I'm kind of a grown up

We recently bought and moved in to our house, and it finally feels real enough that I believe we actually own it, or at least owe the bank lots of money for it while they let us live here.

Yay!

A really awesome part of this whole process was the timing. Since our seller was a real jackass, and so many things were up in the air with the buying process, by the time we felt confident enough to tell our apartment leasing company "peace", it was the same price to either break the lease or just finish it out. We chose option B, so I've kind of felt like this whole home owners thing isn't truly "real" since we still technically have the apartment.

What that boils down to is that we've been paying for two places this summer. It's cool though, payroll has my back. I get emails that say things like "you will be compensated on August 14 for your work on June 25". Then last week they just plumb forgot to give me half my paycheck! When I called, they were like, yup, looking at the time sheet, whoops! Good times.

I hate money! Don't give me any!

We can all agree moving is actually the worst and I truly don't recommend doing it with a baby. As we do with many things, we half assed it. We mainly completed the move, except for a bunch of random crap that we left sitting in the apartment. Including, but not limited to, board games we haven't played in years, clothes we don't want and intended to donate, lamps we don't need in the new house, things hanging on the walls...you get the idea. Sounds lazy, and it is, but our thinking was that we might as well deal with it in the summer when we were working part time and therefore had child care, instead of continuing to do insane stuff like trying to move my entire closet while wearing Dalton since we had no one to watch him nights and weekends while we tried to move.

That put a whole bunch of irritating tasks (moving random things, cleaning, etc) in that sweet spot of "future problems to ignore in the present" which is always satisfying in the moment. But our lease finally ends on Friday, so we were forced to deal with it. The amount of items that still needed to move had really shrunk in our heads and we were very unpleasantly surprised with what we found when we arrived.

I really struggle with getting the motivation for cleaning a place I actually live in and can actually reap the rewards (sitting around in a non-filthy house), so to spend a hot afternoon cleaning a place I'll never see again was a hard pill to swallow. Don't even get me started on the fact that Dalton had to stay at daycare for it. I am financially motivated though, and we need that security deposit back. After last week's half paycheck (which was only supposed to be for 2 days to begin with, even though I had worked the full pay period...yeah) we had exactly $8 left once we paid daycare.

We persevered, got all our crap out, cleaned all the nastiness, and turned in our keys. It felt so good to be done with that place.

Dalton's first nursery

I was a little nostalgic, since this was our first home for just the two of us (we had roommates when we rented a house downtown), and of course, we brought Dalton there from the hospital!

This picture gives me PTSD about my ab binder...that's why people don't want to have c-sections.

He had a lot of firsts in that apartment.

This must be photoshopped. He could not have been that tiny.

One of his very first teeny little smiles.

Santa feet. I cannot.

I will not miss apartment living, and I will miss hauling that car seat up three flights of stairs even less, but we definitely have many good memories there. It's been real, it's been fun, but it hasn't been real fun.

The point of all this is not to complain about my lack of income, but to say that now that we are done with the apartment, I finally, finally feel like an adult. I did a whole bunch of stuff that is often considered grown up in the past ten years. Moved to a new state, held a job that requires professional dress, used my own health insurance, got a masters degree, saved for retirement, married, procreated, even hosted a holiday. But I always felt like an imposter. Even looking at that Christmas photo, it didn't feel like real Christmas, because it wasn't our real, permanent home. Now we have one, and it's conveniently filled with all that random crap we didn't bother to move just in time for our housewarming party this weekend!

What was the one thing that finally made you feel like a real, live grown up?

Worst moving/homebuying/selling experience?