Home Again

And here we have the reason for the name of the blog. We've moved, again. We're still in Jacksonville, but our landlords at the old house said they couldn't renew our lease this summer because one of their mothers would be moving in. Bummer. I hadn't wanted to move again this enlistment. And, that ended up tying for shortest amount of time we've lived in a house: eight months. The other one we lived in for eight months was our second house in Hawaii.

Our newest house is pretty nice. In some ways, I like it better than the last one. The back yard is even bigger, and more fun, and has a mulberry tree (!!! squee!!!), there's a playroom/second living room built onto the back, a huge shed, wood floors throughout, and only one bathroom. I'm happy about that because I really don't like cleaning bathrooms. Although the bad part is, I have two young boys who make it necessary to clean the bathroom almost every time I need to use it. You gain some, you lose some.

Some of the things I don't like: the only phone jack in the house is in Colin and Brennan's bedroom, our bedroom closet has the air filter thingummy in it, which takes up half the closet (which is tiny to begin with, so small, in fact, that we bought a freestanding storage closet unit that's bigger than the closet!) The laundry room is outside, there's no dishwasher, and the last people who lived here had problems with a Peeping Tom. Which leads me to:

I'm getting a dog. Male collie, three years old, named Boomer. I'd been debating, even while asking permission from our landlord, but Delaney next door came over and introduced herself this evening, and told me about that little incident, and that sealed the deal. Dog will be acquired as soon as I get the go-ahead. And no, I do not do laundry at night anymore.

I'm getting the house all cleaned and unpacked and in order, getting rid of more stuff (a perpetual task, just like doing the dishes or laundry). I've gotten horribly behind on the dishes, partially because I took Saturday off to spend the day with Matthew, and also on the laundry. The playroom was a disaster this morning, but has been cleaned up. Yesterday I unpacked eight boxes, the first boxes I'd unpacked in about a week. I don't know what I did all last week, but it must not have been anything useful, if I'm so far behind on everything now!

But anyway, the house is starting to feel like home again. I first started thinking of things in that perspective about a month after we got to Hawaii. Matthew was gone, and I'd just discovered one of Nathan's CDs in my CD case, Blackmore's Night, Fires at Midnight. There's a song on there called Home Again, and it's about travelling the world, and discovering that home is where you belong. One line that repeats in the chorus is "Oh, it's good to be back home again." I was listening to that song, nearly five years ago now, and realized that I was home again. I belonged there, then, in that little housing unit with my flowers and herbs on the porch, hardly anything in the house at that point, but it was ours, and it was home, even if Matthew was gone on an exercise. I was home. Each move, I've taken a deep breath, and smiled, and told myself I'm home again. Today has really been that day for me for this move. The living room is a little less "boxed", things are getting cleaner, my hot spots are occuring again, routines are falling into place. I'm home again. And I don't want to be anywhere else in the world.