You Guys Sure Like February...

So a lot has happened since my last post.

Granted that was almost nine months ago.

After the whole C Diff thing, life has gotten better. For starters, I haven't spent anytime in the hospital. A plus.

Secondly, we bought a house.

Finally.

The plan was always to stay in our place for a short while and then find a house. The plan stretched out a little longer than we had expected but at long last, we got our house.

The path, as usual for us Delps, was not a smooth one. All in all, we looked at around 50 houses. Our realtor deserves some level of sainthood for driving us around to so many places. Through the house searching process we learned a little bit about ourselves. Missy is a glass-half-full-we-can-make-this-work kind of person. I am a I-can-find-something-wrong-with-every-place-let's-leave kind of person. It made for some "colorful" conversations. The process also revealed a lot about our internal struggles - with insecurity, with comparisons, with pride. I never thought a house search could turn into a soul search as well.

After about 50 houses, we came upon one that had pretty much everything we wanted. For the first time in months of searching, we both agreed on a house. It had only been on the market for four days and we knew it would go quickly so we went to put an offer on the house. Only to find out that we were the third people to do so and one offer had already been accepted. So the house we never even knew existed four days earlier became the house wanted and quickly became the house that broke our hearts. And so with Christmas coming and our hearts mending, we decided to put the search on hold until 2012.

And then we got the call.

From Disney World.

Our realtor (who was vacationing in Orlando) called us a few weeks later to tell us that the original deal fell through and our house was back on the market. She was conveniently flying back to Chicago that same day and would bring over the papers for us to sign.

And then we waited.

We decided to not just sit around our house but take the kids on the L down to the Shedd Aquarium. On the way back, we got the call. Our offer had been accepted.

This was the news we were hoping for but it set off a chain reaction of things that now filled our to-do list. Eventually, everything got worked out and we sat down with a big check and a pen and made the home we loved and lost officially ours.

That set off another set of chain reactions that we are still in the final stages of feeling today. The biggest, of course, was the actual move. Which we did. Over the course of the month of February. In Chicago.

And thus the title of this blog.

Two years ago, almost to the day, we packed up the lives we knew in Pennsylvania and moved to Chicago. In February. We hit every form of weather during the drive but it culminated, in the last hour of the drive and through the time we moved in the essentials to our place, with six inches of snow.

This time it wasn't quite as bad but the weather was certainly not San Diego. My father-in-law, who along with other family and friends was invaluable with our move, commented to me during one cold, dark Chicago night as we were putting things in his trailer.

"You guys sure like February."

That line still makes me laugh. As does God's timing. In all of this.

So now I am sitting on one of our new pieces of furniture in our new house. And I must thank, from the bottom of my heart, all the people who helped us with this move. This was certainly a team effort and we could not have done it without you. I felt such a tremendous amount of humility and support as I watched people take time out of their own lives to help us move ours from one town to another. Thank you.

So in the final days of tying up loose ends, we had, let's call it, a misunderstanding with our landlords. As a result of our misunderstanding, I ended up spending last weekend filling holes in the walls from all the pictures and shelves we hung (the Delps love their wall decorations!). I also spent a few hours painting over all of the marks and scrapes and bruises that are caused by a family with two small kids.

And that's when the nostalgic sap came out.

I wasn't just painting over marks. I was covering over memories. This was the first place Ava called home. This was where she took her first steps. This is where we played and lived as a family of four. The scrapes on the wall from Riley jumping in his bed. From Ava shaking her crib. From me leaning against the wall as I walked downstairs so I wouldn't fall while carrying Ava (I assume Missy was coordinated enough not to do that but I used the wall). All of these memories were being covered up so that the next family could have their own memories.

In covering up the walls and memories, I thought about this next chapter in our lives. We would have new memories and new traditions and new joys.

And so we say goodbye to Mount Prospect and hello to Buffalo Grove.

If ever you find yourself in our neck of the woods, please don't hesitate to stop by. We would love to have you. Our prayer from the beginning was that this house would not just be for us but for the people we love as well.

So stop by anytime. And enjoy the wall decorations.