Christmases 5 and 6

By time the next Christmas rolled around we’d moved again.  This time to what was truly a glorious apartment.  This one sat over the pool maintenance and laundry room.  In this apartment we didn’t share walls with anyone, it was just us, no one over us and no one under us, and the laundry room was closed at night.  The only noise was from the pool below us, and that closed too (to kids anyway) when it got dark.  And the whole apartment was HUGE, gigantic compared to the previous two.  We got a bigger tree that year and threw the office Christmas party.  My Dad came again but I think my brother was in the service then.  Regardless, it was a great Christmas. 

And we moved again before the next Christmas came, this time a big move.  We left Texas in late October for a new assignment in Washington DC, John was going to the Pentagon.  When we arrived there we started looking for apartments and soon realized we were in big trouble…  an efficiency apartment like the first two we had in Texas would cost us $1000 or more in DC.  And we couldn’t afford that.  A friend said we HAD to buy a house, it was the only way to afford living there. 

So we bought our very first home.  It was actually the very first house we looked at too… when we walked in it just felt right to us and we didn’t want to look anymore.  But the realtor insisted we look at more.  I’m not positive how many we looked at, but nothing compared to the first one, so we went back and looked at it again and bought it.  (I just had a feeling it was OUR home)

We moved in the day before Thanksgiving and had Thanksgiving dinner there… TV dinners sitting on boxes and using two boxes stacked as our table.  (We had a real Thanksgiving dinner the next day in Delaware with family)  Between then and Christmas we unpacked and settled in, our car was wrecked sitting in front of the house, we bought a new (used) car, I got a job at a fabric store, and we decorated for Christmas.  We had family for Christmas and went home for the Christmas party, and I got a puppy.  It was a wonderful Christmas!  But something was missing.