This One’s Meant for Clara

John and I have realized that our Florida road trip has somehow given us a little house perspective. As much as we have been loving the new house (nearly two months after our move I still find myself going up the stairs and whispering “duuuuude, we have a second floor”) and as much as we have been feeling more settled with every wall that we de-wallpaper and paint, leaving our second house was certainly bittersweet.

It is kind of hard to explain, but somehow while traveling it is more obvious to us that we still remember every nook and cranny of that place, and our new house still feels sort of unfamiliar and mysterious. We do not quite remember every light switch location or which way each door swings yet. So on one hand our old house is sort of glorified in our mind as “the one we know so well” yet we have that early dating excitement for the new house. We are smitten, even though there is tons of work to do and we are simply getting to know each other.

I find myself sitting on the beach wondering what is going on at our new house. Is it raining there? Are there deer playing poker in the sunroom? And then my thoughts jump to how a new family lives in our old house now, which also feels kind of strange yet sweet. I am glad it is not lonely. (I know that makes me sound crazy, but I am ok with it)

That is why I am so glad that one of the last things that we did before we began packing up was to make a video for Clara to remember the house by – simply like we did when we left our first house. And this time instead of being a little lump in our arms like she was for the first one, she could in fact chat and run around and do three year old things. She enjoyed the idea of making a video of the house so she could re-watch it whenever she hoped, but she began out a little shy… so it was especially cute to see her get truly into it as we went (she began telling us what rooms to go to, what to look at in each space, and saying funny things like “we are in New Jersey” when I asked her what room we were in).

Since I know not everyone can watch videos, here is a bit of what is covered: John and Clara play “airplane” in the office, there is some dolly-doctoring in the sunroom, I get bossed around in the hallway (“we have to show this one!”), I get bossed around in Clara’s nursery (apparently it was the baby’s nap time), a bit of frog-dress-up goes on, there is some jumping on the guest bed, and some Clara-throwing in our bed. Oh yeah, and we stand in the bathtub together. Totally normal stuff. There is also some Gangnam Style dancing at one point. And it is possibly the only video in the history of videos to features the sentence “that is not your cousin, it is a llama.”

So much happened in our second house, and it was an especially large part of Clara’s life since she was simply seven months old when we moved in.

It is where she learned to crawl, walk, and talk. And it is where she has celebrated all three of her birthdays as well as three Christmases…

We are so glad to have a bunch of photos (along with a fair amount of video documentation) thanks to this little house diary of ours. My absolute go-to memory of that whole place was this odd little nook that we had in our living room where Clara enjoyed to hide:

Thankfully, she has since declared that her new closet is her “favoritest hiding spot in the big wide world.”

Enjoy that bean. Enjoy that house. Enjoy you folks for sharing in the sappy stuff. Now somebody get me a tissue so I do not ugly-cry my sunscreen off.

*We would have posted this sooner, but John’s computer had a freak out while editing it a few weeks after we moved, and nearly wiped out all of our photos/videos. So here is the obligatory “remember to back up your computer so you do not find yourself screaming into a pillow for twenty hours!” warning (which is the only thing that saved this and countless other photos/vids from disappearing into the computer crash abyss forever). For those wondering, we use a combination of amazon.cloud and external hard drives to back up our would-cry-if-we-lost-them photos and videos.