I keep writing status updates and blog posts and song lyrics (just kidding) in my head, so after a month’s worth of not actually getting any of those words OUT of my head, it’s time to dive back in to the blog.

A month is the longest I’ve gone between posts possibly since I started doing this. Losing my Grandpa Cliff and then throwing myself into one of the biggest distractors ever – house hunting – the day after we got home from his funeral also hasn’t happened in my six and a half years of doing this, either, so you know – uncharted territory and whatnot.

And no, not looking at houses only because I haven’t found a better way to deal with grief (although I’d be fuzzing details if I said I had found a good and proper way to actually do that), but rather picking up a thought we started playing around with about this time last year, which would have been shortly after we found out Baby No.5 was on the way.

In case you don’t recall, we moved into this house when Baby No.2 was brand new. We had tried to sell our first house after I found out I was pregnant and it didn’t go well, so we took it off the market and decided to be patient. Then our realtor came to us about a month and half-ish (six-and-a-half-ish years ago is hard to remember such details, even when you do keep a blog to help with such remembering) after RL’s birth with a potential buyer for our home, so we went looking, and just like that we found our current house.

Make no mistake. We love our current house. It is a beautiful home with a ton of character and a surprising amount of space. But if you know us at all, you know we’ve done our darndest in our time here to FILL that space.

And so….the looking that started last year.

We visited a couple houses early last summer, got discouraged, and decided we’d just spend money in our house to make the space we do have work a little better for us. But then, as the year played out, those plans didn’t all come to fruition and so I still find myself checking Realtor.come on a fairly regular basis, which lead to the discovery of a house the day after we returned from SoDak that caught my interest. And then another. And another. However. The market here is tricky (not to mention expensive) and so the last three weeks have been a whirlwind of “What ifs” and “Maaaaaybe we should just stay puts” and “Do you like this ones” and all of those crazy making (for two Type A planners such as B and I) questions that go along with a search like this.

Also, did I mention that we even showed our house a couple times already? I spent my 36th birthday (and the whole day after it) cleaning my entire house (with family here to help, even!) so potential buyers could see it, which was so much work it left me sore the next day as if I’d gone on an 8 mile run. But its hard to strike a deal for your own house if you don’t actually know which one will be yours next.

Because here’s the deal: in order to get a house big enough to even hold our crew, that is also nicer than our current house, in the Hastings market of today, we’d have to go over $100k for what we paid for this one. When we upgraded to this house, we had to go about $30k up (however it was 2012, soooo). And the real kicker is that many of the homes in our price range actually still need updating, or will in the very, very near future, and that is daunting for a family with this many small children (and one income).

Which leads me to my second deal: if we move, I’m most definitely going back to work full-time sooner than later. I mean, not until all the kids were in school, but still – there’s no way to make this fly on B alone forever.

While I’m OK with that concept (mostly), I also wonder how OK we could be here if we just did the work we wanted to last year and stuck it out in our cute little one-and-a-half story house that would be paid OFF before HD goes to college (& that’s without me working any more than I already am).

Do I have house envy? Do I need to have my head examined? Do I need to just have a big cry about everything that has been topsy turvy in the last month, curl up with a good book, and let it go?

I have no idea.

But here I am, sorting it out in words once again, as I do.

And, y’all…truth moment…if we move, I am really going to miss the room in which I wrote this (which was admittedly a couple days ago before we got more snow and it was too cold to sit out here):