The Big Move

I realize I've left you all hanging for a while.

Last time I mentioned the possibility of us moving was back in December. Oops. A lot has happened since then.

But to summarize, John got offered the job, we accepted, and we're moving to Johnson City, TN soon after baby is born.

BAM.

And I really do mean soon after baby is born. Baby is due in mid-May and we're picking up and moving in mid-June. Call us crazy, but we've actually got quite a few things making the move way easy for us. First, his new job will pay for most of our moving expenses, so we're hiring packers and movers. So lovely! Also, we're moving to his family's hometown, so we'll have lots of family members around to help with the big transition. And finally, baby will be around a month old and I hear newborn babies are still pretty sleepy at that point. We're hoping this'll make our 8-hour cross-state move a bit easier than moving, say, a squirmy, don't-want-to-be-in-this-car-seat-for-more-than-five-minutes 1-year-old. Like really hoping. But also, I kinda have no idea what I'm talking about. Wish us luck!

We were a little stressed about finding a place to live, but quickly decided renting for another year was our best bet, and that took quite a bit of pressure off. As it turns out, renting is best for us right now, mostly because if John doesn't like his job, we basically need to leave town. His employer makes him sign a non-compete clause that basically says if you stop working for us, you cannot work within a 20-mile (or something like that) radius of the hospital. Mostly it's to prevent docs from stealing patients and moving them to their new practice, which John would never do, but it's par for the course for pediatric hospitalist contracts, so we just deal. We deal by renting an apartment in the area until John's sure he wants to work there long term or he wants out and we easily pick up and move to another city, without having to sell a house and such. Win-win-win.

Once we made that decision, it was time to apartment hunt. But me being in the 3rd trimester made that extra challenging because we didn't want to travel 8-hours away to Johnson City to find one. So, we did the next best thing and looked at a bajillion pictures of places to rent on Craigslist. Our plan was to rent a house, but then John stumbled upon this gorgeous and way affordable apartment complex...

... and we were pretty much sold.

Lucky for us, my sister-in-law and bro-in-law, who live in Johnson City, are awesome people and offered to spend an afternoon going on a tour of the place for us, just so we could be sure it was as lovely as it looked online. They gave us their stamp of approval and we called the office the next day and booked an apartment.

*Insert easy button here.*

Gosh, I love it when all the details easily fall into place.

So we still have lots left to do before the big move, mostly arranging all those little details like having the electricity and internet turned on, stuff like that. Oh yeah, and delivering a baby and learning how to be parents. No big. But we've got this, I think.

It's crazy to think that all of this is going to happen in the next 2 months. Insane, really. I don't really know what we were thinking.

Actually, I do. I know we sound insane for doing 3 big life changes -- baby, move, and new job -- all within about 1 month of each other, but it's just all felt so right. And why not just get it all done at one time? We'll have one super intense adjustment period for, hopefully, just a few months, and then life will be awesome in our new city. We'll be living very close relatives (which we've never done before, btw), John will be rocking out at his new job, I'll be spreading the good news of the Creighton Model to East TN, and we'll both be loving our new role as parents to our cute little bundle of joy/poop/vomit/crying/cuteness.

Here's to our new adventures!