Good morning and Happy Friday! 🙂 This week has been so busy with work, kids, starting to finally get back to working out (more on that in another post) and just life. Whew.

Dave and I have lived in our current home in January 2010. We got engaged October 2009 and were so excited to purchase our first home! It started with the two of us but we quickly adopted Bradley 12/2010 and 5 years later our Kayla joined us and Madison soon after! Our house quickly started to get smaller with cribs, toys, books…you name it. On top of this, Dave & I both work at home…two desks, computers, printers, phones. It is a lot. We started talking about moving last year, but where?

Did we want to stay in NJ? Well, our family and friends are here. The Beach. NYC close by. All 4 seasons…though I could easily skip January-March. But…NJ is expensive. Taxes. Houses. Everything. And NJ is fast paced, did we want this for our girls? We started to focus on the Carolinas, specifically North Carolina- the houses you can get are incredible. Weather- good most of the year. Slower pace? I think so. Colleges- pretty darn amazing. We got so serious about it we reached out to friends who have moved, looked into pricing and were trying to plan out how the heck to get down there to look when we can barely get to Target some days.

Then, my sister got pregnant. My thoughts on everything changed. I want my girls to be near their aunt, uncle and pop pop. I really want them near their cousins. I drove around one day by myself to think, through all of the smaller Jersey Shore towns I grew up in. Down Ocean Ave where I worked for many summers with a view of the ocean. By the best pizza, bagel and sub places you could find. By beautiful parks that are almost hidden all through our town. I traveled into NYC for work and a Broadway show and forgot just how lucky I am to be a one hour train ride away from this magical city. What was I thinking? How could I leave where I grew up and love so much? How could I leave our family and friends? We have made some really close friends the last few years and I want our kids to grow up together.

The grass isn’t always greener. Money may be tight while we are paying basically a mortgage payment monthly for daycare and our new house may not be the dream house I always wanted- but I will have my dream family in it. I will have our family just a few miles away and that is what matters. My babies LOVE the beach, boardwalk and seeing their family. I just want them to be happy and healthy. Maybe we will move down to NC one day, but for right now…NJ is our home.

So today, take a break from your phone, work, all the stresses around you & take a look at what you have. There truly is beauty everywhere and you don’t always have to be looking for what you think is the next best thing. You see Instagram posts and you compare yourself to someone else’s lifestyle and we all forget it is just a tiny, tiny snapshot of their day. I will do my best to make our house a home for my family, there are ways to keep out the busyness and craziness of the house world. So many memories to be made and I’m so excited for it.

Have a wonderful weekend friends! (All the pictures I have taken randomly thought out the past few years.) ❤