It’s Saturday. Two of the boys spent the night at grandma’s. The third woke me up at 5am with bad dreams. The fourth, who is 3, crawled into our bed at 6:30am.
It’s been exhausting two weeks, a busy month, a crazy summer, and insanely unpredictable year of transition and change.
And all I can think is how grateful I am for all of it. For the boys, for this house, for a year of growth and change.
It’s been a year of change in two different and deeply meaningful senses. My husband lost his job the first week of January and we immediately decided to sell our house of 5 years and rent while he found a new job he could settle into. During the past 8 months we’ve lived in 3 places and each tried multiple jobs, or for me – business models. So it’s been a lot of physical change and shaking up of life.
The other year of change just ended in the traditional sense. On Aug 27, 2018 I gave my boss of 9 years my two weeks notice. I knew in my heart that it was time for me to move on to a new chapter, a new season of life. My goals were to prepare a way to start homeschooling our boys, and to give my husband greater career flexibility. I had just finished a year of research and networking and my plan was to start my own business.
My husband was suddenly let go due to downsizing, in Jan. He got a new job across town in April and we moved into a nearby rental house, taking the opportunity to start homeschooling.
In May he got a better job across town the other direction, this time near his parents and in the area we wanted to be in. While we gave him time to get settled in the job, we debated breaking our lease early, and whether to rent again or buy, while being told that the market was hot and it would be best to wait a while to buy. Meanwhile the kids and I were a bit cramped in our small white rental house. I remained incredibly grateful for it, but also starting to dream about a house in Chesapeake.
After only just starting to look at neighborhoods, mainly focusing on learning the traffic patterns of the area, looking for where our price range might coincide with a decent commute, I saved a few properties on zillow, and then got an email of a similar house, it was a FSBO that just came on the market that day, which was Aug 23. I called the seller the next day, we saw the house the following day, negotiated price the following week, ratified a contract, and set closing for Aug 30.
Despite the fact that neither of us were using an agent, everything went so smoothly that closing was moved up to Aug 27.
I woke up that day super excited about closing on the house, and then slowly realized it was exactly a year to the day since the day I had given my boss notice a year earlier.
This year has been full of miracles, and growth, a rekindling of hope, a rediscovering of faith, a stripping back of old layers of bad habits, old thinking.
I feel like I’ve come back home, and at the same time am starting a new season that feels like a whole new life. I have so much yet to learn and figure out, but I finally feel I am setting out on the right journey, that I’m headed down the right path.
I’m looking forward to sharing that journey with you, sharing what I’ve learned, where I’ve been, where I’m at, and discovering together where we are all headed as we make sense of this wonderful gift called life.
Alicia Eichmann