cliff notes

Forgive me for not writing in a VERY long time, but it's been an insane past couple months - and as my brother said to me at the dinner table a couple weeks ago, "what? you haven't posted in months?! but SO MUCH is happening, you should be blogging like CRAZY!"
Well, as it turns out, so much HAS happened - but that means I've been incredibly busy, overly exhausted, and honestly just too preoccupied to post. So instead, I'm going to attempt to run through the past few life-changing events in record time. Bear with me.

SO, we got an offer on our Summerville home back in January and in the following three weeks, we had to say good bye to all of our friends

to our Neighborhood


and pack up all our worldy belongings...

We put my car on a transport

and had our house packed into a big trailer

to be stored in SC until we found a new home... our deadline was pretty ambitious. I was more than 8 months pregnant!
And just a note - our moving day just so happened to be the ONE day in twenty years when SC got snow. It started mid afternoon (our movers were there until after 8 pm!!) and didn't stop until we had over 6 inches the next morning! How ironic is that?!Check out Sydney and Meghan with one of the many Legend Oaks snowmen.

So after a quick round of one-last-goodbye's with all our neighbors, we hooked up the boat... No wait, Tom shoveled out the boat, then loaded it up with our "absolutely-necessary-for-the-next-couple-months" boxes, THEN hooked up the trailer and off we went, with Rolo, Sydney and Kya all cuddled in the back seat for our 20 hour drive to Westford, Massachusetts.

We stopped just north of DC at a dog-friendly hotel around 2 am that night, amidst the extraordinary heaps of blizzard snow that had been pushed just about everywhere and anywhere. (Try parking a large pick-up truck and boat in THAT - better yet, try walking two dogs that are used to 80 degree weather around that!)

But finally, that following night - on Valentine's Day to be exact - after a long exhausting trip, we made it to Westford, just about an hour after my car arrived safe and sound off the transport. We were tired, we were disheveled, we were overwhelmed and we were homeless - but we could not have been happier to see Matty, Lisa, Amelia & Isabelle and the attic that we would call home for the next five weeks.

Tom was up and running, working from the dining room by Monday night, and I was busy scheduling appts to meet my new Dr's, take a tour of the local birthing center at Emerson Hospital and of course speak with our real estate agent to set up as many showings as humanly possible as soon as we could manage. The first few days of house hunting were crushing. I was very seriously worried that I was going to be delivering this baby boy in Matty's attic. But as soon as we got our expectations in line with what was realistic up here in such a "different" market than South Carolina - and as soon as I started to think we were just going to have to settle for something that was "good enough - I guess," we drove to what would end up being our new home. I remember following our real estate agent up the endless unpaved drive, thankful that we were in Tom's 4WD truck, and hearing Tom saying, "Wow, this is Impressive!" and thinking, "Wow, this would be a PAINFUL ride when I'm in labor." And then at the end of the long wooded road, we saw a house all alone with nothing but land and trails and rocks around it. Tom was instantly smitten, but as always, I was a much harder sell. After a second showing and some second third and forth opinions from the family, we put in an offer... and after a bit of negotiating and inspecting and all the insanity that goes along with homebuying - here we are, official Westford residents!

I was SO excited to schedule delivery of our trailer. Living at Matty and Lisa's was great - don't get me wrong, we LOVED it - but living out of suitcases and bare-necessities-boxes gets old real quick. The day the trailer was coming felt like Christmas in March! I was SO excited to see it coming up the drive...

But moving in proved to be a pretty big headache - the truck driver had some troubles getting up to our house...

after cutting some limbs (that's our crazy driver up in the tree - luckily he let us unpack our ladder from the truck for him) and digging out numerous rocks and stumps...

our driver made it to the very last little curve in the road, and after hours of trying, he decided he just couldn't cut it.
After nearly a half mile up the road, he gave up just 100 yards from our driveway. I was utterly disappointed and stressed beyond belief. Tom's hands were blistered and torn from digging out more and more of the road. My brother and my dad were sweating over their shovels and rakes and chainsaws. And all we could do was watch our trailer drive away, and reschedule our move for the following day, rent an additional shuttle truck and hope for better luck with our second attempt and a brand new day. All in all, by the following night - everything was in the house, and I had not been thrown into labor - so in hindsight, it was just a small kink in an otherwise remarkably smooth transition. So - here are some photos of the house and the surrounding woods.

Once I clear enough boxes out to show anything inside, I'll put up some interior pictures too... slowly but surely. I promise.
Of course, we're not the only ones who are ecstatic to be in our new home - the dogs are in heaven here. Rolo runs with the deer and Kya ocassionally comes in from outside sopping wet from whatever new stream or pond she's discovered, but we're really trying to teach them to stay in the yard. It's a slow process, but at least we have no real neighbors to complain. We do have the weekly parade of motorbikes and 4-wheelers out front, but other than that it's pretty quiet back here. One day last week we had a new record - 4 cars came up the road in one day, all of them ultimately reaching our driveway, looking utterly confused, and making an awkward u-turn back out. It's funny how quickly Sydney and I have begun to stare out the window with a look of "who the heck are you and what do you want?!" when just a couple short months ago we would've said, "oh, bless your hearts - y'all come back now ya hee-ah?"