I have a long history with this neighborhood. I didn’t grow up in it, but several of my childhood and high school friends did, so I spent a lot of time at their houses. My mom and stepdad moved here when I was in graduate school. I spent the summer in between school years there, and then the following summer, Zach and I moved into our own house in a different neighborhood.
As much as we loved that first house of ours, every time we visited my parents, we wished we lived in their neighborhood. That wish came true just 3 years later, after we’d been married for a few months. I fell in love with what I called my “dream home” the moment we walked in, and the icing on the cake was that it was just two blocks down from my parents.
A lot happened in that house: it was where I worked (when I had a home studio), it was where we raised our puppy, and it was where we brought our first child home from the hospital. We lived there for almost 6 years, until we decided we needed a better floor plan to accommodate two children.
But we loved our neighborhood, and didn’t want to give up being close to family. So we sweetened our situation by selling that house to Zach’s parents and moving just a few streets over, to an even dreamier “dream home” in the same neighborhood.
Not only did we now have two sets of parents in the same neighborhood, but my dad and stepmom live in the next one over within walking distance of our new house. Our children have had the amazing privilege of growing up surrounded by grandparents, all of whom we see on an almost daily basis. Doesn’t get much better than that! Or does it…
Fast forward three years later to today. My brother, sister-in-law, and their two children moved back home from Denver last month, and this afternoon will close on their new house in — you guessed it — our neighborhood.
In addition to having family close by, we also have so many friends around us. We have traveled to Disney World, trick-or-treated, had countless dinners, walked to the pool, and played with our neighbors and their children, built-in best buddies for ours.
To say I’m grateful for our neighborhood is a huge understatement. Between the people who live here and the fact that Zach and I both have 5-minute commutes to our respective businesses, there is pretty much no chance of us ever moving.
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This post is a part of my 23 Days of Gratitude series. Click here for the full list of posts. Thank you so much for reading and helping me celebrate the spirit of Thanksgiving!
