Our New Home

I continued to bring Brandon with me to work.

The following year the family I worked for had another baby. A girl.

So now I spent my days with three little ones.

Tom and I decided we needed to sell my little hatchback and buy a used van.

We also decided we needed to stop spending money on an apartment and started looking for a house to buy.

My oldest sister was pregnant with her first child. We talked about me quitting my nanny job and taking care of her child. After weeks of looking, we decided to go with a different realtor. The one we had kept showing us townhomes and other attached housing. Our new one was a lady who said she could show us detached, single homes in our price range. We saw a few that were disappointing. Then she took us to one that was small, but had potential.

Brandon was a little over one year old when we visited the house. There were three small bedrooms (one was made into an "extra room" off of the kitchen) one small bathroom, a very small family room, and a kitchen. The garage was attached to the house, but there was no door from the garage to the house. Then we went into the backyard. It was nice and big! Brandon went back there and started running around. That was the selling point. We loved seeing our son run around the yard. Living in an apartment building, we didn't have a yard for him. This yard was a very nice size, had a tree, a patio, and was fenced in. Good for Brandon and our dog.

We bought the house.
I still remember driving around with my sister and her husband.
They were also looking for a home in or around Carol Stream so we could
live close to each other. We went by our new house. (They didn't know it was ours yet.) I asked my sister and brother-in-law what they thought of it. They said it looked nice. I said "Good - because we bought it."
My brother-in-law turned around with a big smile on his face. You could see how happy he was for us.
So now we needed to make this house into our home.
It took a lot of work.
 The place smelled.
We were going to need new appliances, new flooring and carpeting and all new paint. There were cigarette butts and trash in the refrigerator's broken drawer. It was disgusting. When we opened up the dishwasher, it fell forward because it was never actually installed. When the family before us painted their walls, they painted around their furniture. There were outlines of their dresser and bed on the walls. There was even one wall that had a strange "bump" on it. As we scraped at it we found a coloring page picture glued to the wall that they just painted over instead of removing first. Nice.
So as you can imagine, I was a little freaked out. Did we make the right decision? Remember, I am not a big fan of change and this was huge.
We slept on the family room floor the first night with Brandon in the playpen next to us. I was crying and questioning our decision, then a plane flew overhead. It was so loud! We were both like - "Oh goodness!"
Then we laughed.

We moved our stuff in on the 4th of July. Our "Independence" Day.

We watched the fireworks from our backyard. It was wonderful.

The neighborhood and town were very nice. We could walk to a wonderful park, a little convenience store, restaurants. (And the elementary school and later the new town center.) Great location.

When my sister had her son, I went to her new home in the same town to take care of him along with our son.