Photos from our summer in Smalltown, Ontario
This is a hard post for me to write, especially when I look at the countdown calendar at the bottom of my blog. The decision has been percolating for a while. Like all things in our lives, dealing with the craziness of day-to-day living overshadowed it. It started as a ‘What if’ question and ended in a long conversation that changed our lives. Again.
It looks like we’re (probably) sticking around our beloved / despised city for a while longer. Our plans of moving to Smalltown, Ontario are on hold for now.
We will go the following year.
It’s surprising news to me, and pretty sad too. But we have good reasons for sticking around.
Right now my job is going very well. Hubby is mastering SAHD life. That part we won’t change, unless we have too.
We want to maximize support services for Little Miss Adorable and Mr. Sensitive. Little Miss Adorable is scheduled to start an intensive round of occupational therapy and physiotherapy in January. Speech and Language therapy will start then too. Mr. Sensitive is a work in progress, working his way through different therapists and agencies. Moving leads to scrambling for new support services in a place that is stretched pretty thin.
And we were fine with that, but… we want to take advantage of what we have before it’s gone. It’s like going back for a second desert at a buffet when you’re already full – you just want to take full advantage of what’s offered before it’s gone.
We also have boring reasons for staying, like saving money for probable employment rough patches we’d face with relocation and that the current political climate is not too favourable to our line of work. We knew this, and were fine with any challenges we’d face. But then things changed.
The decision to stay just hit us both with the idle question, ‘What if we stayed another year?’ We both answered it quickly with the benefits of staying – decent healthcare for us all, financial stability, housing stability and mainly that we can procrastinate on packing for another year. Both Hubby and I breathed a sigh of relief at that one.
What is interesting is that until that moment we were fully planning on leaving. We’d talk about it several times a day; we told friends and health care providers. Until that moment we’d been ready to leave. We currently live in a very large, accessible apartment. We all were eagerly waiting to move into a larger house with a backyard. Mr. Sensitive has been looking at real estate listings and commenting on empty houses, saying, “We could live there, no one lives there.”
Our large, accessible apartment is in a very dodgy area. Police regularly patrol it. There used to be prostitutes up on the 17th floor, they’ve moved on. They used to talk to the kids every morning. There are drug dealers in the building, I regularly chat with one of them about his dog. There are people with serious mental illness and addictions. I chat with them too. Our building is a live and let live place. Which is fine, but…
We’ve all been looking forward to moving out.
The other night Hubby was taking the dogs out for a walk. The elevator door opened, and inside were two police officers and two handcuffed youths in sock feet. Hubby said he’d take the next elevator. Door closed, Hubby and the dogs waited for the next elevator. When they went for their walk they saw two patrol cars in front of the building.
Sometimes in life you have to take detours to get where you want to go. So that’s what we’re doing – for now.
