It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like….

…a FAKE Christmas Tree. There is a FAKE tree in my house. I am not a fake tree person, but I will get to that…

I mentioned that we’ve bought a new home. In fact, we currently own two homes. This house will go on the market sometime in the new year. First we need to get OUT and have some things repaired and get it painted and staged and all the fun stuff you do these days to sell a house.

We’d been looking for a new house since March. Loosely. Like- we didn’t have a realtor but Justin and I watched Redfin closely and Ellie and I would sneak out and hit up open houses most weekends for months and months.

But we were VERY picky and we found nothing.

Then in October a house in a town we were not looking in suddenly came up on Redfin. It had been on the market a bit but we hadn’t seen it because it was over our budget. Well it was STILL over our budget but it had a huge price reduction and on “paper” it filled most if not all of our requirements. We decided to check it out at an open house and ended up spending over 30 minutes there.

It was nearly perfect for us.

AND- our good friends had JUST bought a house in the same neighborhood.

So- we got a realtor and found ourselves buying it. Since it’s 2019 it didn’t go totally smoothly- but overall it wasn’t too terrible a process. The biggest negative was that the seller really needed to stay there for at least 30 days to avoid having to move twice and asked for that in the contract. The seller also has 4 kids and we totally understood not wanting to do the two-move thing so the seller is staying there until around the 19th/20th of December.

Now- you might think it would be CRAZY to move to a new house just a couple days before Christmas anyway. THEN to do it while going through Chemo (I will have one treatment prior to the move) is even crazier. BUT it is 2019 (which means nothing is easy, anyway) and we ALL want to be in the new house for Christmas.

So that is what we will do.

However. This is my MOST favorite time of year- and I could not IMAGINE not having a tree for these last weeks here- but at the same time getting a real tree and them trying to move it would be lame.

So I came up the idea of getting a fake tree. We will use it here and then in the new house- it will go on the front porch most likely. I bought some cheap ornaments at Target and the kids are making other ornaments as well. When we move in the new place- we will hit up Home Depot or wherever and get us a REAL TREE (I love real trees!!) and decorate it and leave it up in January until it DIES.

Usually- we go and cut down our own tree. It is my favorite tradition. I won’t lie- I am sad we won’t be doing that this year. But this will be the next best thing. The kids are all ok with it so I guess I need to be too.

So last night we set up the new tree and decorated it- and we realized we didn’t have a star. Everett tried so hard to make one- but kept getting frustrated and we had to cut him off and send him to bed. Meanwhile Ellie insisted we needed an angel and NOT a star.

To my surprise- I woke up to find this:

Esella made a star angel for our tree.

Perfection.

One thing I have realized on this journey of 2019- is that with each shitty thing that’s happened…there has been a sort of positive or glimmer of hope that follows.

Just like this star-angel. My symbol of hope.