For the first 18 years of my life, I lived in one house. I love my par­ents’ house. It’s not huge or fancy. It’s not even what I would con­sider the per­fect lay­out, but man, I love that place. After I left home to go to col­lege, I lived in 11 dif­fer­ent places. These include dorms, sum­mer camp cab­ins, home with my par­ents for a sum­mer, apart­ments, and the house we owned for three years. Of those places, the house def­i­nitely felt the most like home even though we were there only for three years.

After liv­ing in the house for three years, we started to reeval­u­ate our sit­u­a­tion. Did we really want to live in a place where it was a 10 mile drive each way to go to work, church, the gro­cery store, friends’ houses? In addi­tion, our house had two bed­rooms upstairs and two down­stairs. At the time, we weren’t expect­ing any chil­dren to be born in the near future, but we knew it would prob­a­bly be an issue when Baby #3 was on the way. I also had a really hard time meet­ing any­one in the small town where we lived. It was pri­mar­ily a bed­room com­mu­nity with no great places to meet other moms or kids. We talked about what to do for quite a while. Stay or sell? In the end, we decided that most of the things which we con­sid­ered to be issues or prob­lems were not going to change. We decided to put the house on the mar­ket and see if any­one would buy it. To our sur­prise we ended up with a buyer after the first day on the mar­ket. After that, we had a whirl­wind 5 weeks of look­ing at houses, find­ing none we liked, look­ing at apart­ments, doing last minute fixes on the house, and moving!

We’ve been liv­ing in our cur­rent apart­ment for just under a year now, and while it’s not ideal, there are def­i­nitely things I really appre­ci­ate about liv­ing here. We are close to friends, close to a park, within walk­ing dis­tance of Jason’s work. The apart­ment is pretty afford­able. It’s really pretty big for an apart­ment. The laun­dry room is right off the kitchen and easy to access for me dur­ing the day. It has a deck on the north side of the build­ing which allows us shade in the after­noon sun. It has under­ground park­ing so I don’t have to take the boys out­side to get them in the vehi­cle in the win­ter. We have a bike path prac­ti­cally out our front door. We are just a cou­ple min­utes from both gro­cery stores that we fre­quent. So, as I said, there are many *many* things to like about it. Obvi­ously there are things which I don’t like about it, but I think every house or apart­ment has things like that.

Orig­i­nally, our plan was to live in this apart­ment for a year and find a house this sum­mer. Then, when I found out I was preg­nant, we thought it might be bet­ter not to go through the work and stress of buy­ing a house and mov­ing dur­ing the preg­nancy. One of the cri­te­ria we had decided on in our search for a house was an attached garage. It’s North Dakota. It can be cold in the win­ter. It can be rainy or windy through­out the year. Hav­ing an attached garage would be really nice. Unfor­tu­nately, the more I look at houses the more I won­der if that is a real­ity for us. My hus­band is the Chief Tech­nol­ogy Offi­cer for his com­pany and does almost all their computer-related work. He also does some web pro­gram­ming on the side. I am a for­mer spe­cial edu­ca­tion teacher, but I am stay­ing at home with our kids right now. It’s a pri­or­ity for us to spend time together as a fam­ily. Lots of time by some accounts. I could work, but I would be sac­ri­fic­ing time with my young chil­dren and my awe­some hus­band. Jason could work more than he already does by doing more pro­gram­ming, but he would then be sac­ri­fic­ing his time with me and his time for run­ning, relax­ing, and sleep­ing. How much can (or should) one per­son work???

So, because of our pri­or­i­ties, it seems like we have a cou­ple choices. We can con­tinue to live in this apart­ment and save money and hope that a house in our price range comes up with an attached garage. We can look at houses and go for one that doesn’t have an attached garage. We can wait until this fall (when I will be 7 1/2 months or more preg­nant) and look at houses when the pre-winter price reduc­tions happen.

I’m guess­ing that part of the rea­son this has become a major issue for me again is because I’m preg­nant and prob­a­bly get­ting some of those nesting-type feel­ings. Also, while it’s so much eas­ier to find things to do with the boys in the sum­mer, it’s really hard to keep two boys occu­pied in the win­ter. Think­ing about doing that and hav­ing a new baby is def­i­nitely some­thing that’s on my mind reg­u­larly. I’m also real­iz­ing that even if we stay here another year, with all the money we can save it still will prob­a­bly not be enough to get a house with an attached garage. *ETA* As soon as I hit pub­lish, I real­ized that I for­got an impor­tant thought! I loved my house grow­ing up, and I want that same sense of place and com­fort for my kids.

So, until then, I will be here in our pretty darn good apart­ment. Not lov­ing the wimpy air con­di­tioner but feel­ing thank­ful for the many things which are work­ing out with us being here. And pondering.