Feeling Sentimental

We said good-bye to our apartment on Saturday. The furniture that inhabited its rooms is no longer there, and the only things that remain are pictures we haven't taken down from the walls, one closet full of miscellaneous things we haven't packed up yet, and our food in the cupboards.

We now spend our evenings at our new house, a place we are so blessed to have! The house-buying process came up unexpectedly around Christmas when we crunched numbers and realized we could indeed buy a home that would better accommodate our soon-to-be family of three. After one false start on a house that had serious foundation issues and scary flood potential, we found what is now our current home. It is perfect for us! We now have a dedicated office, a room for the baby, an enormous kitchen that, I hope, will host plenty of guests, and many other features that make this house a great one.

As excited as I am about creating this new home, I can't help but be a little sentimental about the apartment we've moved out of. That cute one-bedroom unit on the third floor was where we spent our first (almost) four years of married life. It's where we learned how to live together, how to laugh together, and yes, how to argue together. It's where we were entertained by the many drunk patrons of the pub next door and where our evenings were punctuated by the sirens and traffic of the nearby major thoroughfare. We hosted parties, out-of-town guests, and small groups in that little apartment too. So many memories were made there.

On Sunday, our first "normal" day at the new house, Dave noticed that I was unusually quiet. It was his first time seeing me become a little sad about living in a new place. I've always been like this. Every year at college, I'd take a few days to re-adjust to the new surroundings after a summer at home. When I moved into the apartment two months before our wedding, I often thought about how much I missed my parents and the comforts of home. This move has generated the same feelings for me. But give me a few more days, and I'll be back to my normal self, settled into the new routine of living in a new house and turning it into a home that will fill up with new memories.