Moving Out

We have officially moved out of the house that was our home for the past ten years. Ten!  It was the first home that we moved into as a complete family.  Fionnula was just past her first birthday, Erin wasn't yet sixteen. The kids' bedrooms were packed, boys three to a room, girls two to a room.  There was almost always something crazy going on somewhere in that house, some of which the kids are only admitting to now and some of which I will probably never know. Walking through it for the last time on Tuesday morning I was remembering some of our adventures there.

Like the time little Ronan stuck the backyard hose in a basement window well, turned it on, and left it there to be discovered later by me when I found water cascading down the basement bathroom wall, across the floor and under the door into the playroom.

Kris and Kegan and Rhys replaced all the windows, over the years different children took turns helping us replace all the floors, we put in new interior and exterior doors and new trim pretty much everywhere. Completely remodeled the kitchen and added a front porch (mostly because I wanted a porch swing). Eventually the insurance settlement on a terrific hailstorm allowed us to repaint it and for a few months we had a big, blue house.

The kids frequently built extensive railroads that encircled the living room and went under and around furniture and stayed put for days.  They set up elaborate scenes with the dollhouse that involved dolls falling off the roof and stuck under the porch and furniture hanging from roofs and balconies that infuriated Fionnula and probably worried some visitors, but which amused me. More than once there were Rube Goldberg designs involving match box race track, dominoes and wooden blocks that wound around the main floor and then headed down the stairs to continue in the basement.

Several children were at one time or another, locked in bathrooms with faulty doorknobs. One time, Fionnula sobbed on her side of the door while Kris worked on the knob and Liam sent his handheld video game under the door to distract her.  Most recently, Ronan got locked in the basement bathroom just last Sunday while we prepared to go to church.  He ended up crawling out through the window well and we dealt with the lock after church, but Liam thought it would be fun to just leave a note for the new owners asking them to "please feed our brother, he's locked in the bathroom."

The younger kids all learned to ride a bicycle on the walking path a block from the house and all of us walked, ran and rode that path frequently, enjoying the company of a herd of deer and the many, many rabbits that inhabit "Bunny Hill."

Once we had a brand new baby fawn in the yard, much to the amusement of the neighborhood cat who often lived on our porch.

Prior to the neighborhood cat making her appearance, we used to get mice in the garage each fall.  One memorable Thanksgiving day, the stench in the garage had become excruciating and a group of kids were sent to investigate.  They found a rotting mouse carcass under the outside fridge and spent their Thanksgiving morning extracting it from the fridge coils.

Fionnula became our first child to ever wear a cast when she landed weird on the trampoline and broke her wrist.

We spent snowy Saturdays in long Warcraft marathons, had some very crazy games of pictionary and charades and party quirks (hopefully someday Noah will go pro with his chameleon imitation).

We sent off 6 missionaries from this home, and welcomed home 3 of them.  The others will come 'home' to temporary homes somewhere.

As the older kids started leaving for college, this was the house they came back to visit, more than once showing up a day before they were expected and walking in the door to screams of excitement from little siblings, or else sneaking in super late only to be discovered the next morning sleeping on couches and floors.

We met our first daughter-in-law and first son-in-law in this house.

Lately though our home had been feeling too big and empty for our ever shrinking at-home-family. And about 6 months ago, we realized that the future we sometimes speculated dreamily about, a future where we could travel extensively, could come true now, if we were just willing to sell the house. So we talked with the kids, especially those who would be most directly affected by this change, and we started to make plans. The kids reacted with everything from sincere anxiety (Fionnula) to sheer exhilaration (Liam). On Monday, we took our first big step and moved out of our home and into a rental that is only a few miles away from that house. We will remain here until the college semester and then seminary finish, continuing in our usual routines, but in a different home.

On Tuesday, we returned to visit what was still our house for a few more hours, walked though the empty rooms (with Fionn saying goodbye to each room and closet).  The kids all jumped on the trampoline one more time. We took pics of the big empty house, and the cement on the back porch where everyone carved their names years ago. But somehow, this house that we had loved and filled our lives with for a whole decade, didn't really seem like our home anymore.