Another major milestone in life to be marked to be remembered. It is not just moving from one home to another, like you are more likely to do. Like move from one city to another or few streets over. This is the big more, moving across the country.
I have made big moves before, like when I moved from New York City to Schaumburg Illinois. Likewise, my wife, son, and I made an equally big move from New Jersey to California in 2010. My son was just a few months old.
Leaving all of the extended family behind, we knew that this had to make the move at that time. We also hoped that somehow, someday, we would be closer to family. The family would either move, but really, we knew that we would move closer. How close would be the only thing to settle. So here it is, the move to North Carolina. A 2 hours flight from NY/NJ, about 30 minutes drive my sister-in-law, and very much closer to getting down to the Caribbean.
The reasons for moving now just sort of worked out well. My son will be 5 years old soon, and shortly their after will be starting public school. We wanted him to be in a school system and not have to worry about him having to change schools too often. We also wanted to be able to own a home and do so without being stressed about it. Living in the bay area won’t have allowed us to do that. Many other are able to afford it, but we just decided that since we wanted to be closer to family and it was very very expensive to live in a decent neighborhood, it just didn’t make sense to plan roots there.
Being close to family is very important to us. Had it been reasonable to live in the bay area, we would have owned a home, but still left anyway. Both my wife and I grew up with aunts, uncles, and cousins close by. It is some of my fondest memories, visiting aunts and cousins, and having them visit.
So far, our new neighbors are just awesome. We had wine and pie with one set of neighbors on our second night there. Our son found a play mate his age right next door. Something he really lacked where we lived in California. Not that there weren’t kids to play with, but nowhere we felt was safe. Letting kids playing in the community parking lot is definitely not safe and we didn’t let me go out there. Here, he can play in ours or the neighbors very long driveway.
There are so many other benefits too, from more space, to lower car insurance rate, to cheaper gas, and trees, and less noise, and knowing the people you live next to, and on and on and on. No need to rub it in, but for now, it really seems like the we did the right thing.