Our Big Move!

It still hasn't quite hit me yet that we actually LIVE in Nashville, we're not just visiting this time, we permanently live here haha. Our Philadelphia apartment no longer belongs to us, and it will never be our home again. Such craziness! Our life is so crazy right now, but I'm so content to just sit back and see where all this change is taking us.

So naturally I want to give everyone a little bit more background on our decision to move, because it wasn't as much of a random selection as it may seem. As you may know, after our wedding I made the tough choice not to return to my graduate school program. Since that point I had been searching for jobs with absolutely no positive response to speak of. It was very frustrating and discouraging, but Keith and I knew that eventually something bigger and better must be coming my way. We had very seriously talked about moving out of Philadelphia because we felt it was pretty void of job opportunities and we never felt like the city really "clicked" with us. After our trip to New York in October Keith and I chose 3 cities that we were interested in moving to, which were Boston, New York, and Nashville. I had a possible job connection in each of these cities so when we got home I sent out messages to 3 people and only got a response from one of them. Sign number one. It was our friend Jamie here in Nashville and she reached out to me with a whole list of after school programs in the area (something that I was really interested in pursuing) and with all kinds of helpful advice. I sent emails to the HR departments of all the places she suggested and heard back almost immediately from one of them. It seemed like such a miracle to even hear back from a potential employer after months of nothing and it felt even better to find out that they wanted to offer me a job on the spot. Obviously we couldn't just jump without a few more things falling in line, but we used that job offer as a motivator to pursue a potential move. Slowly but surely things started to come together, like Keith finding out he would be able to transfer his job with American Eagle, and our friends Tytus and Jamie offering to let us stay with them for a month or so until we got settled. The last of the puzzle pieces that needed to fit together was finding a new tenant to move into our apartment. We were pretty nervous about it because it decided whether or not we would be able to get our security deposit and last months rent back (which we needed to be able to move). We put up an add on craigslist and within a couple hours we had lined up around 15 people to come and view the place. It was SO COOL! We had about 4 people that were absolutely serious about moving in and while we were in Florida our landlord had chosen someone to move it. It was SUCH a blessing, and definitely made us feel like moving was something we were meant to do. Nashville is just a place that we have such a large community of friends which is something we were really looking for in the next place that we moved. The Northeast was not kind to us... like literally, the people there were kind of mean haha. Keith was born and raised in the south and has a huge list of reasons that he's excited to be back here (like being able to drink sweet tea where ever he wants haha). I'm still impressed that we haven't lived here for more than a day and everywhere I go someone holds the door for me and calls me ma'am.

Ok, so I haven't mentioned what I'm exactly going to be doing here in Nashville that was big enough for us to move a thousand miles for haha. I'm going to be working full time at an after school center here in town as a teacher. I'm going to have a group of 10 kids that I'll see every afternoon, and I'll be spending the beginning part of my day meeting with their teachers at school and their parents to get to know them and work to come up with the best plan for success. I'm excited to get to be part of a community, and to feel like I'm contributing positively to that community. This is also a great opportunity because the organization will begin paying the interest on my student loans as well as giving me a large educational credit that I plan on using to get my teaching certification. All good things! Wish us luck, because Keith and I both start our jobs on Monday morning! I'll surely keep everyone updated on how it goes :)

Here are some photos from our move:

Our boxed up Philly home

Empty

Our last night

My faithful driver

My passenger seat companion and road trip champion

14 hours on the road. Ugh.

Marty!

Headed home :)

Who knows where life will lead us from here, but after the very stressful experience of making this move Keith and I both agreed that we would like to stay here for at least the next 5 years. Moving is the worst of the worst, lowest on my list of things I don't enjoy, but we're happy to be here and happy that it's all over and behind us. Now we just need to search for a home, and settle ourselves here in the great state of Tennessee.

I love our life right now :)