Home, Sweet Home

On Halloween of this year Driver and I celebrated six years of home ownership. If you would've told me on October 31st, 2002 that we would still be living here I probably would not have believed you. The plan was to stay here for five years-TOPS, then move to something bigger and better. Well, here we are, our family has increased times two, and we manage to not run into each other too much.

It was a very scary thing for me, buying a house. I wasn't nervous at all on my wedding day, but the day we closed on this house I was trying very hard not to vomit into my cupped hands. I remember looking at that huge number and wondering what the hell I was thinking. What WE were thinking. We knew nothing about owning a house. We were going to be responsible for mowing the lawn and fixing stuff when it broke, and there was probably going to have to be some preventative maintenance. We live in a fifty year old house. Things break. Stuff happens.

I can honestly say now that I love this house. No, not because of all of the closet space or the very efficient kitchen (ha, ha), but because this house has a lot of our history in it now. We'll always remember it as the first house we ever owned, just like we wax nostalgic every time we drive into uptown and are anywhere near our old apartment or old hang-outs. We've remodeled the bathroom and stayed married. I sat down in the middle of the living room and completely freaked out when I was seven months pregnant with Back Seat Girl. I cried on the bottom step the morning I went into labor with Back Seat Boy and Mama Wonder showed up to take BSG and I realized our family would never be the same. I've read countless, countless stories in every room of this house. I've seen two children learn to walk (FINALLY) on its floors. I've cleaned up puddles of pee and piles of baby food and spent many dark nights nursing tiny babies while only half awake.

I'm not saying we're going to live here forever, because we're not. Believe me, we've thought about it-thought about remodeling or adding on, but it just wouldn't work out. I know that someday we'll be making new memories in a different house (preferably with at least two bathrooms and room for more than one butt in the kitchen), and when I look back at this house it probably won't seem so small and the kitchen won't seem so useless and having only one bathroom won't seem like so much trouble when we have company.

The thing that I will miss most about this house when we move, though, is the nice, low mortgage payment.