new home.

We love our new home!  We are so thankful to be in it.  We seem to be in a great neighborhood and have met some really nice neighbors.  Unpacking boxes is so time consuming.  If I never hear the crinkling of that paper again it will be too soon.  I am so thankful we had movers bring our stuff in.  Maybe wishing now that I had had them unpack.  I didn't think about how much paper there would be and how many boxes I would have sitting in my garage.  Anyway, just happy to be here.

We have started a new project already, of course.  The dogs always seem to make things a little more complicated, so we are working on the backyard.  And by we, I mean Tommy.  He's working really hard on it.  Big changes to come, and I will have lots of pictures to share.

In the mean time you won't believe-- or maybe you will-- what our week of eating has been like.  This seriously busy, seriously tired family has stayed in our house for 7 nights and I have made dinner one time.  Spaghetti at that.  Took me 15 minutes total, and my mother-in-law finished the noodles for me.  We've been eating some junk this week, and my body's starting to rebel against it.  I've got to get back into the cooking groove, and the making healthy meals for my family groove.

Now for the fun part, the pictures...  

Our new home on closing day!  Our front porch. 

We're happy homeowners. 

The "before" color of Jack's room.  A little too bold for my taste so Tommy got to work. 

This room seems to be everyone's favorite. 

My favorite area-- the loft! 

Living room/dining room.  With a mess of stuff. 

Master bath.  We're so excited to have 2 sinks!  Talk about luxury. 

Our moving truck.  We had that thing loaded.  Feels like it was longer than just a week ago. 

Our garage.  This is such a luxury for us since we didn't have a garage in Maryland.  It's loaded up with boxes but it's also got my car in it! 

View of the living room from the loft and all of the work I have to do. 

in tennessee life is rich.

Nearly two weeks since my last post, and we are settling in here in beautiful East Tennessee.  Tommy is in his second week of training for work, we are unpacked mostly [not too big of a feat considering we only brought clothes and baby things with us], and we are learning a routine here... maybe.  Life is definitely different here, and for many reasons we love it!  I love that I don't have to leave forty-five minutes early to get anywhere.  I love that strangers strike up a conversation anywhere.  I love that as I'm driving around town, I can see the mountains in the distance.  I love it here.  It feels like I am home.

Jack is adjusting well.  Lots of time with family, and it is so sweet.  My camera broke and my smart phone is no more, so I don't have many pictures of our first week and a half here.  I did snap this one of Jack earlier though.

Momma, I love my green beans!  

days to go.

I don't think I've ever felt such a mix of emotions as I have during this moving process.  It's a great move for us, so we're really excited.  We are so looking forward to this new chapter of our lives as we relocate back to Tennessee.  There is so much anticipation for this and we are eager for it, certainly.  But we are sad.  We will miss our friends here.  We are in "get it done" mode, so we haven't had much time at all to be in the present and process all that is happening, but we want to be.  So if we seem like we are brushing off goodbyes or giving half-hearted sentiments, please know that we are not, we are just overwhelmed.  We have been so touched by the outpouring of love for our family.  We are incredibly thankful for people who have come over to help pack, clean, watch Jack, take garbage to the dump, and even take poison from our house to the hazardous materials dump (that's a story within itself).  We are thankful for friends bringing dinner, snacks, cookies, and sweet youth who make us Christmas cookies because she knows we love them and won't be here at Christmas time.  We are thankful for neighbors who do anything to help us.  We are thankful for those who choose to drive well out of their way to come help us, to be here day after day doing whatever task they can to help.  We could never say enough thanks!  We couldn't properly express how much it truly means!  We are so grateful, and we will so miss our Maryland friends.

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.