{"id":1062,"date":"2013-07-01T08:12:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T12:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/?p=1062"},"modified":"2014-11-23T16:13:48","modified_gmt":"2014-11-23T21:13:48","slug":"one-year-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/01\/one-year-here\/","title":{"rendered":"One Year Here"},"content":{"rendered":"

One year ago today (at 2:30 in the morning, after a 24 hour travelling ordeal, see One Year Gone<\/a>) we arrived back in Florida and began our new life.\u00a0 I arrived and settled in with a lot of hope and hesitation about our new life.\u00a0 We had developed a great network of friends in Dublin and I had high hopes for creating a similar network here.\u00a0 But I was hesitant, knowing how hard it was to meet people in Florida when we lived here previously.\u00a0 I looked into mommy groups, joined a group on meetup.com but just never found anything that worked for us.<\/p>\n

I was fortunate to meet a few of hubby\u2019s co-worker\u2019s families early on and began spending as much time with them as possible but they live over a half hour away and it was a struggle to get together when Honeybun had to be collected from school at noon.\u00a0 I also started hanging out with another mommy from Honeybun’s\u00a0school who has a son Sugarplum’s\u00a0age.<\/p>\n

Until recently, these few mommies were all I had and I barely got to hang out with them.\u00a0 \u00a0I was struggling to feel \u201cat home\u201d here and missing my Dublin mommy friends dearly.\u00a0 I missed the every week gathering we used to have and how laid back, genuine and un-competition-y everyone was.\u00a0 I still long to be back amongst that amazing group of mommies and children and get sad when Honeybun\u00a0says \u201cmommy, remember so-and-so?\u00a0 I miss him\/her.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the past year hubby has talked about moving again.\u00a0 We reminisce about our time in Dublin and travelling Europe and he\u2019ll chime in with \u201cI think we should go back to Dublin\u201d or \u201cwhat about London?\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019ve insisted from the moment we got back that we have to be here awhile.\u00a0 We own a house and can\u2019t afford to lose money yet again (the last two houses I\/we owned we lost big money on).\u00a0 Then it hit me the other day: I\u2019m actually kinda happy here.<\/p>\n

Sure, I still hate driving and the people are not very nice and it\u2019s a hard place to raise children BUT I like the weather (really, the heat doesn\u2019t bother me), I love that I have family around almost constantly, Target is only a 10 minute walk away, I can actually work here and most importantly, I have friends now.\u00a0 Friends that I adore and that even though we\u2019re still in the \u201cgetting to know you\u201d phase a little bit, that I want to keep in my life.\u00a0 My children have friends they adore and while I do think we will move again sometime and it\u2019s always hard for kids to say good-bye, I want my children to know how to build lasting relationships.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want them to fall into a pattern of never getting close to anyone because we\u2019re just going to move.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t want to get in that habit either.<\/p>\n

Florida may not be our forever home, but right now it does finally feel like HOME.\u00a0 A few months ago I never would have guessed I\u2019d be saying that I\u2019m happy but it\u2019s true.\u00a0 The past few weeks have really changed for us.\u00a0 My going back to teaching, Honeybun\u00a0being out of school and us being able to spend more time with people we like has made a huge difference in our family happiness and I\u2019m now excited for our Florida future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One year ago today (at 2:30 in the morning, after a 24 hour travelling ordeal, see One Year Gone) we arrived back in Florida and began our new life.\u00a0 I arrived and settled in with a lot of hope and hesitation about our new life.\u00a0 We had developed a great network of friends in Dublin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-mommys-life","category-family-ties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1062"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6573,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions\/6573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}