It Will All Work Out

This is what I keep telling myself lately.  We have so many changes coming our way and it's scary to think about.  The changes are a good thing and I am excited for them, but heading into the unknown always makes me worry.  I can be a stress mess sometimes.  I'm not really a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of person.  I don't have to have every detail of my whole life planned out, but when I leave the house in the morning I like to know exactly what I'm doing that day.  I like to at least have an outline of how the future will go, but I know it doesn't work like that.  Life throws you curveballs and you learn to deal and make the best of it.  You go around them, you catch them, you just get through.

We've had plans to move for awhile now.  It's always been a dream that seemed so far off and is now slowly becoming a reality.  Has everything magically fallen into place?  No way.  But we are beginning to take steps to get where we eventually want to be.  It's scary and exciting all at the same time.

Suffice it to say, we have outgrown our house.  When we first moved in three-and-a-half years ago we were a family of three.  Calli was one-and-a-half and we had everything in front of us.  We were extremely optimistic, thinking this was the house we wanted to be in forever.  It is only three bedrooms, but I remember saying that the second bedroom was big enough that two kids could share if we ended up with so many.  Fast forward to three years and two more kids later and it's not working out quite as well as I'd hoped.  The master bedroom shares a wall with the girls' room, which means there's no separation of the master from the other rooms.  There's no extra room or game room upstairs for the toys to go, so we turned the unneeded dining room downstairs into the playroom.  The problem is, the toys have quadrupled since we moved here and they don't exactly stay in the dining area.  They get scattered throughout the living room and kitchen too, causing us all to trip over things every time we walk.  The toy box is overflowing and yes, I know that is our own doing, but it sure would be nice to have somewhere else to put all those toys!  Even if we didn't have a toy room, it would be nice for the kids to each have their own bedrooms and enough space to put the toys in their rooms.  I envision in our next house a small basket of toys downstairs and everything else upstairs; out of sight, out of mind!  At least when people come over the first thing they see won't be a gigantic mess and toys galore.

Aside from outgrowing the house, the neighborhood is going downhill.  It makes me worried that our home values are only going to drop the longer we wait because I don't think this neighborhood is ever going to be what I had hoped.  The new HOA board seems to be useless, there is graffiti everywhere (which is a big problem all over this city, but since this is our neighborhood I notice it specifically here), people let their dogs run loose all over (hello, ever heard of a leash law?) and the crime isn't great.  The last straw for me was going out for my evening run last week and seeing four police cars across from the park and someone being arrested.  I don't feel safe.  I don't feel safe for my kids and it's really not fair.  I've read of gang activity happening at the basketball courts near us and one time we were at the park when some police officers showed up asking if anyone had seen a knife in the trash cans because they had gotten reports that someone put one there.  I couldn't leave fast enough!  I have not heard great things about the schools and to be fair, I will reserve judgement until my kid actually attends.  I am a believer that even if you don't go to the best schools, you can still have the best teachers. 

My point with all this is: even if you took moving to California out of the equation, we would still want to move.  Knowing that it is in the equation, however, makes moving that much more appealing.  We are trying not to rush things, but timing everything is so hard.  There's no saying how long our house will take to sell or how long it will take Richard to get a job.  I worry about us finding a buyer before he has a job lined up.  I worry about him getting a job and us not having a buyer!  Who knows how long our house could be for sale in this market.  Every time I go out for a run I feel like I see more and more houses popping up for sale in our neighborhood.  I like to think that we have a great location, on a cult-de-sac down the street from the park and pool and 3/4 mile from the elementary and middle schools.  We have a great backyard, even if it does lack privacy, but that is fixable.  I hope these things are enough to make someone choose our house over the one down the street.  I worry about selling at all: why should someone buy our house when they can drive down the freeway and build their own new house for the same price?

The truth is, most of the things we worry about in life aren't worth fretting over.  It will all work out.  One way or another, it will all work out!  I keep thinking about "what ifs" and then realize that we will cross those bridges if we even come to them.  It's no use worrying about things if they might not ever even happen.  It's easier said than done, but I am working on adopting this attitude.  This doesn't mean we'll just act impulsively and hope everything will be okay.  We've made informed decisions every step of the way thus far and we will continue to do so.

As of now I am getting the house ready; decluttered, cleaned and staged.  I am throwing out the old and broken items we've been hoarding, selling things on craigslist and getting together bags to take to Goodwill.  The garage is being cleaned out, the pictures are being taken down, things are being packed up.  We are preparing to put this house on the market and see what happens.  We've set a tentative date for the week after Labor Day and everything is moving forward.  This is a big step for us; our first home sale!  I know it won't be easy and I know I have some hard days of scrubbing and packing ahead of me, but in the end it will all be worth it.  I don't know when it will happen, I don't know exactly how or even exactly where we'll end up.  All I know is that one way or another, it will all work out.