This post brought to you by Allstate. All opinions are 100% mine.
I am about to turn thirty. Like, literally, tomorrow. And one of the Big Life Lessons I’ve learned over the last few decades is that the path to a good life is one where you cultivate contenment and celebrate simple moments.
We choose our joy, that’s what I believe. Because, sometimes life is hard. I don’t have to tell you that. If you’ve read here for any length of time you know that the chapters of my life story involve years of infertility and 156 days lying next to my sick baby in a hospital.
I was thinking back to when we bought this house, our first home. We were moving from Tennessee and had a house lined up. A perfect little house, in a great neighborhood with a quaint backyard and a picket fence. A family friend was selling and we agreed to rent for a few months while we got settled with the intention to buy.
The week before we moved, we got the call that she had an offer from someone to buy the house. It was a fluke thing, being no longer on the market, that an agent had someone who wanted to live in that neighborhood. And it was higher than we were able to match and of course we graciously said “Absolutely, you should sell to them” but we were fairly devastated.
Jeff’s parents graciously let us move in with them, since Jeff was slated to start his new job here in Atlanta and so we quickly rented a storage unit and then settled with suitcases into their basement. I can’t complain about that- they have a fully finished in-law suite so it really was the best of a bad situation. Plus, I have great in-laws.
We started our house hunt and found another home that we fell head over heels for. We put in an offer that day. At the time, we didn’t know anything about things like “short-sales” – just that our agent told us that the process would be long. And it was. Like, nine months long. Like, long enough to have a baby, long. Like, my in-laws are saints because we only expected to be there for a couple of months, long.
Then my company closed down and I found myself out of work, which meant we took a long look at our decisions and decided to buy something that we could afford on one salary, even though I was looking for work and would quickly find a new position.
That’s when we found this house. And while it wasn’t as fancy as the one we loved and didn’t have a picket fence, it was bigger and in a great location and also was going to cost less. It needed a lot of cosmetic work but we would qualify for a home buying tax credit that would help us do a lot of the things needed (hello all new floors!)
In the end, we signed the papers and ended up with this house which wasn’t our dream house when we started out but after all the hard work we’ve put into it and the special memories we’ve made here (like bringing our baby home!) it has become our dream home.
And it all worked out because Scarlette’s unexpected early arrival and subsequent intense medical care meant that I had no choice but to stay home with her, which meant we were quickly forced to live on one salary.Tightly. And this house? This house that I let go of my dream home to have? It has let me live my biggest dream, of staying home with my daughter.
Everything fell perfectly together for us to be living this good life now, despite how it all seemed like nothing was going our way when we were house shopping.
So that’s my Allstate Good Life story, what’s yours? Share in the comments!
