Day 4: my home

Almost 4 years ago... MW and I set out with our tiny 10 month old Super Muscles to explore central IL to see if it was a place we wanted to move to. Really the options were few considering Mr. Wonderful was starting school as a grad student in the spring rather than the fall. It is very rare to do such a thing. But we decided that UofI was an awesome school and there would have to be very big reasons not to come here... Like tripping over a dead body during the campus tour big. This school or one like it is what my husband has dreamed about for a long time. So when we came up here I had already contacted a realtor because we needed a house... or at very least a yard with a fence and I didn't know how to do that without a house. I had just gotten MW a surprise for graduation... a very large dog. So... we did the school thing, had dinner and decided this is where we would be. The next morning we met with a realtor thinking... well we can look... if we don't find something today though it would be pretty unlikely that we would be able to buy a house anytime soon. The logistics just weren't going to work if we didn't put an offer in that day and have it pretty promptly accepted. So... we went and looked. Our price range was pretty low... MW was going to be a grad student and I was going to stay home with our boys. We had to do some work to get a loan because of how grad students are paid. And most of the houses we looked at were going to require too much work.

Then we came across a tiny little gem near downtown Urbana. And by tiny, I mean... some days I am not sure how we all fit. 890 sq feet and in wonderful shape for the age of the home. The price was a little more than we had set out to pay but there would be far less work to do on the house than other places we had looked. I fell in love with the tiny blue house. It was near the bus line, in a great school district, right across the street from a church and a preschool (which my son now goes to), and a couple of blocks from the police station and fire station. It is also very close to campus and you can easily get to anything you need since it is only a few blocks from down town (the library, food, small mall, starbucks, groceries). So we put an offer in that day. Had to haggle a little bit to get it all to fall into place. The electrical was terribly outdated and we had to work getting it fixed into the agreement. But, we did it. We put the bid in the day before thanksgiving that year and closed on Dec 23 2006.

I often tell my husband that even though we will be moving on to a bigger and more comfortable home at some point... I KNOW I will miss this house. There are so many memories here and it is the only home my children have ever known. My boys in Christmas pjs and opening gifts on Christmas morning. All the messes and art projects. The new experiences. Both of them had there first steps here. Well pretty much most of their firsts have been here, in this house. This tiny little house that seems smaller every day that my kids get bigger.