My Story {Part 4}

{Part 1}
{Part 2}

{Part 3} 

After the early days of life with three little ones, motherhood became easier.  My fourth pregnancy was easier, too.  Though I still had morning sickness (I always get morning and all-day sickness.), it didn't last as long and it wasn't as severe.  It was in the first trimester of this pregnancy that I began blogging.  Benjamin was born eight days before his due date...and we became a family of six. 

Six people in a townhouse can get to feeling a little cramped so we began to tentatively, hesitantly look for a home to buy.  It was a leap of faith because we knew the Lord's hand was on us, but we didn't know if we were financially ready to handle the expenses.  I held back, but Brian said we needed to take the plunge.  We looked and looked and came up dry.  We made an offer on a house and someone outbid us.  We prepared to make an offer on another house and someone beat us to it.  We became discouraged and wondered if there would ever be a house out there for us.

Then we found out we were expecting number five.  Though we were not preventing pregnancy, this one took me by surprise.  I did not feel ready to have another baby.  Benjamin was only fifteen months old, still a baby himself, and we were still living in our rental. 

In August of 2010, I turned 30.  We had been home searching for fifteen months...and learning to bloom where we were planted.  Apparently God was planting us deep within the walls of our townhouse because there were no prospects on the horizon.  Alaine was due in less than a month when we finally surrendered our plans and contented ourselves with making the townhouse work-- arranging the kids' bedroom for Benjamin to move in with them and making space for the coming babe to share our room.  Three days later, Alaine surprised us by arriving three weeks early. 

It was a year ago this month that we first walked into our home.  We passed through its door on a sunny Friday morning and fell in love.  We made an offer and a counter-offer, and just when we thought things were working out for us, the seller decided not to sell and took the house off the market a few days after Thanksgiving.  In a whirlwind of events, she relisted the house again in the winter, we bought it, and we moved at the end of April this year, two years after our home-searching journey began.  Though we were ready to stretch our wings and get some elbow room, it was a little emotional packing up the house we had shared for six years and brought three more children home to live in. 

This summer we celebrated our tenth anniversary.  We reminisced about our years together.  We thought back to the people we were on our wedding day and wondered what those people would have thought if they had realized that ten years later, they would have lived in three different houses, changed careers, and become the parents of five children.

As a little girl, my dream was to be a wife, a mother, a teacher, a nurse.  Today, I'm living my dream.