East moves West

The Biswold’s Take on Cali! So I guess for my first post I should tell you a little bit about the Biswolds. We are two mommies raising two boys (4 & 2 years old) and we have two Labradors. We are East Coasters and proud of it. I grew up in Maryland and my wife grew up in Pennsylvania. Recently I was presented with what I call a “no-brainer” promotion at work….with a small catch….we’d have to relocate to California. Did I mention most of our extended family lives w/in 3-5 hours of us? My wife works full time too, she is a criminal defense attorney and has worked at her job for 9 years. Hey babe, about that career…you can restart it right? Our 4 year old is finishing up his first year of Montessori pre-school and our 2 year old is set to enroll in the same school in the fall. My mom picks up the kids for us once a week…Gi-Gi gets quality time with her boys and we get date night which has morphed into workout night. My wife’s parents are in Philly and her dad’s health has been a roller coaster the last few years. Her sister and her wife…yes, they are lesbians too….I will write a ‘gayest family in America post’ about us at some point! Anyway, they live in Philly with our two nieces who we absolutely adore, but not more than our boys adore them. All of these reasons were literally screaming in our face…DON’T GO! WHY WOULD YOU LEAVE ALL OF THIS? WHY TAKE A RISK WHEN YOU CAN TAKE THE STEADY ROUTE? So after all of this…we’re in, we’ll do it, I’ll throw caution to the wind (very unlike me), it will be an adventure, there is more diversity in California, the weather….these were all things we old ourselves to make us feel better about the vast number of reasons we had to JUST STAY PUT.

To be perfectly honest, I still don’t know if we’ve made the ‘right’ decision…in fact, we may never know. One thing we both agreed on, we would never know until we tried, and we may always question what it could have been like if we took the leap. Ever since committing to this decision about a month ago I have wanted to carry around a tiny closet door with me that I could open up and scream into whenever I needed it…which would probably have to average 5-7 times a day.

Telling family and friends was the next order of business. The build up to that was unbearable. The only thing I could equate it to is preparing for a final exam in a class that you had skipped all semester. You basically want to just crawl into a hole during exam time because you know you are going to disappoint the teacher and flunk the test. The reactions we got vacillated between extreme excitement, sadness, shock, sadness, sad but happy, and anger. I tried to prepare in advance for all the emotions but it didn’t prepare my gut for the emotional turmoil and guilt. Looking into my mom’s eyes and seeing the sadness in them, trying to send reassuring text messages to loved ones that we wouldn’t lose touch, and bawling my eyes out on the phone with my sister in law because I wanted to reverse the damage that had been done…all of it hit me like a sucker punch to the gut.

Now onto the business of relocating. My company has tried to make this as seamless a transition as possible but there’s nothing easy about selling a residence and finding a new one. So here we are 2 appraisals, a market analysis, home inspection, termite inspection, roof inspection (which could be it’s own separate blog post), multiple meetings with our relators, furniture moving, power washing, carpet cleaning, de-cluttering, removing any evidence that real people actually live inside of our home later, and the house is officially on the market! In all of our free time we are still working full time, raising these two crazy kids, and frantically searching every real estate/rental site out there until midnight every night. Averaging 5-6 hours of sleep per night while juggling the above mentioned activities, well, sucks.

Up next…our house hunting trip. 4 days of California bliss horribleness.