One year ago today my husband and I, our 2 kids and one dog arrived in Texas to start our new adventure (or so we told our 4-year-old). I thought now would be a good time to try and chronicle this time in our lives even though I am a year late. I am sure I am going to miss a lot of things that happened in this past year in this blog, but as anyone who has ever moved to a new state can probably tell you, it takes awhile to get the house in order, kids settled and feel like the new house is a home.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and my husband and I settled there after college to be near family. My husband hated the winters and I had always wanted to move somewhere new and exciting after college, but life has a way of happening and I wound up married with a kid 2 towns away from where I lived my entire life except for college. How boring is that?
For years my husband and I talked about moving, but we never pursued it for one reason or another. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis we both had at the same time or maybe I was just excessively hormonal after having our second kid, but my husband wanted to change jobs and when he asked if I would be willing to move away from Chicago, I said yes. (I blame the hormones and the horribly snowy winter.)
An opportunity came up for him to interview in Houston, Texas so with our 4-year-old spending the weekend with an aunt and a 7 week old in tow, my husband and I flew to Texas for his job interview and to look around the surrounding area. It was April and it was already hot in Texas,. (Little did I know that 85 degrees is "spring" weather here.) He liked the job, the people seemed nice and I was tired of our house in Illinois, so we decided to take the plunge and accept the job offer.
One month later I returned to work from my maternity leave while my husband readied our house to put on the market. Two weeks later he drove to Texas alone, leaving me with the kids, dog, and a house I had to keep "show ready" for any potential buyers (more on that in another post). Needless to say, much of summer 2011 is a blur, between sleepless nights with a baby, constantly cleaning the house, work, and taking online college classes I am not sure how we all survived to be able to drive to Texas last September, but we did.
So here we are one year later. Am I glad we moved? Most days yes, some days not so sure. Are we true Texans yet? I don't know if we ever will be, though I did use the word fixin' correctly in a sentence the other day. I still miss my friends and family in the Midwest, but I am happy we are teaching our kids to be adventurous and try new things (now if only my 5-year-old would eat something other than in nugget form). We have exposed them to a different area of the country with lots of different customs and occasionally a different language (or so the Southern drawl seems to me).
In future posts I will reflect on our move and things we learned about our family and about others and of course there will be calamities to post as well. So join us!
See Y'all later!
Bluebonnet Yankee
P.S. Bluebonnets are the Texas state flower.
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