I've decided that I'm nuts.

So, we've decided that we are finally going to put our house on the market. I say "finally" because we've been talking about it for at least two years now. When we originally bought it, we said we'd be here for 5 years, max. Well, that was 5 years and 4 months ago. The thing is, I don't think that we planned on having children quite so quickly. (I got pregnant 3 weeks after we got married...we call him our planned surprise.)

As I take a break from doing what I like to call "house stuff" (yes, that's a scientific term, feel free to adopt it yourself), I am struck by just how emotional of a process this move will be. That will be different from the other dozen times I've moved in my life -- this is the first time I'll be leaving the only place my children have ever called home.

We have a great house. Is it huge? No. Is it extravagant? No. You know what it is? It is THE perfect first house and THE perfect place to bring babies home to. It's not huge, but it's big enough. The neighbors' houses aren't so close that I can open the window, reach out and borrow an egg, like some of the newer neighborhoods are. We have an honest to goodness YARD, people. With a deck. And a shed. And a sandbox.

Here's the bottom line...I'm beginning to love my house again, as much as I'm ready to move, I'm realizing how attached to it I really am. We've definitely outgrown our space here, and we are ready to move to a more centrally located neighborhood, but I will without a doubt miss our house.

What really makes me mad is the fact that someone else is going to walk through it and look for "what's wrong". What they like, what they don't like, what they want to change, what they want to keep. It almost feels like I'm putting my child out in front of someone to be criticized without regard for what really matters. I hope that someone else walks in and just instantly can see themselves living here...that's what happened for me. I walked in and just knew that this was the house for us.

When we were looking for houses, our realtor encouraged us to give each house we looked at a nickname so we could easily remember and distinguish them when talking about what we'd seen later on. It really did work -- five years later I can still remember the dirty house (uh, yeah...'nuff said on that one), the hunting house, the hot tub house, and the squeaky floors house. Makes me wonder what our house would be called. (My money is on "the rubber duckie house" because of the kids' bathroom. By the way, we refuse to change it -- love our house, love the ducks. If it gets changed, I don't want to know about it.)

I need to get back upstairs and finish packing some stuff up...I just had to take a break, come down here and say that I love my tiny, perfect little house. Flaws and all -- it's still perfect to me. I can't imagine starting our family's life together anywhere else and if I'm crying while I type this, I imagine that as ready as I am to move us into the next "perfect house" for us, I'll be bawling as we drive away for the last time.