When I met my now husband he lived in a 3 bedroom house in the suburbs of Boston with two of his college friends, even though he was pushing 30. Eventually, one roommate moved out & I moved in. Living with two boys sounds fun, I promise you as the person who cleaned the bathrooms, it was not.
I had worked as a nanny for almost 10 years and thought for sure that would be my career until we were ready to have kids of our own. I knew when that happened that I would quit and stay home to raise them; spending every day barefoot in the yard, hopping between the park or story time, and squishing their chunky little faces. I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d quit nannying before then. But life comes at you hard and fast sometimes and the career I’d spent a decade of my life building no longer brought me joy. I was burnt out and felt like I spent so much time making sure other people’s lives and homes ran smoothly that I never had time for my own. Throw in a traumatic life event or two and some crippling anxiety, and I quit my entire career without a back up plan. I had no idea what I was going to do now but I knew that I had to figure it out.
I landed on my feet, as you usually do when you take a leap of faith, and got a job working from home in global Support for a pharmaceutical software company that specializes in randomization and supply management for clinical trials. Did I know anything about software or clinical trials? Absolutely not. Had I ever worked a corporate job before? Definitely not. How I convinced my boss to hire me is still something I don’t understand, even 3 years later.
A year passed since I got that job and then I married my best friend (gag, I know that’s such a cliche but it’s true). Our lease was going to be up in a few months and we knew we were ready to get away from the roommate phase of life. We could stay in our current house and live a totally boring suburban life as cogs in the corporate wheel, or we could move to NH for a slower paced, community based life. Spoiler alert: we went with the option that lets us see the mountains from our driveway.
We moved to NH in September 2023 and immediately felt like we belonged. My husband runs the farmer’s market here, the librarians in town know us by name, I share cookie recipes with the guy who runs the dump and we live directly in the center of town (which looks like the center of a snow globe).
The GingerSnap Homestead 