The Full Nelsen: The Update.

In the last week we decided to sell our home and then finally decided not to. We'd been toying with the idea of moving for several weeks. It's been an agonizing, exciting, confusing process for me. As with most big life decisions, there are many pros and cons on either side of the issue and I desperately want to make the right decision for my family. I finally realized that the only pro about moving would be living in a larger home. The cons list is much longer. I'm not ready to leave our next-door neighbors, the Hicks family, for example. We LOVE them and the babysitting we do for each other brings peace to my life. Peggy Hicks, the mom, has also become my early-morning swimming/aqua-jogging buddy (we're both runners that are presently cursed with plantar fasciitis!) and her companionship and friendship are real blessings in my life. Plus, we live within an easy walking distance to our church, we're only 1/2 mile from Maia's school and we have a large, south-facing lot on a dead-end (i.e. relatively safe for kids) street. We also live less than a mile from the Marvins, our bestest buddies. I am haunted by the darn current 4.24% interest rates, though. It's such a smart time to buy, from that perspective. So, we're keeping our fingers crossed that interest rates will stay low for a long time. In the meantime, I'm rearranging furniture and trying to figure out, once again, how to maximize space in our small home as our needs change with our kids' ages. And I'm grateful that I do live in a nice house and have the world's greatest neighbors. Sometimes it takes almost losing what you have to make you realize just how very precious it is.

Here's a few recent pictures: