The Rankin Zoo 

Another day, another update. Who knows, maybe I’ll even post some pictures sometime soon.

Ever since Coral was born we have talked about where she might go to school when she’s older. B grew up in DC and went to private schools. I grew up in Reston (more or less) and went to public schools. I think we both have open minds about the options but we also have no first hand experience with the other way. Well, as Coral gets older we’ve been thinking more and more about our options. Even though we’re still a year away from kindergarten, if we wanted to go private school we’d have to start looking into the silly admission tests soon.

Anyway, we lived in Fairfax County, which generally has really good public schools. Our neighborhood elementary school was apparently pretty good but we had heard bad stories about the middle school. We lived very close to the City of Falls Church, which has a national reputation for it’s very small, independent school system. It seemed like it might be a good mix of the benefits of public and private schools.

We had been casually looking at houses in the City for a while and over time realized that unlike Fairfax County there wasn’t a lot of turn over in the City. We figured that there wouldn’t be many houses up for sale that fit what we were looking for so we got mentally prepared to move quickly if something popped up. We weren’t in a position to buy a new house before selling out old house, especially in this market.

As it turned out, a couple of months ago we saw a house that we liked. We made a mad scramble to get our house on the market and got very lucky with the timing - someone happened to be looking for a house just like ours right as we listed it. The house sold in 24 hours. We turned around and put an offer in on the house we wanted in Falls Church. Now, I’m writing this blog post from our new house! Wow.

To make a long story longer (just like yesterday), this house isn’t exactly new. It’s actually two houses stuck together. The first house was built in 1871 and the rest was added about 10 years later. In 1983 the house was moved a few blocks from its original location to its current location. Speaking of location, we really like it here. We can walk to the community center, park, library, shops, restaurants, and the metro. I can walk to work. The neighbors seem really nice.

We’re still getting settled in and we do miss our old house. We bought that house in 2000 and I lived in that house longer than I lived in any other house in my life. We did a lot of work on it over the years getting it just the way we wanted it - and now we’re gone. We have tons of memories in that house and I think we’ll always remember it fondly. But, with two rug rats running around (okay, one running and the other just lying there for now) it was getting a bit cramped.

The new (old) house is still a disaster as we try to get all our junk stuff moved in. Once we’re a little more settled in we’ll start having people over. Of course, if you’re up for carrying boxes around you could probably come visit sooner!