Pitter Patter

When we moved into this house a little over 3.5 years ago I was not very happy to be here.

I could not seem to figure out all the different, crazy light switches quickly enough and kept thinking that the one in our closet should be on the left side and not the right. The floors were all hard and there was absolutely no soft carpet at all, like in our house back in Texas, the one we had just left behind. So, I bought slippers.

Our furniture did not fit very well in this house, mostly because in our previous home we had two living areas – one formal and one more den-like and here there is only one. I had too much improvising to do with my decor.

The oven did not work at all when we first moved in and my husband’s birthday was coming up.  I just wanted to bake him a cake. My seven-month pregnant self did not sleep well in this new place. The counters in our bathroom area were way too short for my liking and the ones in the kids’ bathroom were just right, for me, not them.

All of these nit-picky things were exacerbated of course, by the fact that I really just wanted to be back in the city we had left behind, back with my friends and closer to family. And the fact that there were so many boxes. EVERYWHERE. I like order. I like things unpacked and in place and clean and just the way I want them.

There were a few nights that I cried in bed, just wishing I could go back “home”, to my comfort-zone that I knew so well.  I thought in my head “what the hell are we doing here!?” I thought it SO hard sometimes. Like enough to where it gave me a headache. Change is hard for me. It always has been.

Even when I went to college, leaving my family over 3.5 hours south, I was stunned into change.  I made the independent choice to leave home and it was a good one, but the first few weeks were so very HARD.  I vividly recall my parents in the elevator of my dormitory as the doors closed on their beautiful and loving faces and my heart wrenched in my chest.  And the dog tears that followed.

I was assigned a dormitory roommate who wanted NOTHING to do with me.  So in the first few weeks I made a transfer and hurriedly moved all my things by myself, up one flight of stairs to another room, with a girl I knew from home. She was not the ideal roommate either but she was familiar. And I needed familiar.

So.  When we came here NOTHING was familiar, except of course my babies and my husband.  It WAS different this time, at least I had them with me in the change.

And my “babies” at the time liked trains, so we used part of the enormous hard floor in the one huge living room to create the biggest train track they had every played with before. Their previous train table (which I sold to a friend back in Texas) couldn’t hold a candle to the masterpiece of intricate track we were able to build here. And they were happy.

It was then that I realized for them, and for myself of course, I needed to make happy too. We WERE here and I was about to give birth to the baby girl I always wanted and my husband had a good paying job and even though it rained every afternoon, the weather seemed pretty good and the people I had met so far were quite nice.

So now, over three years later I have figured out all the light switches. We bought different furniture and moved some of the old around.  We have made new, good friends.

Also, my feet are mostly accustomed to the floors and I cannot deny the enormous love I have for the “pitter patter” sound of the six little feet that walk and run down the long hallway from my room to theirs, multiple times a day.

And in the end, no matter where we are geographically, where their feet land is my home too.