From the day I was brought home from the hospital, I have lived in the same house.  I lived at home and commuted when I was in college.  My husband and I purchased my childhood home from my mom when she moved on.   That was the only house I had ever known.

I may have changed bedrooms, I started in the small bedroom, bunked with my siblings in the bigger bedroom, moved to the downstairs bedroom when I was a teenager and needed my space, moved into the master bedroom and felt like I was breaking the rules.   We celebrated our birthdays and holidays with relatives now long passed away.

My parents planted trees for each of their three kids.  The now big Ash tree was planted for my sister that provides the perfect shade for the deck.  A Sunburst Locust was planted for me and a Charlie brown looking, white pine, grown from a seed, was planted for my brother.

The house was perfect for the two of us.  We had two extra rooms for an office and a spare bedroom. We had plenty of closet space and lots of room to spare. Then we brought home our first family member, we added a fence for our beautiful Golden Retriever Kodi who lived his whole life in that house from the time he was brought home as an 8 week old puppy to when he unexpectedly passed away in my husbands arms in the living room from cancer.

We brought home our own children from the hospital to that home.  I turned the small bedroom from an office into a beautiful unisex nursery, where I laid my first baby in the crib.  When our second baby was born, our green striped spare bedroom was changed it into an under the sea, Nemo bed room for our little swimmer.  The master bedroom changed from a sterile white, to a bright yellow room, into a serene gray.

We gutted and refinished the kitchen and lived without a stove for months, gutted and rebuilt the basement with our own blood, sweat and tears, remodeled every room of the house and replaced each light fixture until it was comfortable and modern.  We landscaped the yard with beautiful perennials that transformed the yard with color throughout the summer.

Our house was where my neighbors were.  The two old couples who were still the original owners and have known me my entire life.  Our new neighbors and their children who could walk out their front door and instantly have a few other kids to play a game of tag, or ride bikes with.

This was the house where my children received their first skinned knees and foreheads, learned how to ride bikes and learned how to pump on the swings in the backyard.

We had outgrown our house.  It no longer fit our kids toys, our two crazy rescue dogs, and it no longer had room to fit the stuff we have accumulated over the years. One night while searching the internet we found a house that was interesting enough to look at.  We drove out to the house, and both agreed we wanted to see inside.  We scheduled a showing with a realtor the next morning.  We walked in and felt comfortable.  It was a home that had already been remodeled perfectly for our family and felt like our family.  We got financing the next day and the house was ours to pay for four days after we first time we laid eyes on it.

Two crazy whirlwind, exhausting months later, I have officially broke down the last moving box and found a home for most of the stuff we had strategically squished in our old home.

This morning I look around and think, this is my new home.  This is where my children will explore in the woods, ice skate on the pond, bring friends over for play dates and sleep overs.  Where we will watch our two crazy rescue dogs get old and we will make new memories as a family.

My goal for this summer is to buy two new trees, for my own children.  I will plant them in the yard so that someday when they are grown and have their own home, they can bring their own children by and say, do you see that tree in the backyard?  That is my tree!