Moving, moving, moving.... Moved!

Moving never seems to be an easy process. I once sat down and figured out how many times I've moved in my adult life... it was around 13 times! And that is just my adult life, I also moved a lot as a child because my father was in the Navy. Well I just added one more! This time there were some new twists to make it all the more challenging. The first was home owning and thus home selling, a first for me. The second major twist was having children and moving.
We moved into our old house 9 years ago before we started having children. We picked a sweet little two bedroom craftsman type bungalow in the "North End" of Tacoma because we were planning on having one child. The houses down in Tacoma were about half the price of the houses in Seattle and moving to Tacoma meant we didn't have to move to the suburbs and we could get most of the walkability we wanted. We were naive and thought that the train that went from Tacoma to Seattle could only get better and that certainly before too long there would be a straight run with no stop up to Seattle... the train was a new thing 9 years ago... it has not gotten better. What this meant for us was a nice life for me and the kids in Tacoma and Jon's life was in Seattle! It also meant that even though he was taking the train and the bus and not driving himself, he still was spending 3 hours a day commuting! Something we never wanted and we thought would only be temporary. When his company moved his office even further, adding an addition 20 minutes to his commute each way....well he sort of snapped.
We made the decision to move last spring, we spent the weeks following that decision working on the house, organizing, packing and getting rid of stuff. We also were driving back and forth from Seattle a lot looking at houses. Ultimately falling in love with a rental!
We put the house on the market in June and as soon as the kids were out of school I took off with them for most of the summer. We had a great time, did some camping, did lots of visiting with family. Margo learned how to ride a bike and learned how to swim on her own! We moved in August and spent the weeks following that unpacking, organizing... settling... breathing and enjoying getting to know our new neighborhood.
While it was difficult to leave the home we'd known for 9 years and the only home the kids have know because they were each literally born in the house, we have all settled into this new home and life nicely. We went from having not enough house to having too much house and we are thoroughly enjoying it!
Solomon has his own bedroom and enjoys staying up late and reading in his bed. I have my own bathroom for the first time complete with a claw foot tub and a door that actually locks!
The other benefits to living here, well the biggest benefit is Jon can walk to work and he almost always does! So he went from getting little or no exercise every day to getting a nice long walk in every day, hurray! The elementary school is literally right across the street from our house and we feel very lucky to have two wonderful teachers for both kids this year and they are thriving. Mira was lucky enough to get into the 2's class at the local co-op preschool and hopefully will get much the same co-op preschool experience as Solly and Margo did. The local business district and the preschool are a ten minute walk away! Which is almost too close because it means I only get short walks in :)
As difficult as it was to move and leave behind our little house and our friends and support system in Tacoma this move feels so right, the kids seem amazingly unaffected Jon and I feel lighter and felt almost giddy for weeks. I love living in Seattle and feeling apart of a city that is alive and busy. We found a high school girl who is wonderful with the kids and we have a standing every other Saturday night date night now, something we have never done. All in all this move feels like something we probably should have done a few years ago... but things tend to happen when they need to and we were able to sell our house now with really no problems and it didn't take that long to sell, which was nice! So huge sigh of relief! We have moved, we have moved! And we love it!