The text comes while I am feeding my baby her bottle.

Hey guys decision has been made and we did not get the house. Let’s see if anything good comes up for this weekend.

I had been expecting it, honestly. The house we looked at last weekend had been big, with a huge garage and decent-sized yard, a roomy den, and a dining room that we could easily turn into a study. Sure, it needed a lot of work – but I loved the space. I loved the little porch in the front and the feeling that I got when sitting on the front porch waiting for my husband to finish talking with our realtor. Sitting there watching my girls play in the shade of the giant tree, I felt like I was home.

This was the third house we had put an offer on so far. But on a single income in a seller’s market, it’s starting to feel hopeless.

And expecting it doesn’t make me feel any less sad.

I love our two-bedroom apartment, but with three growing children it is feeling smaller every day. There’s hardly a place to step in the living room between the baby swing, the coffee table, and the toys that never seemed to quite be 100% put away, despite my best efforts. We recently had to shuffle rooms around during nap time so that baby could nap in one bedroom and the toddler in another, with three-year-old Violet relegated to some small corner where she could play quietly while I rested on the couch. We need more rooms. We need a yard. We need a house.

As I try not to fall too deep into the disappointment, Violet comes and climbs up next to me, then wraps her arms around my arm and lays her head on my shoulder. “I love you,” she says.

My heart melts, despite the inkling in the back of my mind that it was mostly said to try to make up for having spilled purple nail polish on the floor moments before. “I love you too, baby.”

“Let’s take a walk,” she says.

“Yes, we should take a walk,” I agree.

Around here, getting ready to take a walk can take nearly as long as the walk itself. We can’t simply march out the door – babies have to be buckled into the stroller. People have to find their shoes. People have to go potty. If we haven’t gotten dressed yet – and in this case, we hadn’t – we have to start by finding matching tops and bottoms for everybody and throwing those on. This particular morning is no different, and after much preparation and scuffling and people needing one last drink of water, we start out the door with baby and toddler in the stroller and Violet walking beside me.

It’s a perfect day for a walk – neither hot nor cold, overcast, breezy. My heart feels overcast, too – clouded by discouragement.

We walk in a little residential area behind our apartment complex, and in this season just the walking past all of the modest, well-kept brick houses can be hard on the heart. I try to squelch the covetousness that creeps up in me as we walk, without much success on this particular day.

“Look, Mommy. Acorns,” Violet says. She stops for a moment to pick up one for herself and one for her sister.

Baby turns around in her seat to smile up at me, and the sunshine of her smile breaks through the clouds. I smile back.

We walk on, Violet chattering beside me, the toddler with her hands flung out, open, to either side, as if to embrace the breeze and just rejoice in being able to be outside on a day like today.

I think back to our search for this apartment, back when Violet was still the baby of the family. Of dragging her along to look at multiple places while my husband was at work, places that were too small, had too many stairs, were too expensive, or were not in a good area of town. I remember when I found our current place, in the perfect location, right in our price range, just the right amount of space, with a big, roomy kitchen and lots of light. I remember actually birthing child number two in our bedroom, and bringing child number three home from the hospital through our front door. I remember first steps and first foods, thousands of tears and thousands of smiles, morning sickness and reading Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada over and over again.

Violet bends to collect yet another acorn and trips and falls to her knees. The tears begin. I pick her up and hug her.

“I’m hurt, Mommy!” she cries. “I need a Band-Aid!”

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s hurry back and we’ll get you one. It’ll feel better soon.”

“Where is our home, Mommy?” she protests as we resume walking. “I can’t found it.”

“We’ll find our home soon,” I tell her, and the sound of the words settles into my heart.

It’s true. We will. We have collected a few extra things along the way, and in the process we may stumble and get hurt in ways that a Band-Aid won’t heal – but together through every step of the journey we will find our home soon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A few days after I wrote this, we had an offer accepted on another house, our fifth try. We’re currently in the process of paperwork and inspections and appraisals and are hopeful that this will indeed be our new home, but are trying to hold it lightly, just in case. Whether it’s this place or another, the truth remains the same — we will always find home.