It's starting to feel a little more real now...

The move, I mean. Now that the house is sold and emptied of our things I can now officially (and legally) not go there anymore and spend the night.
There is no reason to browse the home aisles at stores in hopes of finding an adorable little holiday-what-not for my house at a fabulous price. It's a strange feeling; not having a home but not being homeless. I still feel uncomfortable inviting over friends to a place that is not mine. Making dinner with pots and pans that I didn't choose, with food I bought but is in someone else's fridge. Unsettling.

Gage started school last week, and it seems that he will be alright. We don't know one other person in his class but he has not come home crying yet and he likes picking his own food for lunch in the cafeteria. On Friday the dessert was donuts and the little rascal admitted later that he ate that first. Yeah, well, me too.
The first day he got off the bus, I was trying to be cheerful and encouraging, you know... really peppy... "How was it?" I had to swallow hard when he said, "I miss Nate." Me too.

I have to remember though, when we started kindergarten last year we only knew 2 other children, and by the end of the year we knew all the classmates first and last names and I knew most of their parents. I felt like it was a place where we could spend our lives and that place could be the "village that raised our children" and that was only after about a year.

I think it will only be a matter of time before we feel the same way about this place. I know many of the adults from church or rather remember them from my own growing-up (I'm still deciding if this is a good or bad thing because I am unsure of how they remember me). We've already got the kids signed up for soccer and dance and gymnastics, and I hope we'll have a few friends before too long.

I'm still really looking forward to the days when I can ask the kids what colors they'd like for their rooms and I can look at the Pottery Barn catalog with the intention of actually ordering something. We would start today if the golf course would hurry and finish the road... and if we had a few hundred thousand dollars. Ugh. Details.

In the meantime, everything I see, everything I watch- I am taking mental notes. Colors, shapes, sizes, windows, plants, patterns, textures, prices; everything is a jumbled mess of ideas in my head. Have you seen the handrail from the movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith? Or how about the gorgeous Georgian-esque mansion on the front of Shannon Hale's Austenland. (Read it, it's good, by the way.) Driving to school, I saw a white 3-plank fence dripping with brilliant yellow bush-roses. They're the wild-looking kind that have slightly darker, smaller foliage than cutting roses. So sweet.
I cannot wait to plant a few of my own.