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I'm doing something that I guess I figured I would probably do one day, but it was one of those "one day" situations that had no real time assigned to it, and I wasn't even sure it would happen.

I'm house-hunting.

The weird thing is, it just came out of the blue.

We live in the house where I grew up. My parents bought this house when I was four. I don't even really have many memories from before the time we moved here. I have lived in it 30 of my 34 years. We bought the house from my folks in September 2001, just a month before we got married.

Needless to say, I'm attached to this house. Memories abound around every corner. I have pets buried in the back yard. I know every tree. Every creak and crack. I've seen this house transformed from a little white house in a big, bare yard to a bigger brown house with a beautifully-treed yard. Oh, how I love the back yard!

I have neighbors I love. They are wonderful, and our back yards are almost like a shared yard. If we want to play Frisbee or baseball or soccer, we are welcome to incorporate their yard into our playing field. We watch their house when they go away. They watch our house when we go away. I used to bother the neighbor guy when I was little. Now my kids do the same thing.

In so many words, this is home to me. Always (mainly) has been.

So, last week I was driving my sons to the mall and I spotted a nice-looking house with a for sale sign and, on a whim, I called the number to inquire about the price. I don't have any idea why I did it.

Anyway, the house was bigger than I thought and came with a lot of nice property, netting it a price tag of $775,000. Uh, OK, then, thanks, bye!

Later that night, I conversationally mentioned the call to my husband and also mentioned it on Facebook.

I never thought it would lead to anything.

All of a sudden, my husband and I are actively looking at homes. An acquaintance from high school saw my post on Facebook and contacted me. He's a Realtor. He's already showed us three houses and has taken a look at ours for listing purposes.

Oh my goodness. We might be moving!

I am an overwhelmed jumble of emotions over this whole thing. Mainly, I'm excited. We have outgrown this house. It's a decent house, well-built and my parents made a lot of improvements while they lived here, and we have also made a lot of improvements. In fact, our bedroom and the kitchen and half bath off the kitchen are the only rooms we haven't redone, and we've finished the basement. We can live here, but it's kind of crowded and I can only imagine it will be even more crowded as the boys grow. The bedrooms and living room are quite small. Our bedroom, in fact, is so painfully small that with just a queen bed, a regular-size dresser and a smaller dresser, you have to walk sideways between the dresser and the bed (and it's pushed against the wall at the headboard and on one side!)

I am so in love with my back yard, though. It's hard, because we want a bigger house, but on a nice piece of property where we can play. But we have a budget, too. We are a one-income family of four, after all! We have discovered, however, that it's a decent time to find a new house because you can get more bang for your buck. $300,000 homes are selling for closer to $200K, in many cases. But what will that mean when it comes time to sell this one? Only time will tell.

I will be sad to leave this house. Tears will be shed. I haven't cried yet, but I have become wistful playing out in the back yard I know so well. I'm trying not to think about it too hard, but then there are moments like last night, Hubby and I were standing on the deck, having a glass of wine and watching a storm blow in (the breeze felt so good, by the way!) and he looked at me and said "the more we look at other houses, the more I come to appreciate this one."

I know how he feels.

What he meant was, we've seen some shoddy construction and some hideous examples of taste (purple countertops, muppet-colored paint jobs, etc.) We've seen some ugly yards. We've seen houses that would be more work than they were worth.

We live in a relatively maintenance-free home right now, decorated mainly just how we like it.

But, there are reasons to move. The size. We don't really like the road we live on (lots of FAST traffic, which will probably only get worse). Etc.

I am trying to focus on the exciting part of it all. Hubby and I never really got to house hunt together and we've been married almost 9 years. Hubby still kind of sees this house as "my parents' house" sometimes. It will be fun to decorate a new place. (I'm hoping to enlist the help of my Aunt Katie when that time comes, because I am completely in love with her house and the way she decorates. She really should go into interior decorating!)

Part of getting ready for this process is finally letting go of the baby stuff, at least the stuff Jordan has outgrown so far, so I have begun forming a garage sale pile mountain in my basement. Two huge storage tubs of teeny-tiny little boy clothes. I can picture each of my boys wearing those outfits and my heart aches to get rid of it, but I don't plan to have any more babies, so why store and/or move it? *sigh*

Anyway, that's where my life is right now. I'm in the middle of a crazy and unexpected experience that somehow bloomed from a tiny seed I planted simply by calling the number on a sign last week.

It's exciting and terrifying all at once.