The Second Place the Kids Ever Lived

This blog is supposed to be about the kids, right? Well, the big move to Minnesota affects them, too, so I guess it's fair game for the blog.Here are a few photos of our new place. I didn't take photos during our initial showing since it wasn't ours yet, and we didn't go back inside after we decided to put down our deposit, so these interior shots are stock photos.
The main floor is mostly a big square-ish living room. This photo below is looking toward the front door; you can see the pass-through window to the kitchen, and the exterior window beyond that. Over on the right is the coat closet, half bath, staircase up (have to figure out the best way to baby-gate that when Hazel starts crawling) and the staircase down (that one will be easier to gate):
Here's one I took through the front door, looking toward the back slider. Kitchen is on the right. I'm thinking we'll just gate the kitchen doorway, too, instead of putting drawer locks on all those cabinets and drawers.
Kitchen has a dishwasher and my long-dreamed-of garbage disposal. I think that's an electric stove, which will be an, um, adventure in cooking, as I have never used one before.


The upstairs consists of a landing facing four doorways. The master bedroom has its own half bath, which I find strange, but I'm not complaining. This will be my first time in my life living somewhere with more than one bathroom. No more calling dibs on who gets the bathroom first after a long car trip! Every other place we looked at was a one-bathroom, but this one has the one full bathroom plus two half-baths. That's more bathrooms than potty-trained family members at the moment.

It's got three bedrooms, but we're going to attempt to have the girls share a room, and we would use the third bedroom as an office. If that doesn't work out, there's plenty of other space for our desks downstairs. We can be flexible. We won't be putting anything into decorating or painting or anything, so it's just a matter of moving the furniture where we need it. All four of us are graduating to new beds! Geoff and I are planning to get a new, king-size bed (we can stand the full-size bed no longer); Cora will get our full-size bed; and Hazel will get the crib. Every time we stay in a hotel and sleep in a king we're reminded how much nicer it is. On our apartment-finding trip Geoff pointed out again that we need a bigger bed and said, "It's not that I don't like you, but I think I like you even better today than I did yesterday." Ha ha! It's true, goodwill comes easier when you haven't slept with someone's elbow stuck in your ribs.

How we will go about making these changes with switching beds and combining rooms remains to be seen. It'll be a big change for little ones who have only known one home, one place to sleep, but we'll do it step by step and hopefully no delicate young psyches will be permanently scarred. (Or maternal psyches.)

I've also never lived anywhere that had an upstairs (what's the best way to vacuum stairs??), and definitely never parented anywhere with multiple levels. It seems strange to think of the kids "asleep upstairs," or that we will "go down to breakfast." Will I find it best to run up and down the stairs for diaper changes, or just change diapers in the living room? We'll see. Some of our bedtime routines and such were so hard-won that it's hard to believe we will be changing them in the new apartment, but I assume we will quickly adjust. Now that I've seen the new place, though and we're still living in the old place, I realize how much we're used to living in places where you're never more than a couple steps away from every part of the apartment.


The finished basement is a big square family room--a blank slate--plus a laundry/storage room. Right now I'm picturing Cora riding a tricycle around in circles down there. We could get by without the family room, but I'm really glad to have the storage space. With us only planning to be there a year, I think we'll have many boxes we'll just leave taped up and we need a place to stack them.


These are the exterior pictures that I took. Here's the front of the place. Glad to have an end unit--one less neighbor to be disturbed by our shrieking children.
The kitchen window. I wonder if it would look tacky if I planted herbs in these window boxes instead of flowers.
The back.
Our patio and tree. Completely fenced in with no gate.
Each unit comes with a one-car detached garage. We can park our second car (yet to be purchased) in the lot, and there seems to be ample visitor parking.
A pool!
The basketball court and "barbecue area." There's a nice new picnic table just out of frame of this shot.
So, that's our little way station for a year. I am, of course, mentally arranging and rearranging our furniture in there ad infinitum. It maybe is bigger than we need--I'm curious to see how much blank floor and wall space we end up with after we move our furniture in there. We are not buying more furniture to fill it, Geoff cautions, and he is right. The next-best place we saw was almost the same price and half the space, though, so between a little too big and a little too small, it was time to go with a little too big.

I'm really looking forward to getting in there and seeing how the reality matches up with our speculations.