the great move, charlie brown.

So I didn't quite accomplish my week of "featuring our home projects".  In fact, it's been almost a month since I last posted, and ironically we have been working very hard on our home.  But not for us.  We've been working very hard on it so that we can sell it!  Our house goes up on the market on October 27th.

We are selling our house because we are moving!!!  We are moving to Tennessee!  We are beyond thrilled!  This is such a blessing to us to be able to go back to where we're from and be close to our family.  We have missed them, and we want Jack to know them.  We want him to grow up close to his grandparents, aunts, uncle, and great-grandparents.  We have great friends in Knoxville who we want him to know.  And we miss East Tennessee.  We miss the South, in general, but particularly East Tennessee.  And although we wouldn't change it for a minute, our hearts have grown weary living here.

Tonight Tommy and I were talking about how we thought a few years ago that we would move here, spend a bit of time living in DC and doing that thing, and then eventually move away.  Very eventually.  Life has happened differently, and we are so thankful it has.  We never lived in DC [as we quickly learned living in Maryland does not count as living in DC!].  We never did the living in the city thing.  We never walked our dogs along the city streets and lived completely dependent on the metro.  We bought a house, we got a dog, then another, and we had our sweet baby.  Not our plan at all.  So much bigger.  So much better.  During that time, we realized that we were unsettled here.  We were determined to be committed to where God had us, so we really tried to focus on our lives here, but continued to hope we would some day go back to the South.  This is a great place to live- please don't think I'm just knocking on this area.  The traffic and congestion are no good, but this place offers so much, although our most favorite thing has definitely been the people we met here.  And that is what makes this a bittersweet thing for us.

We are so excited about our big change in life, but at the same time that we feel joy and excitement, we also feel sadness- it is not easy to leave.  We thought if we had the opportunity to go back to TN that we wouldn't even hesitate, but it wasn't like that- it wasn't an easy decision.  We LOVE our friends here.  People who have become our family.  People who have been so good to us and loved us so much and then loved Jack instantly, too!  We've been blessed.  We want to share that this isn't easy, and we are truly sad to leave here.  We're both sad to leave our jobs- we have great jobs here!  We're sad to leave people who we have truly come to love.  But we do look forward to what is ahead.  We are filled with anticipation as we wait to see what will happen.