Home. Again.

When we last left Madame Queen's family, they were in the midst of negotiations for purchasing a home. Remember? And remember how she said the whole thing was fraught with discord? Yeah, well, it was a sign. That house was not meant to be.

We had the inspection done and the inspector found some problems. Not a ton of problems, but enough and of a nature that it triggered my own PTSD from the time the sellers didn't disclose a bunch of a problems with the last house we'd owned and well...I just couldn't do it. We didn't have a contract and so we told the sellers we didn't feel comfortable buying that house. The sellers were not happy, to say the least, but what could they do.


A few weeks later we made an offer on another house, one that I'd kind of had my eye on since the previous October and within a week the sellers accepted our offer. This was in February? I think? But because of our foreclosure history, we had to wait until three years from the date of our foreclosure to buy another house, so we had to wait until May 1st to apply for the loan. You want to talk about some months that simultaneously flew and dragged by? And I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs the whole time that something was going to wrong.

But May 1st came, we applied for the loan, it was approved, we had the closing, and we moved in.

I'm not sure I can fully describe the feeling of owning my own home after what we've been through over the past 4 years. In that time we've paid off all of our debt with the exception of Mr. Daddy's car and I think, for the first time in a long time (ever?), I feel like a grown up. No, I'm not proud of what happened 3 years ago, but I'm not ashamed of it either. It sounds like self-help mumbo jumbo to say that if it hadn't happened we wouldn't have learned so much about ourselves, but it's true.

The most exciting part about living here, though, is our neighbors. There are tons of kids close by and Bubba and Punkin have loved being able to head out after dinner every evening to play with whomever is around. And I and three of my neighbor friends have started a running club, meeting 3 nights a week to run together. And did I tell you about Halloween? It was Halloween last year that I fell in love with this neighborhood. It is THE place to trick-or-treat in our area and everybody opens up their garage doors and goes all out decorating and dressing up. We came last year because several of our church friends live here and it was so much fun -- such a sense of community.

So, if my autobiography used to be called "How I Went from Living in Tree-Lined Suburbia to a Double-wide in My Daddy's Back Yard," I think I could now add the subtitle, to steal a quote from Bilbo Baggins, "There and Back Again."