Moving to Illinois
When I was nine years old, my family moved to Lawrenceville, Illinois. I remember many things about this move. My mother, bless her heart, took her three children (ages 3, 7, and 9) house hunting by herself. My dad travels a lot for business and wasn’t able to make this trip with her. We drove from house to house looking at so many different ones. After about house number two all of us kids were shot, but we kept going until mom found one that she loved. Want to know what the one she loved looked like to me? We walked in and there were dog cages all over the place. They were stacked up on every single wall, and we had only gotten through two rooms. Of course, being a dog lover, I loved the idea of moving to a house with all these dogs! Little did I know the dogs wouldn’t come with the house. Now I’m sure you are wondering, “Why all the dog cages?.” Apparently the owners bred dogs for a living. The sad part is that they didn’t take very good care of them and there was mess all over the house. But my mom didn’t care. She had fallen in love with all of the solid oak floors and the huge oak beams in the ceilings and the oak staircase. All she could see was wood everywhere and that is how we decided on the house!
After finding the house, Mom and Dad went back up to look at it together. “It’s a fixer upper alright,” I remember Dad saying. But Mom had fallen in love with this 100-year-old house, so Dad gave in. Next thing I knew, we were off to this new (but very old) house! My sister Shelby and I couldn’t wait to get out of the car after our eight hour drive to the new house. We jumped out and ran inside to get dibs on the good bedrooms before anyone else could. At 9 and 7 years old, this house looked huge to us. There was a basement, a main floor, a second floor, and a full sized attic! We explored that house like it was a foreign country. We found a laundry chute that went all the way from the second story to the basement! We had fun with that for hours. One of us would stand at the top and the other at the bottom and we throw all sorts of things down that laundry chute. Mom had to put a stop to that, though, after we tried to send my little brother down it. Oops!
Shelby, Scott and I noticed that Mom and Dad had placed all the mattresses in one room until they could get all the beds put together. The three of us made the coolest mattress fort that anyone had ever seen. After that though, our new neighbors came over to welcome us and help with the moving process. They had a son about my age and he started to take the mattresses and ride them down the stairs! I couldn’t believe this boy would do that, but soon we all joined in and had a great time. Until the parents put a stop to this as well.
The best thing I remember about the move is the first night in the new house. I remember getting the bedrooms put together, but our living room and our kitchen were still empty. We sat in our living room that night with no TV and no phones, and we ate pizza together (because we couldn’t cook yet either). We talked about the day and about moving and leaving all of our friends and about starting our new life and new school. My little brother took it the hardest, but we all had such a great time that day. That is one day in my life I will never forget.
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