Bye Bye Dallas and Hello Fort Worth!

Anyone that follows my blog or follows my life knows where we've been the last few years! Shortly after getting married in 2011, we bought a brand new home, had our first baby, then started traveling around and haven't lived in our house since!

First, we traveled to Dominican Republic and lived the high life in a 3000 sq. foot fancy apartment that I'll probably never live in anything that compares again.  While the apartment was beautiful, living in a foreign country and struggling with the language and culture brought other challenges.

The next year, upon a surprise dilemma with my husband's US residency, we were forced to return to the US a little earlier than planned. Since our house we owned was already under a lease with our renters, we moved in with my mom in Minnesota until we could decide on our next move.  Mom has a lovely townhouse. We took over her basement with our son and had our second child while living there.  While she had lots of space and it was a mutually benefiting situaion,  we still lived at mom's and I don't need to explain the challenges that come with that.

The next year, we decided to move somewhere we could ditch the Minnesota winters.  Texas has warmer weather, no state taxes and more home for your buck compared to many other states.  We are fairly city people so we ended up in Dallas, which is a big city with the benefits of Texas I just stated.  Because we moved on a whim and for a new adventure, we chose a little apartment from apartments.com and got a two bedroom place.  While the living quarters aren't much, our location in the city is fantastic.  There's other kids in the apartment that play in the courtyard all the time, lots of people who speak Spanish, which is a bonus for our family, and there's so many good restaurants around.  I can't even!  While living here, we moved my in laws in for three and a half months while my mother in law has been struggling with her health. It was good to be able to help for a while but there were 6 people in a two bedroom.

Well guess what's happening now?! We are finally buying a house again!  Our house in Minnesota is on the market and we've already chosen one here in Texas. Except it's bye bye Dallas and hello Fort Worth!  As we were driving to our new house last week, there was a whole lot of country and some weird looking animals like llamas, cows with ginormous heads and something we didn't even recognize...maybe a mule?!  Once we arrived however, I was back in suburbia in a fairly new development of homes with all the necessary amenities around.  Our community even has a pool and a playground.  I also found out we are just 15 minutes from downtown Fort Worth which makes a city girl like myself feel a lot better!

I've been reading up on Fort Worth and have only heard good things about how great it is for families.  There's a huge shopping and dining square in the city, it's home of the stockyards for a true cowboy experience, it has one of the best zoos in the nation and I'm sure BBQ as good or better than what we've found here in Dallas. It is smaller than Dallas and I've heard has a slower pace of living. I don't really know what that means yet to know if that's positive or negative but I'm not worried. Fort Worth is just under an hour from Dallas and closer to my husband's work in Arlington.  Arlington is home to the Cowboys and Rangers stadiums and Six Flags where we have season passes. Can you tell I'm getting excited?  Oh and our home is new construction so that helps too because we are not fixer uppers!

I'm really excited to have a home of our own again.  We have a fairly new family and two young kids and hope to have at least one more. We've done the travel thing, we've done the city thing and I'm not saying we're stopping all of that, I'm just saying we need a house. We need space and we need to embrace this phase of our little family life.  We've been patient, don't you think? I'm so excited! So keep your eyes peeled for more adventures on the blog as the move approaches!

Construction phase!