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If I could move my house along with all my belongings, this is the house that would go with us everywhere we move. There were so many things about this house that I loved. I also loved so many things about our life at that time. This house is in Lexington, Kentucky and the back yard borders the county line between Fayette and Jessamine counties. The kids got on the school bus at the end of our driveway. We lived in a great neighborhood with lots of friends for all seven of us (we had 8 families in our ward just in our neighborhood!). The back yard was big and fenced and great for Jake, our dog. But the best part was the barn and cows on the other side of the fence. I could have city or country by changing which window I looked out.

The house was great. It had big bedrooms with big closets. All the bedrooms were upstairs, except Sam had a room in the basement. The kitchen was at the back of the house--no one could see if it was a mess unless they were specifically invited to that room. It had a formal living and dining room and a wonderful family room with a fireplace. The basement was unfinished, but would have been perfect for a family room, game room and office for Dave. The master bedroom was over the garage on the opposite end of the hall from the kids rooms. The master bath was two rooms, the double sinks and a huge closet were separate from the toilet, shower and whirlpool tub. We had a window facing the front yard and the back yard so I could check on kids and dogs very easily. There was a laundry room right off the kitchen. There was a bar where the kids would sit and visit with me while I cooked or cleaned up. The alcove for the kitchen table was windows on three sides. The weather was wonderful all year long! Four seaons that were beautiful. As we drove through the Lexington area I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I never lost that feeling the whole four years we lived there. There are beautiful farms with white fences and stone walls and big trees and horses (colts in the spring). Fall had beautiful colors, winters were mild. We had snow every year we lived there, but it never lasted long. It has made living in South Dakota very hard because I know there are such good alternatives to the yucky winters here (yesterday the high for the day was -3, up one degree from the high of -4 the day before). The house had lots of closets. We had sweet bay magnolias in the front yard--they smell heavenly. I don't think I could have designed a house that better met our needs at the time. I could write pages about so many things that I liked about that house.

But I also have to mention some things that made living in Kentucky so wonderful. The people were awesome--southern hospitality is alive and well. The food is great--I gained a lot of weight living there. We had friends that we did things with a lot--get togethers just for fun, celebrate holidays. They say Kentucky is full of beautiful women and fast horses (sometimes it is twisted to beautiful horses and fast women) and we thought the people and the animals were beautiful. We loved our ward, we loved being the only ward in our building (after we had lived there for a while), Dave loved his job--it just seemed like all the problems and complaints I had ever had in other places were answered by the move to Kentucky. The biggest standard-of-living increase we ever had was with this move and Dave made exactly the same amount of money as when we left Massachussetts. The cost of living was so much lower: house prices, utilities, groceries, taxes, car insurance, etc. It was a magical time that I remember so fondly and know that even if I could move back into the same house things would never be the same. Most of our friends moved away, our great neighbors sold their house the same time we sold ours. Our kids were at a perfect age--past the hard work of babies, but we really hadn't got into the teen years with a vengeance yet. I went back to school--something I had wanted to do for a long time. We were a foster family for babies being adopted through LDS Family Services. It was a wonderful time in a wonderful house.