Well, the day is here. Ready or not, we are moving! I can hardly believe it is really happening. Especially since Portland has been my home for the past 15 years. Even though I always wanted to move and be adventurous in my early 20s, since starting a family, I always assumed I would raise my kids in Portland with them going to my school. But, life had other plans...
Here's the back story: Every time we visited Bend in the past few years, Brian has always tried to talk me into moving here. Of course neither of us had a job in Central Oregon that could support such a move, so it was always a far-reaching dream for him. And then last fall, Brian made a career change that ended up with a job that included CO as part of his territory. At that time, we also found out we were pregnant with Talia. We always knew we wanted me to stay home with two kids as it doesn't make much sense to pay childcare for two on a teacher's salary. And then around the holidays, Brian was given a job opportunity to have more of a presence in the Bend area. Soon aferward, we made our yearly Christmas trip to Bend and saw neighborhoods that were perfect for us and so different than our Portland one. Also the housing prices were so affordable, we realized that we may be able to make this dream a reality. Soon after the holidays were over, we found a ridicuously reasonable house for sale and jumped on it. Since it was such a long and complicated process to buy this house, we didn't tell many people about our plans. In fact, we weren't sure we were going to get the house up until the day we signed papers. We also didn't want to get our hopes up because we told each other that if this house didn't work, it must mean it's not in the cards for us to move. Crazy enough, the day after we came home from the hospital with Talia, papers were signed! Even then it didn't feel quite real and ended up not telling our friends for a few weeks after that - maybe I was in denial, or scared for such a big move or maybe just plain exhausted from having a toddler and newborn!! Either way, we kept it under wraps for such a long time that when we finally told people, they were shocked that we were moving in only 4 weeks!!
Fast forward to today - our first day in our new home and new zip code! We are loving our new house even more than we thought we would and loving our neighborhood even more as well! Oh, and Brian's sister, brother-in-law and kids live just six houses away!! Of course we are going to miss all of our best friends in Portland, especially my brother and family, but we are excited for our new adventure!
T helping out with the moving. Well, as much as a toddler can. Notice my role was to take pictures as I had a newborn attached to my hip. Packing and moving wasn't really doable in my state, especially since I had just had a C-section six weeks before!! Thank you to Trav & Brian for doing ALL the work!!!
Maybe one of the only things I will truly miss from our Portland house will be this view - amazing!! I'm not sad about leaving the house (a tri-level and all deck/no backyard = no bueno for kiddos and dogs) or the neighborhood (we'll miss our new neighbors but that's about all in the hilly, older-crowd neighborhood).
What amazing photos from our last night in Portland! It was like nature's going away present to us to have such a spectacular storm right before we left!
First two items of furniture in house - chair for mom, chair for little one :)
Out to breakfast with the Danners - so lucky to have them there the whole weekend!
We were also lucky to have our first visitors from Portland! The Zervis and Dudy crews were in town for a concert and decided to ride their bikes to visit us from their house they were renting in downtown Bend. Loved having them here!
Love having this toddler playground just a few blocks from our house!
