Moved, that is. And not just moving from one house to the next- we have moved back to Indiana!
After we had Haley it became clear to us that we were simply too far from our friends and family. The East Coast is nice, but even after two years just didn't feel like home to us. We had some friends (and great neighbors) there but just were not established to the point that we felt comfortable. So, I started looking for a new job. We were originally looking to move either to Wisconsin or Florida to be close to at least 1 set of Grandparents, but then when I got a message on LinkedIn from a headhunter about a job in Fort Wayne, we really started thinking about Indiana again. It occurred to us that we had really loved living here. Its a great sized city- you can get anywhere in town in roughly 30 minutes- great shopping, great restaurants. More importantly, it was a place where we had an established group of friends, babysitters and also all of our "people" i.e. doctors, dentists, hair stylist, etc. It is also right in between Madison and Pittsburgh so an easy 5 hour drive from either of our families. Once we started thinking about it, it was perfect.
So, I told the headhunter that I was interested in pursing the position. The following week I had a phone interview with the Tax Director and then two weeks after that they flew me out for an interview. I had an offer from them the following week. In the meantime we had started working on getting our house ready to go on the market. I accepted the position and we put the house on the market in early June. I gave my notice at my old job and then we were bombarded with showing requests and open houses. I think we ended up doing 12 showings/open houses in about 3 weeks before we had an offer on the house. For the record, selling a house when you have a toddler and an infant is not fun. Keeping the house immaculately clean with said rugrats is really, really challenging. We did end up hiring a cleaning lady to come a few times to help out with the big cleaning so that we could focus our time on the small daily picking up of the toys and just keeping the place looking presentable.
Our last week in the house was the week of July 4th. We had a great 4th- ended up cooking out at home and then went to the parade in our town which Nicholas loved. They had a firetruck there which he got to peek inside. Then we came home and chilled out for a bit and then went back out to the Middleboro carnival, again a really good time. We had the inspection the next day and after that had some marathon packing to do to get ready for our travels. I'll cover the details in a separate post, but I travelled with Nicholas and Haley by myself. On an airplane. It was an adventure!
So, once we all got here (Josh got here about a week after us- he had to hang back to wait for the movers) we got somewhat settled. We are in a temporary apartment for about another month - we will be renting a house from some friends and they need a little bit more time to get it ready for us. Sometime after the holidays we are going to get more serious about looking for a house. We have looked around a little bit and think we are going to build and even have a neighborhood targeted but don't want to get too attached since we are not quite ready to pull the trigger yet.
We have already visited with several old friends and definitely feel at home here. I am really looking forward to the next 12 months- getting to our rental house, Nicholas's 3rd birthday, the Holidays, then we will have building our house to look forward to. We are so, so happy with our decision to move. This place definitely feels like home.
