My Husbband Wants to Move Me to a Morman Mansion and I Don't Know How I Feel About That

Obviously I have some idea how I feel about it or I wouldn't be writing this blog post but I'm hoping the writing process helps me ferret out some positive energy in this...developing...situation.

You see, when I got the email that we were getting an offer on our current home, I got a little choked up. This the home in which our babies have spent the bulk of their 3-5 years. And sentimentality aside, the property rocks. Our location is perfect and we actually have over an acre with a year-round (mostly) creek, 10 minutes form the thriving metropolis that is the 'Burg; so if we had stayed at the same number of kids we had when we bought this place (2), I'd never leave.

But that didn't happen. Instead, about 3 minutes after moving in I got knocked up with the twins. And I love them and all their silly little boyness, but when you double the amount of children living under your roof, suddenly said roof seems quite a bit smaller. And I know as kids grow, the amount of crap they have does as well. I know that.

So while I love this home, I know it is too small, and frankly there is enough about this place that we would change that I can't justify trying to corner my husband into what I'm sure would become a multiple hundreds of thousands dollars renovation. So, we decided together we'd start looking for homes.

After about a 10 second conversation about moving to North Carolina which mostly consisted of me suggesting it and then my husband experimenting with how deeply his eyes could roll into the back of his skull, we started talking criteria for homes in our current location.

My biggest prerequisite is that the kids have a good education, which is admittedly hard enough to come by in this rural part of America but when you start dong the math, sending four kids to private school is about on level with that multiple-hundreds of thousands dollars home renovation I mentioned. So option C? Move to the best school district in the county. (There is an option D of home schooling which I haven't completely ruled out but I'm not even gonna look into it until the boys can formulate whole sentence...so, in like 10 years it might become a legit option).

The only hiccough is that the best school district just so happens to be 30 minutes away from the nearest town...the small, 20k person town in which we currently reside.

"Come on! Thirty minutes?! That's nothing! People commute 30 minutes every day, all across the country."

True, but those people usually pass a couple of grocery stores, a Starbucks and maybe a pharmacy or two. Wanna know what I'll pass on my 30 minute commute? Freeway exits.

I'm going to have to get on the freeway to get the kids to school (15 minutes away), get to a gas station (17 minutes away) and to the grocery store (28 minutes away).

I know there are plenty of people used to living "off-the-grid" like this, I'm even friends with some of them!, but you've got to remember: I was raised in the metro area of one of the 10 largest cities in America. The most off-the-grid I've ever lived is now, where I live off a gravel road and consider Marshalls THE shopping destination in town.

And now I'm gonna go live in a house (albeit a much bigger house), on a bunch of acreage, in the middle of nowhere? Does the garbage even run out there? What do we do, burn it like a bunch of rednecks? And if the well runs dry, do I send the kids down to the spring with buckets or just resort to drinking my own spit because just the idea of all that work wears me out??

I'm already envisioning signing the kids up for FFA so they each have an animal to raise and subsequently slaughter in order to feed the family and save on grocery store runs (I don't know, is that probably something they're gonna bring up to a therapist in 20 years?).

I have a 10 year plan that I won't divulge the details of here but suffice it to say that in about a decade, you should be looking for free-range, organic, non-GMO Appalachian-style moonshine in a discerning retailer near you.

I don't know, I mean I have journals from the 6th grade where I dreamt of living in a small cabin in the middle of Montana where I'd have to have supplies parachuted in so I never had to see anyone ever again. Maybe it's like that? Except of course that it doesn't account for the four humans I'm going to have to raise that hopefully won't aspire to the weirdo, Unabomber type existence I was apparently fashioning for myself during puberty.

I'll say this: the house is big enough. It's not fancy at all but legend has it the family that built it had almost three times as many children as we do so it has bedrooms and bathrooms galore. Bedrooms and bathrooms I'm going to have to child-labor my kids into cleaning but they're 3, 4, and 5, they can handle a toilet wand now, right?

Least you think I'm bragging about this fancy new house we're (potentially) buying, let me assure you that the word "fancy" belongs no where near the words "peel-and-stick tile" which is the primary flooring in this particular abode. They went big on space, small on finishes. But blue lament could make a comeback, right?

Anyway, half of the four humans I'm raising have the flu and I'm not far behind so I'll leave it at that. I'll probably be posting more on my adventures in home buying/selling later on but for now, if you have any words of encouragement, helpful advice, or tips on where to find the best long jean skirts, feel free to leave them here.

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