Hello North Carolina!

Hi friends, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. We had an adventure filled summer, packed our house and moved from Texas to North Carolina.

We sure miss having our family in Texas super close but could not love North Carolina more! Sean is working from home in a new position and instead of working full time as a nurse this school year, we were able to make my dream of being a stay at home mom come true. It has been such a big life change moving from a huge city to a small town. Our new town has a population a third of the size of our previous neighborhood! The beach is just minutes away and life is slow and sweet here. We downsized and bought a builder grade house with a ton of potential. We’ve been in project mode since a few weeks after moving in and are having so much fun making this house “ours”. I cannot wait to share our new spaces and what we’ve been working on. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the Tidy Cape Cod. It’s where we brought our second miracle baby home to. We poured so much of our hearts and love into it that house and made beautiful memories there.

Preparing for the move was a long and stressful process but worth every bit of it. There was a lot of coordination that had to happen to build a new construction house across the country, site unseen, while both working and preparing to sell Tidy Cape Cod. Y’all, we could not have made it all happen without our amazing realtor Rob Vaughan and his amazing wife Melanie walking us through every step. They are an incredible team and we are so thankful for them. Selling a house can be a stressful and emotional process. They had so much patience and grace with us when panic or fear started to creep in. They are the absolute best at what they do. If you’re in The DFW area and are thinking about selling your house, you need them! In our case, our intention with moving was to simplify our lives, make time to be with our boys while they’re little and change the hectic and busy pace we had been living at for so long. Since our new house is smaller, we sold a ton of our belongings prior to moving and decided to move ourselves to save money. We hired movers to load and unload the truck at each house. This was a huge help for a very reasonable cost. My parents were so supportive and swooped in to help as always. They dropped everything they were doing and insisted making the 20 hour trip with us to help with the kids or whatever was needed. My dad is a retired truck driver and drove our moving truck the entire way, allowing Sean to be with me and the boys the whole car trip. We are forever thankful for their help. It was so fun to have all of us together for a week and felt more like a vacation than moving. The boys did amazing the entire trip and love our new home. There were two things I did to prepare for the long road trip that were super helpful.

1. Pack outfits in gallon Ziploc bags. This makes it so easy to thumb through a suitcase and grab an entire outfit without turning the entire suitcase upside down. You can also shove the outfit back in the bag and zip it up when it’s dirty. Also, put a spare outfit in a Ziploc bag in the seat pocket in front of each kid. I was so thankful I did this when were unloading at a restaurant only to find that our smallest had a major blow-out. It was nice to just grab the bag from the seat pocket and go. It also doubled as a wet bag for all of the soiled clothes.

2. Pack goodie bags for the car. In the weeks leading up to the move, I collected small and inexpensive items from Amazon, Target dollar spot, and Party City. I got both boys the same or very similar items to prevent any arguing and packed them in numbered paper bags. Whenever I could feel the boys getting antsy in their car seats, I grabbed two bags with the same number and tossed them back. G and H absolutely loved this and were so excited to get “presents”.

The past few months have flown by here at the new house. I’m still unpacking and we’re slowly completing projects including a fence for our yard, updates to our builder basic kitchen and a ton of painting. Can’t wait to share it all with you soon!