Changing perspective

It's funny, when you don't have kids you are ignorant to how much space they actually take up. Take for instance our Jetta. The January after we graduated college, we needed another daily driver. Matt was using "Henry", his '66 Mustang, as a way to get to and from work. This was becoming increasingly problematic because Henry was dying more and more frequently, often as Matt was driving down a fairly busy road. Thank goodness we were living in College Station and Matt could avoid the highway and getting into an accident. Because I was tired of going to pick Matt up and because we were intending to move to Houston soon, we knew we needed another car. After much research we picked my beloved Jetta and I immediately knew we had made a good "car match" for me. I think highly of this car and Matt frequently comments on how "over engineered" the Jetta is. There is a lot of attention to detail and almost everything on the car is automatic. I also rather enjoyed having heated seats and a 6 C.D. changer! Back to the original point, when we were picking the Jetta we looked in the back seat, saw three spots, and figured, "Great! We can make this car work until we have more than three kids!" HA! Fools! When we had MacKenzie we quickly realized it was a tight fit to have one kid in our car, much less two, and now impossible to have three. I will say that two forward facing kids fit nicely in the Jetta, but it is impossible to make our three kids fit safely back there. I am missing my little car and the ability to whip in and out of spots, but I am looking forward to having a Mommy-mobile very soon.

We carried this on to our house buying process. We knew we liked the Cypress area (and still love our location in Cypress) and that we wanted more space than we had in the apartment. We also made the decision to buy a house on a bit of a whim. In fact, friends left for their honeymoon and by the time they came back, we had an offer in on a house. When looking we figured that this would not be our "forever" house, but thought we would be able to stay here for awhile. After all, we had three bedrooms and a loft in addition to all of the regular house rooms. Again...Fools!!! And it's not so much room for us and the kids we need (although space for a king sized bed may be nice), but room for "stuff". We find ourselves lacking in storage both short term and long term, places to put things that we want easily accessible (toys, art supplies, mail), and having a good staging area for our day. We hope to be able to change this situation in the next year to two years and to get a home that fits our growing family more. This time though, we are already looking at floor plans for houses around us to see what we think may work for our family or might not.

I recognize that we are blessed to be able to upgrade and trust that we are truly thankful for what we have. Others in this world would love to have what we have and if we did have to keep this house or not upgrade our car then we would make it work!!! We are truly fortunate to be able to move up if we desire.

So...any advice out there when looking for upgrades, houses specifically? We are glad we will take our time with this so we can see what we like and don't like, but wouldn't mind other's insight.