Goodbye, little Virginia house!

Well, it's done with! We sold our very first house ever -- definitely bitter-sweet. We lived there for 3-1/2 years! I do know that's not long in the grand scheme of things, or compared to some of y'all in ya'll's houses, but it was our first real place, and we have so many good memories from it. It was even kind of fun giving up everything not-absolutely-necessary those first several months so we could afford it. (We even made do without cellphones! Gasp! Almost unheard of in this day and age!)

(Mom, Erin, Liam, Maire, Aine, Aislinn, Declan, and Patrick. The infamous road trip of 2005, when Mom and Aislinn came up from Texas with A's then only 4 kids... Our house is the red brick townhouse. And Mom's green van. Sadly, I can't find any pics of Z and I in front of our house. That could be because we have about 8 billions photos, and I just didn't wade through the right month/year. Digital cameras: A blessing and a curse. But more of a blessing.)

Zachariah turned our big cement one-room basement into a big play/living room and a bedroom and a 3/4 bath (all by himself! he's amazing! Well, I helped...hold drywall and spackle and paint...). What a lot of work, but so rewarding. Next time we won't go crazy and paint the bedroom bright blue and the bathroom...peach-ish? What the heck? At least it's in the basement. I love painting, maybe not always the work part of it, but the outcome, and since it was our house we finally got to paint our kitchen and living room and hallway fun colors (but more normal than the basement, like butter yellow, and pretty blue, and dark red) and we did some gardening. We had one season of amazingly prolific tomatoes and jalapeños. Yummm.

(Our backyard. That's Finnegan, one of our cats.)

We laughed and cried and brought our babies home to that house. And then cried some more when they wouldn't sleep, but laughed a lot more, too. We spent a LOT of time with Erin and Rob and little Liam, and then Brigit (my sis, and her family. Now they have Colin, but we didn't get to spend time with him because we moved before he was born), especially the times they lived in our house with us :) Family and friends visited, the house was bursting with loved ones when Nuala and Bran were blessed! We were members of the wonderful Chantilly Ward, full of amazing people, and we had terrific neighbors, a pool across the street, a nice greenstrip behind us, and loads of gorgeous paths through our woodsy neighborhoods.

(Finnegan and Mushi, the "original" twins. They have been deposed and sent to live with Zac's parents at their zoo...I mean house! Only because Finnegan pretended to get sick so we couldn't fly him to Uruguay and didn't want to split them up so off they went to WA and has he been sick since? NooOOOoo...)

And our kitties! Oh, we miss them! The rascals loved the place and would follow us on walks. Oh, and there were cute little skunks that lived under the neighbors' porch and we would watch the babies play on summer evenings, awwww...one summer Mushi got a little too curious about them and was sporting eau de skunk for quite a while. Good times. It was a great place to live. And now it belongs to another young couple with an 18-month old daughter. I'm sure they will make wonderful memories there, too.

Erin and her family had been renting it from us since we moved here, but now they're moving to Poland (Rob works for State Dept. like Zachariah) and we decided that since we really have no ties to VA, we should sell. We were blessed that it sold quickly and for our asking price, so it worked out very nicely for us. We plan to buy a house in TX this summer or next and rent that out, but we'll see. Anyway, it's sad to see our very first house go...so just a little "good-bye" to our house...we'll miss ya!