Bittersweet Goodbye to My Apartment and our Move to Our New Home

On Saturday we finally moved out of my apartment and into our new home - something we have been looking forward to doing and that I've been saving money for years to be able to do.  It was FREEZING outside (27 degrees!) and snow/ice was still on the ground from the day before, but we did it (mental note - NEVER move in December again!).  Looking around the new house, it's hard to believe that everything fit into a 2 bedroom apartment!  I like how my friend Cherie, said it when I pointed this out: "You're just good at organizing" :)  We have most of the boxes unpacked except for a couple, which is mostly my scrapbooking things, which I still need to figure out how to store and where to make my 'scrapbooking station' that isn't in the way of everything (at the apartment I used a closet-unfortunately, the new house doesn't have a closet I can use for it).  Side note: packing all of my scrapbooking stuff made me go through everything that I have, so my creative juices are flowing and I can't wait to start scrapbooking again - yahoo!  Sean says I have too much scrapbooking stuff, so I need to make more things to prove to him that it is all an investment in preserving memories:)

Today my mom helped me clean the apartment one last time and we did the final walk-through -- it was surprisingly hard saying goodbye to it! (Ok, I admit, I teared up when I closed the door for the last time and drove away).  I worked really hard (both in college and in my career) in order to have a place that Ethan and I could call home and be completely ours.  When I was pregnant with Ethan, I made a promise to myself and was determined not to be another statistic - so I worked hard to be successful and the apartment was a small physical proof to us that I was not yet another number. 

We created so many memories within those walls - I know all of the stories behind every stain in the carpet (the orange soda stain from when I was laying in the chair and accidentally kicked the small table, the Hawaiian Punch stain-almost overlapping the orange soda stain-from Ethan jumping around and knocking over the same small table)... no matter how much I scrubbed at those stains, they wouldn't go away!  We created new traditions and kept some old ones, we had dance-offs with each other with music blaring (sorry, neighbors!), Sean told me he loved me for the first time, and Ethan lost his first tooth there. 

I took pictures of the apartment-before I started packing about a month ago and then today I took some of the outside of it - I will post them when I get a chance.  Ethan and I are staying with my parents tonight through Wednesday night, as being here cuts 45 minutes off of my commute, so I'm using their computer now.  (Our computer isn't set up yet and we don't have Internet yet at the new house.)

Now, don't get me wrong, I am very happy with our new home and look forward to making new memories in it just like we did at the apartment, but it is sad closing a chapter in my life.