"Learning To Say Goodbye" February 20, 2017

"Last year, today, we said "goodbye" to our house in Canton and we moved to Massillon. The temperature was near 80 degrees and we had a wonderful group of family and friends who came to help. We had everything packed up and moved in under 6 hours. It had to be some kind of a record. After everything was packed up, everyone was gone and the house was just an empty shell, I purposely took one last walk around our house by myself. In every room there were so many images of so many happy memories. The garage, where Myles kept his toys and bikes. The kitchen, where Caroline would bake her famous homemade granola and where we experimented cooking squid for the first time (not good). The dinning room that we slept in when we first moved there in 2010, shared many great meals and conversations with family friends and told Myles he would soon be a big brother to a little sister. The living room where Myles would take his first steps and where we would later play hide and seek and dance around listening to Gangnam Style. The family room where we first told our family we were we're having a baby boy, where Myles watched The Muppet Show and The Lawrence Welk show and where Caroline and I would sit with the windows open watching TV. The downstairs and upstairs bathrooms that my dad, brother-in-law and friends helped us remodel. Our bedrooms that our families helped us paint and where a pregnant Caroline sat on the floor rubbing off paint stains so we could have hardwood floors. These were just a few of the millions of memories inside the house. After I locked up the house, one last time, I took my last walk around the outside of the house. I saw the two trees that use to be joined by our hammock. I saw our back patio where we had a few of Myles birthday parties and where we would grill out and eat dinner as a family on warm summer days. I saw the back yard where Myles would ride his four-wheeler, where we would play in his sandbox and walk around finding cool sticks. I admired all of the beautiful landscaping my brother-in-law created to make the outside of our house look amazing. Millions of amazing memories. Leaving this house was not easy - in more ways than one. For me, however, it was more of an emotional experience than I expected. And, as anyone who has owned and left a house can tell you, it's not just a house. It's a larger space filled with smaller spaces, each filled with hundreds of thousands of special memories that you can't take with you except in pictures and memories. Despite our few frustrations with this house, it was a blessing from God and we were greatly blessed in it." Originally published to Facebook on 2/20/17