We are in the market for a new place to live. Not that there is anything wrong with our current place. We love our current place. The biggest problem with our house is that the reason we moved into it in the first place was that it was less than 2 miles from Simone’s office. When she got a new job in Burlington, her 3 minute commute became a 30 minute commute (or 45 minutes if there is traffic) and suddenly her quality of life decreased.
What we really want is to live close to Simone’s new job, and close to stores and schools and all sorts of things that we are currently not close to. What we want is to go back down to one car. We want to walk and take the bus. We want to pay less car insurance. We want to use less gas. But we also don’t want to repeatedly uproot our children.
I moved around a lot as a kid. In fact, Ruby and I counted today and our current house is the 25th place I have lived in my 33 years of life, not counting random places I have stayed for a month or two during gigs. Ruby is four and this is her third house. If we move again it will be place number 4 for her. Luckily, she also has the ability to recognize that the grass might be greener on the other side.
Our grown-up reasons probably don’t matter much to an almost-five year old, but she has her own reasons for wanting to move. For one thing, she is very upset that we have no sidewalks. We live on a state highway in a rural area, and our driveway is a patch of dirt and stone. Forget about rollerskating, or even easy tricycling. If we want to practice our wheeled sports, we need to pack up and go find a parking lot or a bike path somewhere. Ruby remembers living in Baltimore and biking down the driveway and riding her bike around the neighborhood. She often asks us when we can find a house with sidewalks.
She also wants to find a place with laundry. Believe me, nobody in the family enjoys laundry day. Having to pack up kids and laundry into the car and spend an entire day once a week out of the house just doing laundry is not anybody’s idea of fun. As much as I hate it and wish I could just throw a load in at home, the kids dislike just as much. When we talk to Ruby about a potential move in the future, she always asks if the new place will have sidewalks and laundry.
I think that once she starts elementary school it will be harder to move around, and once middle school and high school happens, we definitely will want to be settled in some permanentish place, but for now I’ll just try to explain it to her as best as I can and trust that she will find the good things about whatever place we end up living in. Luckily she’s good at that.
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