House Happy

Claire is seven weeks old (how did that happen so fast....!!!).  

This means we've been in our new home and in our new town for six weeks.

We are mostly moved in to our new house.  There are still boxes that have to be unpacked, but they are tucked away in closets and their contents are mostly items that will go in said closets.  There aren't any pictures or art on the walls yet but the ideas are forming in our brains and we have a batch of things we are going to get framed next month.  We are sitting on folding chairs in the backyard but hope to get some nice outdoor furniture when the sales start.  

Our new house?  Awesome.  

Yes - if you told us our new dark wood floors would be a pain in the ass to keep clean, you were right.  But guess what - they are a hell of a lot easier to keep clean than our stone floors in the old house!  And yes, our neighbors can see into our bedrooms if our windows are open at the same time, but that's an easy fix.  

I do miss some of the things I knew I'd miss -  the "compost pile" in the back pasture and the dog poop-removal non-issue...but the trade off is immense (this morning, for example, we jumped in the car and drove less than ten minutes to a restaurant that serves Eggs Benedict - my favorite breakfast ever).  Charles can make a Starbucks run, we can bribe Jack to poop in the potty with a trip to the toy store down the road (it worked!) and we can load up and drive two minutes to one of the seven parks in our neighborhood.  

I feel so lucky to be here and so happy with our house.  I wonder when/if the newness will wear off.  I am guessing it will take awhile.  In our last house, Charles removed the toilet in our bathroom when we were tearing up the floors and he didn't replace it for, like, six months.  Well, when he finally did replace it I was so grateful to have a toilet in our bathroom I think I said a little prayer of gratitude every time I used it for the next two years.  Seriously.  So if I was that happy about a toilet (and I was pregnant and peeing a lot when we were sans toilet, so I reallllly did miss it after a few months of walking down the hallway every time I had to pee), I imagine I will be grateful for this home and happy to be here for a long time.  I hope so anyway,  I don't want to sell a house/move again for a long, long time.  

I should also note that no matter what, the grass is always greener...yesterday I made Charles drive down the road behind our community because I spotted some jumps in an arena down one of the roads and I wanted to check it out.  Sure enough, there are lots of pretty, well-maintained, smallish (2-3 acre) horse properties.  I said to Charles, "If we have horse property again, this is what we need!"  He could see that I was serious and said "I'm going to pretend you didn't even say that." I guess the conversation he had with his cousin yesterday about hay prices being the highest they have ever been due to the drought was still in his mind.  Or maybe he was thinking about taking fresh water out to three horses and two donkeys in 18 degree weather because their water was frozen.  Or maybe he was thinking about the unexpected vet bills.  Or the manure. 

I stand here again (yes, STAND, baby in Ergo!) and write this because I don't want to forget how happy I am with this house.  When I start bitching about this thing I would change with the house or that thing I would change about our area, I want to be able to read this and remember how hard it was to get here and how happy we were once we got here.  I want the "new car smell": to stick with us for a long time to come.