Progress on the decision front...at least a little bit.
I finally owned up to my feelings regarding city vs. country and faced them head on. I've been trying to create my childhood and forced it on Emma. Not that it's a bad thing, it's a great thing, if it works. I am still torn, but the pro's vs. con's list has shifted and the scale has tipped and showed me what it is that we need and want as a family. Convincing myself was hard, convincing the rest of the family proved to be slightly more difficult, but once the points were spewed on the table, it was obvious that the benefits lay on the city side.
We love this house we found. We loved it the moment we saw it online, and we certainly fell in love with it when we walked through the doors. It wasn't what we had been looking for, not at all. We had been searching for a newer home than what we had, a bungalow preferrably, closer to the city, but not far from friends and family scattered about, no further south than Winchester. The house we bought, and fell in love with back in October 2007 was a two storey brick house, built in 1875 and 10 minutes from the St. Lawrence river (45 minutes south of Ottawa). What were we thinking? It had old floors, a tired old kitchen, a backyard that was in ruins, but with loads of potential and we certainly felt at home. The first night we stayed here, Emma slept through the night without a sound, she'd never done that. It was a sign, a good one. Since then we've demolished the old kitchen to the bare walls and replaced it with a brand new one. We removed the old shower in the downstairs bathroom and made it a laundry room. We beautified the entrance and installed a gorgeous fireplace/woodstove in our living room. Small changes here and there and voila, we have a home we do adore no matter what we try to tell ourselves about it's downfalls. BUT, here's the killer...we live almost an hour from all of our friends and family. It's been wonderful to see that not one of our friends have bat an eyelash when invited to join us out here in the country, and instead they've arrived and stayed until late in the evening despite the long drive. I know I cook well, but I hope it's more than that.
It's wearing on us, our relationship, our lives in general. We spend so much time apart from eachother and especially Emma. When you leave the house at 6:30am and arrive home at 5:30pm it wears you down. I know there are lots of people who do it, even in the city, but I'd rather have 45 minutes on a city bus, reading my book, listening to music or chatting with a friend, than 20 minutes on the bus and 40 minutes in the car, any day.
We've made a decision, we're moving. or at least, we're going to try to move. It's not easy to sell a house in the country, especially one that's 125 years old, but I am taking a chance and hoping that we will have a buyer who will fall in love with this house, just like we did.
