Life had other plans.

Fast forward to now and that same little house is home to six people. Isaac and me, four kids, and a life that is quite literally bursting at the seams. We became a family in this house. I became a mother in this house. This is the only home Kota and Xylo have ever known. We love it — it got us here, it held us through more than I can put into words — but we have outgrown it in every possible way. There are mornings where I look around at the controlled chaos of it all and think about how this space was designed for one person and a dog and I genuinely cannot believe we made it work this long.

And then there’s Isaac’s situation, which deserves its own paragraph.

Isaac started his tree service in 2016. He has been running it for almost a decade, building it from the ground up into something real, something that supports our whole family. And for almost that entire time, his equipment — his trucks, his gear, his tools, everything he needs to run the business that keeps us going — has lived across three different properties because we have never had the land to keep it ourselves. Three different places. For nearly ten years. Because we live on a fraction of an acre and you cannot run a tree service from a fraction of an acre, but you do what you have to do when you’re building something and you don’t have another option yet.

We have wanted land for longer than I can count. We talked about it before we had kids — wanted to have something in place before the family grew. It didn’t happen that way. Life moved faster than our plans did and we built the family first and kept waiting for everything else to catch up.

For a long time we weren’t even in a position to look. Big equipment purchases, the business building itself year by year — it took time to get to a place where it financially made sense to move forward. We waited until we could do it right. And then we started looking.

We looked at properties. Too expensive, wrong location, too much work, not enough acreage, something always wasn’t right. We got close a few times and it fell through. We kept waiting.

And then we found it.

I’m not going to say too much yet because we’re still in the middle of the closing process and I’ve learned not to count things before they’re mine. But if all goes well — and I am choosing to believe it will — we are about to have our own little piece of land. Enough room for Isaac’s equipment to finally come home. Enough room for the kids to actually run. Enough room for the bees and the garden and the chickens and whatever else this family decides it needs to become.

Enough room to become the thing we’ve always been trying to build.

I hate this house some days and I cannot wait to leave it. And somehow I know I’m going to cry when we do.

I bought that house in 2017 for myself and a brindle pit named Cabo. I’m leaving it for something so much bigger than either of us could have imagined back then.

We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. We’re almost there.