Movin' up!

Most days for the last 6 weeks, upon waking I would hear footsteps on the floor above as our host family geared up for the day.  This morning, I woke up at 5:15 (note: totally abnormal behavior) and the sound was decisively different.  Footsteps, yes.  But hurried ones, the quick pitter-patter conveying the urgency and excitement of such a big day.

At 7 AM, Justin and I stood in the driveway with the dog, waving as a minivan drove down the long drive, several suitcases bungeed to the roof.  Justin turned to me and said "...and then it was just us."

I was surprised by how sad I felt at the departure of our hosts.  In some ways, I've been anxious to get into our more permanent routine and spaces here in the house, but I've really appreciated the company.  It was SO quiet today with just Anna and I bouncing around the big house.

As the day wore on, however, the sadness and loneliness gave way to a new excitement at preparing our new home upstairs.  If you've ever had the pregnant nesting bug...you can imagine my crazy to-do list at suddenly "needing" to clean every surface in a 3,000+ square foot house.

We're still sleeping downstairs because I'm in no position to help Justin carry furniture up two flights of stairs (plus, all of the aforementioned cleaning I want to get done before we find some people to help with the heavy lifting).

Soon, enough, though, we'll be movin' on up.  The exciting thing is that we're not just moving up from the basement, we're really moving up from our accommodations at our beloved former home.

A few perks:

My very own sewing room / office (a huge step up from my tiny corner-of-the-bedroom I was working out of in Ithaca).  I used to balance my serger on the ledge of our foot board - it will be luxurious to have it on a table while in use!

A "master" bedroom - technically, we're not using the real master bedroom of the house (that's on the first floor, and I'd prefer to be on the same floor as the girls), but one of the upstairs bedrooms has an attached bath, and that feels pretty fancy!  Also, it has about double the closet space of our room in Ithaca.

Lots (and lots!) of space! - if you look down the hall from our bedroom, you'll see another bedroom straight ahead, which will be where the girls will sleep.  There's a third bedroom upstairs that will be a guest room (in addition to the official master bedroom on the first floor), so having space besides our living room (and a semi-comfortable pull-out sofa) for guests is exciting!  The girls' room is more spacious than Anna's nursery at home, and has a pretty substantial walk-in closet to boot.

(Can you tell this was the boys' room?  They have no problem with me removing the spiderman wall stickers, so we'll be looking more girly pretty soon!)

As I look at the pictures now, it seems like I was aiming for the worst possible shots, so my apologies on that.  I was just trying to get some quick pictures to get this posted.  I'll have some better pictures (we hope) after a few days of my frenzied cleaning/organizing!