and say "that happened here, in this room, down those stairs, across this floor." Instead we'll be looking at those photos saying "remember that house? Remember that room, those stairs?" Eventually, even I admit, we'll struggle to remember the little things... How may stairs did we have up to the front porch? Did I ever get around to painting the porch swing white?
Yes. Home IS where the heart is. It is where your family is and where you feel at peace and comfortable and loved. For the life of me, though, I cannot imagine turning another house into a home at THIS very second. I love THIS home. This is where my heart is and where my heart is breaking as we prepare for our final nights here. We've already spent our last weekend here, our last Sunday morning getting up for church, our last Saturday morning eating cinnamon rolls together on the couch and getting ready to play outside with THESE neighbors.
Cooper has already moved once, but he doesn't remember it. Kendall came home to this house from the hospital down the street. Cooper pulled his chest of drawers over on top of himself in his bedroom in this house. He got stitches from his Tonka Truck vs Upper Lip accident. Outside on these sidewalks he has skinned everything from his toes in the Cozy Coupe when he couldn't even walk to his shins to his knees right up to even his nose. In these yards, he has learned to throw a football and a frisbee and how to ride a bike without training wheels. Here, we discovered that he is a skilled driver of all things electric, that he really doesn't like basketball much at all, he sells himself short in soccer and isn't half-bad at Four Square.
Kendall has read a thousand books in her bed here if she's read one. She has flipped on our couches until we needed new ones. She has swung at least a million times on that playset out back and fallen out of it even a few times. She's loved on the neighbor's dogs and the strange cat across the street that no one else likes. She has built snowmen and snow forts and hidden from her brother in the neighbor's bushes. Here, she, too has learned to ride a bike and throw a frisbee but she does not care for football. She has proven that girls can hit baseballs just as far as boys can and you can play just about any sport in a tutu. For 6 years she was the only girl on the block and she held her own just fine. These neighborhood boys have turned her into a fine little Princess Tomboy.
Chip and I have spent more than 8 of our 15 years together in this home. It's the most settled we've ever felt in those 15 years, for obvious reasons. We've watched our children grow from sweet-smelling babies to toddlers with smashed peas all over their faces, preschoolers with sass and bravery and eventually into actual little people with clear thoughts and opinions and manners. We moved here with 3 wild and hyper dogs and we leave with only one. We have had church parties and birthday parties and family parties here. We've had game nights and movie nights and rainy, lazy days here. We've written on the sidewalks and driveways in this neighborhood so much with sidewalk chalk that I can't believe none of it is permanent. Life has happened quite a bit while we lived here. Our life, here. How can we just pack it up?
But we don't have to. So much of life cannot be packed in a box. We have lots of pictures and even more memories and that is just going to have to be enough. Because as "they" say, Home is Where the Heart Is, and all 4 of us will bring our slightly breaking hearts with us to our new home when we drive away from here behind the moving truck.
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