People say that we move a lot.

I guess if you consider that Rick and I have lived in 7 different homes since we got married over 27 years ago, mayyyyybeeee that’s a lot? Two of those places we lived in for less than a year. The house we are moving from this weekend has had our longest run: 11 and a half years. But those moves that happened so close together? Family members whose muscle we call upon to help – they still think we move too much.

I was recently explaining this to a friend and said that really, they weren’t all our fault. And then when I started recounting the houses to her, I realized: it’s all our fault. Really. We could have stayed put more after we initially moved from Edmonton out of our honeymoon apartment that didn’t allow kids. (But then we had a kid. Our fault.)

The first house that we rented when we moved to Vermilion we “showed” to a retired lady from our church who wanted to move to town to be closer to her husband in the nursing home and couldn’t find anything suitable. We solved that problem for her. We thought our house was pretty nice and, alas, so did she. Our fault.

That was one of the less-than-a-year houses. The next one – our first house purchase – was a little less than five years. But then we started to get ideas about living on an acreage and we moved. Oops, our fault.

We lived on “Coyote Acres” for over 5 years – the second-longest stint. And it was a wonderful place to raise three little boys where they could play and explore outdoors, where we had our one-and-only-ever dog, where we started reading the Harry Potter books out loud together as a family and where Daddy built the coolest ever basement fort for the boys. But then we realized we couldn’t afford the acreage anymore and we traded houses with someone back in town, seriously downsizing ourselves and circling the wagons. But pretty much our fault.

The next house was another short stint: only ten months. We put some sweat equity into the house and liked it so much, we decided to sell it. By this time we had the fixer-upper bug, so we found a deal of a house to move to. The deal being it needed a lot of work and we considered entering one of those ugliest-kitchen-in-Canada contests. But the buying and selling and fixing? Our choice, our fault.

At the three year mark, we moved again. It wasn’t our fault that our best friends in Vermilion were moving overseas and needed to sell their house. We were just helping, right?

It’s been a pretty great house, this one that we’re about to leave. It’s was big enough to accommodate our extended family gatherings – including 3 graduation parties and one wedding for our kids, plus lots of Christmases. It was a great landing spot for all the teenage friends the kids brought home. And we loved the location: on the provincial park that you could get out and enjoy in less than a minute or just open up the blinds and enjoy the view.

But then it got too big. It’s not our fault the kids moved away. (Is it?) It’s not that we stopped liking our house – on the contrary, we fixed it so much to suit us that we liked it more and more each year. Is “too big” a good enough reason to move? Maybe. Probably. It’s kinda our fault we didn’t realize that our house would someday outgrow us.

And so we are moving again. Although I am one of those weird people who actually likes packing and unpacking, it’s a bit stressful as we get close to the actual moving day – did we do everything we needed to do? Where can we find another 30 boxes? Did I pack the packing tape? Where are we gonna sleep tonight? But the adventure of going someplace new, setting up new routines, figuring out where everything goes and what we can get rid of – I (and I think, Rick, too) like that challenge. It’s our fault. And that’s okay.