Too Much Nostalgia Lately

between caylin growing faster than i can keep up with, mother’s day, and moving soon, i feel like a basket case. it doesn’t help that our townhouse (up until this week when we tidied up a LOT) was starting look like a shell of a home. boxes everywhere, walls slowly becoming bare, caylin’s old clothes all boxed up.

the older i get, the more i realize i don’t deal well with change. which is crazy when up until 2 and a half years ago, that’s all my life consisted of. i moved 9 times between 2005 and 2010, but the difference was most of those moves ended up with me moving back to boone. or somewhere else in boone. the last 3 were in charleston, and each move was less than 2 miles away from where we’re living now. our little corner of the world, with everything we’ve ever needed nearby. my first big girl apartment out of college on my own is 1/4 mile from here–the first apartment brett and i lived in together when he finally came to charleston. then we moved down the street. and then we moved here.

so much has happened since we’ve lived here, and so many memories:

  • planting our first garden
  • our first fight
  • buying crappy patio furniture so we could sit in the garage with the door open and drink scotch together in our pajamas
  • getting engaged
  • hosting UFC fight nights with friends
  • frequenting our favorite friday night dinner spots (the mexican place down the street and king street grill) together before caylin was born
  • stopping at food lion on my way home from work, where everyone knows me now
  • trying to sunbathe in a lounge chair in the bed of my truck
  • learning to cook
  • date nights at the awesome bar down the street
  • buying crappy walmart bikes to go ride through the trails behind our neighborhood
  • finding out loki had a tumor, crying after her surgery, hoping she’d make it to our wedding. and then caylin’s birth. and now to the new house.
  • great times with our awesome neighbor
  • taking shots with brett over the kitchen sink, chasing them with giant steroid grapes from food lion
  • finding out we were pregnant, crying, panicking, and driving to walmart to buy more pregnancy tests
  • getting married
  • our awesome disney honeymoon
  • piecing together caylin’s nursery, little by little (i never knew it then, but i absolutely loved making that room perfect for her. god, that was awesome.)
  • watching all our shows in our cozy living room, it was always the coziest when the christmas tree was up
  • bringing caylin home from the hospital
  • having the time of our lives getting to know her over the past 8 months

i could go on forever.

the last 8 months, all we wanted was to move into a bigger place. a house where caylin and loki could have their yard. our future home. but this HAS been our home for the last 2 and a half years, and i guess i never really thought about it until it came time to leave. and now we have like, 3 weeks left in this place.

maybe it’s hormones, or maybe it’s because i missed working out for 5 days when i was sick, but this just sucks. it’s exciting and awesome and i love that we can give caylin such a gorgeous home in a great neighborhood, but part of it sucks. i wish i could take it all with me. i wish that i could print a photo of every single memory and get it framed and stick it on a wall in the new house without it costing a billion dollars to do so. i don’t want to forget a single bit of it. ever.

also, i wish caylin would just stop growing and that might make this all just a little bit easier. she wore size 18 month pajamas to bed tonight. it makes my heart hurt. i revel in the very few nights she wakes up crying and i get to cuddle her.

for the love of god, i can’t take all this at once. no one told me parenting would tug at my heartstrings so much, dammit.