If you follow us on Facebook, you already know our great news:  our apartment application was approved, and we will be living at The Gardens at Citrus Tower.  Doesn’t the name just sound like someplace you want to live?  Of course that’s not the reason we chose it!  We feel very blessed to have completed the process so quickly, and we are relieved that we have a permanent address to call home once we arrive in Clermont.  This will allow us to provide forwarding addresses before we leave, as well as set up the kids in school before school ends for the summer.  It’s hard to believe the end of the school year is fast approaching, though we certainly are looking forward to what the summer brings us!

Tonight we attended an awards ceremony at Catie’s school for high grade point average achievement, and realized this would possibly be the last time we would see the inside of her school.  At the elementary school where Ben attends, this will be our eighth (and final) year there.  It’s hard to walk away from an institution that you have been going to regularly for eight years!    We would have this feeling with or without the move, as Ben is in his last year, but it somehow seems amplified given the fact we are walking away from everything.

We’ve been experiencing a lot of “lasts”.  We have tossed around the idea of composing a list of the things we want to do before we leave Wisconsin, similar to the Top 100 List we published for our Florida to-dos, but it possibly will not happen. It may be too depressing to see the things we never got a chance to do, and given the rising price of gas, it is very likely our summer entertainment budget will be minimal.  Ben will have his camp trip at the end of May, and Catie will be going to Six Flags (Great America) before school ends, so the children will at least get a fun trip in each before our move.   And of course, there’s Walt Disney World on the horizon! It is just going to be so AWESOME to be able to go there whenever we want.

We are slowly paring down our furniture.  Our oldest son, Nick, will be staying in Wisconsin and renting an apartment, so he will be taking some pieces, but others we are putting on Craigslist and/or Freecycle.  Right now our goal is to do one box each in the younger kids’ rooms, and they are doing a great job of donating a lot of their personal belongings.  We are very proud.  We started the decluttering process with the idea of keeping only the things we absolutely wanted, motivated primarily by the cost of the move.  Now that we are locked into our price, we have found that our focus has not changed.  We are still going through every item and deciding whether to keep or toss.  We will get a small refund if we go under our estimated weight, but we really like the idea of being able to start over, and we want to do that with as little items as possible.  We will have 2 walk-in closets, as well as other closets, but we are losing approximately 600 square feet than what we currently live in.  It’s all good, we will be one less person with Nick staying in Wisconsin, so I don’t anticipate that we’ll feel crowded in.

Thanks for following along!  Please feel free to friend either one of us on Facebook if you have not already.  We will only keep our Wishes and Pixie Dust profile on Facebook through our move (and settling in period), though our website will stay up indefinitely.