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The day felt like it came slowly, but before we knew it, it was our last morning in our little home. And we started on full speed and never stopped.
Jon went first thing in the morning to my parents' closing and I stayed behind and finished packing up the very "lasts" of the lasts, then he picked me up, we dropped the boys off at our friends the Beechem's house and we went to our closing.
I had such a weird deja vu moment in the title company's office. It felt like it had been only a brief second since we'd signed our names on those lines saying we were buying the house! We left the closing, picked up the boys and headed home to finish up.
Playing on their beloved playhouse for the very last time. I was a mess this entire day. I could barely move without bursting into tears.
Love my sweet boys.
Jon was in and out all day trying to figure out stuff for Mom and Dad's closing and ours and so he would run out and do something and come back and pack in his dress clothes and run back out. We were both completely stressed out by this point because we had no idea where we would even be that night, since it didn't look like Mom and Dad's house would close in time. Poor Parker and Eisley both collapsed on the family room floor in exhaustion because their beds were already packed.
Last wrestle in the backyard! It was just about time to go.
This house. We came in as two and we left with full hands. Jon carried me over that doorstep on our first night there and he carried our babies out on our last day there. In this house, we experienced so much. We brought three sweet babies home to this house and we said goodbye to one. We taught a puppy his boundaries and we watched him turn into an old dog who followed us around. We landscaped our backyard 597 times and we knew every river stone by name by the end of it. ;) We taught a baby how to sleep through the night and taught that same boy how to read. We snuggled babies in our rocking chair every single day. We painted walls, we cleaned up when kids wrote on those same walls and we got teary washing handprints off the back door for the last time.
In this house, we baked cookies and shared them with neighbors. We packed kids and friends in around our tiny kitchen table and when it got too small, we shoved some of those people outside. ;) We planted a garden and watched our kids' wonder and excitement as the first vegetables came to life. We took walks and bike rides and said hello to friends and neighbors. We read the Jesus Storybook Bible to one child, then two and then three. We wept with friends who could not have children and then wept again when they came back to our table and told us they were expecting. We hung streamers over doorways to celebrate birthdays and turned the whole house into a winter wonderland for small boys who made everything magical.
In this house, we lived. We laughed (a lot). We cried. And most of all, we loved.
Thank you, Jesus, for our sweet little first home.
