Home.

Everybody who knows me knows that I have grown up loving my family and the greater Seattle area, but that I have always had dreams to travel the world and live in foreign lands, marry a German man or something romantic like that.  The thing that I'm realizing now is this: traveling is a great idea, but I can't bare the thought of living far away from my family.  I know that I will have my own husband and children someday in the future and they will be my focus, but I absolutely do not want to be far from my immediate family.  Also, Provo just has absolutely nothing on Seattle or Gig Harbor.... or the rest of western Washington, if I'm being honest.  This is a good ol' fashion case of "don't know what you got till it's gone."

Right now, I am approximately 900 miles from my family, and I hate that for more than a few reasons.  Why?  Because I'm missing my little brothers and sister growing up.  All the little things that parents just eat up, I eat up, too.  It's my mom, too.  She's one of my very best friends, and not getting to talk to her and tell her every little detail of my day is annoying.  How many people do you know that call their mom to scream about a kiss or just a smile from across the room?  That's me.  I adore her.  I'm not saying that everything is perfect and hunky-dory, but it's pretty fantastic.  I digress... Moving on.

Just about my whole life I've been close to my mom's side of the family.  Oma and Opa live ten minutes from my home, Uncle Hans and his family just five, and Aunt Heike and her family live less than an hour away.  It's been that way for the last ten years.  It's perfect that way.  My dad's family, on the other hand, are not like that.  Still close and full of love and friendship, but there's less intimacy there.  I want something like my mom's family.  I love my siblings, I want to be near them.  FOREVER.  Got that?  good.

Now, after that big jumble of words, I just want to spill a big dream of mine onto paper, or, well....computer.  Here's the short and sweet version:  I want to live in Seattle on Queen Anne Hill and teach ballroom dance at PBD (I know, it's a stretch), and be close to family.  And now for a more detailed version:  I want to be close to family, and I do want to teach ballroom dance somewhere, and PBD is just about the greatest place in the world to do that, so that means that I need to live close, so I pick the beautiful city of Seattle.  Should I mention that I want to fall in the greatest, deepest, most lovely kind of love possible with a beautiful tall, dark, and handsome man who happens to dance (in my dreams we are smooth champions together) and wants to team-teach with me?  It could happen.  Actually, I'm fairly certain it will someday, even if my "tall, dark, and handsome" looks an awful lot like Danny DeVito (which is a definite possibility).

Okay, so who knows if I'll ever be smooth champions with Danny, if I'll ever actually marry someone who wants to teach or even dance, or if I marry someone who needs to live in Wisconsin because of work, or if my family will even still live in Washington.... but for right now, it's a lovely dream, especially when my nights are full of less-than-stellar nightmares.

Ps.  Just for reference sake, let's call this dream "Plan A".