And so it begins. And ends.

If you've ever read my blog, or if you know me in real life, you know that my biggest desire is to be home with my baby girl. Only she's not a baby anymore. She's two and a half! And just like that, my heart drops, my stomach flips, my mind reels, and every cliche comes true IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE.

...But...

Things, they are a'changin'. How often do you follow your dream? How often do you chase it down? How often do you say, to hell with the fears and questions and doubt and just take the leap? I hope everyone in their lifetime has a dream come true at LEAST once. It can be hard, though. Logistics. Comfort zones. Budgets. Fear of the unknown. The list of reasons not to follow a dream can seem endless. But the dream? The dream is the soft cloud you land on after you make the jump.

Jeff, Cade, Olivia and I have jumped. We're still falling, slowly, and relatively painlessly. And in about two weeks, we're going to land on that cloud. We're going to stretch out our legs and lift our arms and faces to the sun, wrap ourselves up in the coziness, and rest IN THE DREAM.

Jeff's Dream: to move out of Colorado. To build a boat. To live near water. To be a family of four full time.

My Dream: to stay home and raise my baby girl. To support Jeff's dream. To be a family of four full time.

And so it is. Cade will arrive here today. For good. In two hours I will walk out of my office building forever. In two weeks we are moving to Maine. In two months we will settle into a new home that will hold the memories of our family of four. In two years we'll look back from inside our dream and think, yep. It was risky, scary, stressful and hard. But it was worth it.

I can't wait to make notes about how things turn out in our dream. Because we're not dreaming. We're awake!

Let me be real, though. There is still a lot that has to fall into place. There is a lot of change going on. The past two months have been full of tension. And while I've waited 2.5 years for this, I'm totally nervous about how it will work. I'm sad to say goodbye to sweet Olivia's second mommy. I'm scared to be far from home and family. I'm anxious to get things right with a toddler and a teen. But more than anything, I'm so excited.

In a while I'll try to tell the story of how it all came to be. I'll tell you what, things really fell right into place. Applications went out. Interviews came through. Offers came in. The house went under contract in one day. Badda bing, badda bang, badda boom. Hello dream come true :) I think we'll stay a while.