Moving house is bittersweet. We always knew we would need to move out of our one bedroom house into somewhere bigger when we had Jack. We’d even tried to move house a couple of times before he was born but no one came along to buy ours.

We tried and failed to sell our house while I was pregnant and ended up taking it off the market when I was about 20 weeks gone because I thought that even if someone came along there and then with no chain, we still wouldn’t be able to move in time – a good decision as it turned out considering he then arrived at 28 + 6!!!

We actually made having a baby in a one bedroom house work quite well because really what major furniture does a baby need other than somewhere to sleep, which we bought our snuzpod for? (definitely recommend by the way!) We didn’t need a changing table, a portable mat worked fine, and a Moses basket downstairs and a playmat in the lounge. We even managed to fit in his big oxygen cylinders.

But now he’s bigger and nearly growing out of his space saver cot, it’s time to move house. We’ve had more success this time, we have found a buyer for ours and somewhere to move to and the solicitors are paperworking, as they do. We’re nearly there.

And I am packing our lives into boxes. I have come across so many wonderful memories and even found a copy of the original advert for our house! I’ve come across some bad memories, such as old journals from when I was a bit suicidal many years ago. Christ, I was in so much emotional pain it was hard to read, but it felt therapeutic to shred those pages.

Special ornaments have been bubble wrapped, and why do we have so much decorative glass in our kitchen? I have culled a lot of crap. I am struggling to pack certain things, even though I know we’ll be unpacking them the other end I’ll see them again in time. I can’t bring myself to take Jack’s pictures off the wall, the ‘to-scale’ picture of him on the day he was born because looking from that photo to him now is so damn miraculous. Despite it only being decor and not an “essential useable item”, it will probably be one of the last things to be packed. I can’t just hide it away for weeks.

We have lived here fore over 11 years. It was our first home that Hubby and I bought together when we moved our of our parents houses. We decorated it to turn it from a house to our home. We gave our rescue pets a home here. It was in this home that we planned our wedding, and where he carried me over the threshold the morning after we got married. This lounge is where I told a shell-shocked Hubby that we were having a baby. And after 3 long months in the NICU, our brave Jack came home to this little house and made us realise that he is exactly what had been missing from it all along.

I have watched my son flourish in this lounge. I have bathed him at this kitchen sink. I have sat in this bedroom and watched him sleep. He took his first steps on this rug.

And soon we will say goodbye to this little house, to move to a bigger house, where Jack will have a bedroom of his own. I will wake in the morning and his little face won’t be in a cot at the foot of my bed. It’ll be in his own room in a big boy bed. Is it crazy to think that I will miss him, even only a room away?

So here I am, so excited to have a bigger more practical kid-raising house. But when I think of all the things that have happened in our first house, I know it will be heart-breaking to say goodbye.