The Daily Hailey

Facebook was generous to inform me, this morning, that I have been in the daily blogging game for FOUR YEARS! Maybe that doesn’t seem like a ton, but it feels like a pretty sizeable accomplishment to me! When I began writing my blog, Dekker wasn’t quite a year old, and now he’s coming up on five! A lot has gone down since then, but I think it would be fun to just briefly recap on the last year, 2015/2016.

I had to do a bit of looking back, but if you remember, when we listed our past house, we switched realtors halfway through. Two months with our first realtor before we switched to the second one. So at this point last year, we were one month in with our first realtor. Our house was on the market, but hadn’t been for long. And since then, SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED!! I’m positive a lot of you remember this whole thing, but for my own fun, let’s recap.

The first half of the blog year was the second half of 2015. We spent it with our house on the market, so most of what we did revolved around the sale of our house. We worked like dogs to keep it clean and tidy, yet we sweated and panicked over every showing. We stressed out about it a lot. In the midst of everything, we conceived and lost a little one. Sad days. I won’t delve too deep into that, but it is a VERY notable event that could not be excluded. Shortly after our loss, we were blessed to discover that we were expecting once again!

We made our pregnancy public on the same day that we were FINALLY able to announce that our house had sold! The very end of November was an exciting time! At that point, however, we had no plans for what would happen after we moved. We had nothing concrete saying we could build, and we didn’t want to buy somewhere, only to try to build a year down the road. So we began looking for a place to rent. Our house was officially sold as of November 30th, and we had to be out by January 7th.

The Christmas season was nuts. We basically moved into my parents house for the holiday days that family was out, and just didn’t go back. Well, we returned to pack and organize and make trips to our storage container and back, but we spent very few nights at our house after that. In the final days, we paid someone to come clean the place, left the next owners a bath bomb beside the soaker tub, and bailed, no looking back. It was awesome.

We were blessed to find our first rental easily, through people that we knew from before. They let us move into their acreage on January 4th, so after a few choppy days moving our stuff over and around, we had a new place to call home. While living at the acreage, we did a bunch of calculating, and basically did our taxes uncharacteristically early. We took our final numbers to our mortgage broker, and she confirmed how much of a mortgage we would qualify for. Very quickly, our dream to build became a reality. We spent a lot of time in January in and out of meetings with our builder, making plans and getting our ducks in a row. A few wrenches were thrown into the home build mix over the weeks, but thank goodness, they were all errors made by others, not us!! It helps SO MUCH when its not your mistake.

On February 9th, we broke ground. It was an epic, surreal, emotional day.

As it tend to happen, some unexpected things came up, and we left the acreage. (No love lost whatsoever ;)) My parents graciously took us in, when we had no other plans or direction. We began a desperate search for another rental, this time even shorter term. We needed April, May, and June. That was it. We found lots of short term rental options, but they were all tiny two bedrooms, which was not going to be functional for our soon-to-be family of six. God provided for us yet again, and within a week or two of searching, we were signed on to a lease in the north end of the city, in a quiet cul de sac, for exactly those three months. The cabin, we called it. If you ever saw it, you know why. It was perfect for us. We really settled in and felt at home.

In those months, January through to May, we were busy. We were at countless doctors appointments, we were sick SO regularly, and we were walking through/touring the house that was being built for us a ton. Beyond that, Brady was working, I was in a lot of physical pain, and the kids were struggling with all of the moving and constant uprooting. These were challenging months!! I am so very thrilled to be able to say that we had so much support and love from those around us, though. We fell out of the groove of going to church, not because we lost faith, but because it was HARD. And we were TIRED. Yet our friends from church didn’t forget about us. Our family didn’t forget. Our friends that we knew from outside of our church didn’t forget. People really kept a close eye on us. It was amazing. When we had absolutely NOTHING to give, people stuck around. I love you guys. You all know who you are.

After all of those insane months, we embarked on the craziest week of our lives. We were given the amazing gift of our fourth baby, Solomon Brady, and days later, we were moving into our palace.

Its been 3.5 weeks since we moved here, and 4 weeks since Solly was born. What a year. In the past twelve months, we’ve moved four times, conceived two babies, lost one and delivered another, had a house built, all the while maintaining Brady’s business and raising three kids. It has been NUTS. But I wouldn’t trade it 🙂 Its been an incredible year! And for those of you who have been along for the entire ride, I’m SO glad to have you looking in on our life. I like to secretly think that lots of you are rooting for us, even if I don’t know you read, or don’t know you at all, and its nice to have a cheering section when things get crazy. And this has been the definition of “crazy.”

So! Thanks for sticking it out for yet another year!! I keep wondering how long I’ll keep this up, and I truly have no idea, but I’m still enjoying it, and it appears that I have a handful of you who have stuck around, so I want to hesitantly raise my glass and say “cheers” to another year!! *clink*