Life has been moving at a different speed lately. I’ve been consumed by several life-changing events, and in some ways, I feel like I’ve been living in an alternate reality.

Even though life has been busy, it’s been a good busy. I’ve felt very blessed with the changes going on in my life, even though they’ve come with stress and disorientation.

Today, I’ll share one of the exciting things that’s happened: We bought our first home.

I remember the days when that was only a dream. The first couple years of our marriage were spent living with my parents, hoping for better jobs so that we could rent a place of our own.

And of course there have been many steps in between: looking at houses online (even when we couldn’t afford them), finding a realtor, building up good credit and job history, saving money for a down payment (something we had to work hard to do), getting approved for a mortgage, and making an offer on a house.

Even after we made an offer, we didn’t know if we would get the house we wanted. In fact, there were many days when we assumed that we wouldn’t get it. It took seven months to get full bank approval to buy the house, since it was a short sale.

Then on the day of closing, we had something come up. We thought that everything would fall through.

But we still drove to the title company’s office. And they handed us the paperwork. And we signed it.

That was a very exciting, surreal day.

Of course, moving has also been a process. It took weeks. Yesterday, we didn’t get home until after 8 am, because we were moving the last of our stuff out of the house we had been renting. The moving process process dragged on throughout the night, fueled only by our sense of urgency to get out of there by “the end of the month.”

Right now, I’m sitting on the couch in our new living room, trying to make sense of what just happened. It feels surreal to be sitting in a house that we own. I’m breathing deeply. It’s a blessing to finally be home.