WIld and Wonderful.

So much life has happened to us in the last month it's mind-boggling. On March 12th, Moses had a minor surgery and during the recovery time, Jeremy was in the lobby, on the phone with his now boss from West Virginia, recieving a verbal offer for a new job. But let me back up a little bit and see if I can tell you how we got to this point.

THE DECISION

You may or may not be aware that Jeremy and I have been trying to move to Indiana for the better part of a year. The criteria for this move was a new, stable job for Jeremy in a location within decent distance to my parents. But that job never presented itself, instead, we continued to hit dead ends and a whole lot of nothing in terms of job prospects. Jeremy's commute and job here had become increasingly more arduous and overall our quality of life and ability to enjoy time together as a family was suffering big time. Also, with our very active (almost) two year old, Moses and a another baby (a girl! yipee!) on the way we began to feel very claustrophobic in our condo. (this is just a scratch on the surface of the list of reasons we wanted to move). Another reason we wanted to move to Indiana was my dad's health problems. He's  currently doing well, but he continues to have struggles off and on and traveling long distances is hard on him. It was very frustrating, being here, wanting to be there, having nothing happen and praying and waiting and hoping something would work out.

Jeremy had applied for a career mobility program within his company, hoping to find a job in Indiana to transfer to. In that program recruiters from the company could also contact him about positions. At some point in February, a recruiter emailed Jeremy asking if he would consider WV. When he asked me what I thought about it I said "NO FREAKING WAY!" But we continued to talk about it. Our discussions centered around our quality of life here in Maryland, the wellbeing and raising of our kid(s - almost), and where we felt we were "supposed" to be - where God wanted us to be. And soon I began to change my mind (and my heart) about this idea of moving to a place where I'd never even visited. It even started to seem like a good idea, and maybe like it was what we were supposed to do.

Don't get me wrong, this was not an easy decision to make. I cried a LOT - about leaving Jeremy's parents and Jordan, Sarah and Levi here in Maryland, not being near my parents, Abe, Lisa (and unborn nephew), Luke and Elyse in Indiana (not to mention a handful of extended family), knowing my dad's health is still up and down. But overall I had a peace about it. We have to do what's right for our family.
It's a good I felt that way, because Jeremy had a couple phone interviews, recieved a verbal offer and then an official offer. It all happened really quickly. And without ever meeting anyone face to face or visiting where he was going to work (or where we were about to live!) he accepted. And the chaos began.

THE MOVE

We thought we had a good plan going into the moving process. We wanted to put our condo on the market and find an inexpensive place to rent until it sold. After looking into the area I heard from people as I called around that there was a rental shortage and that there really isn't much available. So we moved to plan B. Plan B was to buy and pray our condo sells quickly so we're not juggling two mortgages.

We house hunted for one weekend and fell in love with a place, put in an offer and were under contract within a week. The only catch was the current owners can't (read: won't) move out until the end July. So now we had to find a place to rent. Back to our original problem! ARG!

Luckily, we did find a place to rent, but it's 20 minutes away from everything and Jeremy guaranteed me that will be excited to move into our house by July.

THE HOUSE

Here's the house! It's in a great neighborhood. The main floor is adorable with hardwood floors and a super big and open living room/dining room area.

But one of the biggest reasons we loved it so much was this:

That's the basement. It's a walkout and a HUGE space for a playroom and family room. There are also two other rooms downstairs just for storage!

Oh yeah, and this:

This is the back yard. Just past the nearest trees you can see is a creek that's about 30 feet wide and apparently stocked with trout each year.


THE AREA

There are two towns within 10-15 minutes of where Jeremy will be working that we considered, Clarksburg and Bridgeport. We visited Bridgeport and Clarksburg alone at first and after driving around aimlessly and not knowing where anything was we didn't find much and I got really (really, really) car sick. But before we got there I had called a real estate agent and she called us up and said she wanted to meet us to tell us where everything was. She was a Godsend. She offered to drive us around and showed us a bunch of neighborhoods we could have never found on our own. After seeing both towns we quickly knew we wanted to be in Bridgeport. Clarksburg is pretty run down and depressing and while there were a fewe nice areas and neighborhoods,  the houses were close together with no yards and often only street parking.  Bridgeport is cute, has quiet neighborhoods with both older and new homes with yards! And all the shopping is about 5 minutes away. They also have some fun local things (a french restaurant/wine bar/espresso bar, farmers market all summer long, public pool, parks) and, of course, lots of outdoorsy activities.

Jeremy has been living in the hotel for the last two weeks and Moses and I are going to join him there tomorrow! We move into our rental on Saturday. It's a new chapter and a new adventure and we can't wait for it to start!