In 2020 we decided to sell our house near downtown Austin and move to the suburbs of Austin. I have never had such an emotional move! In one sense, it was the end of a chapter of our lives. (I look back at photos from those years and they’re often of Nate and I cooking together, making interesting cocktails, and exploring Austin! Ahhh!!)
But this new chapter of life has been so sweet. We decided to move because we wanted a yard, a safer street for our boys, and a neighborhood community of friends. Check, check, and check. I absolutely love living in the suburbs of Austin.
It takes me about 15 minutes to drive to downtown Austin. When I’m coming home, I feel a sense of peace and quiet when I enter our neighborhood. It feels like a little oasis. There are lots of live oak trees, not much traffic, and I can feel my shoulders relax a bit. It’s such a change from our old home, where we lived steps from South Congress and our home was nestled in between three other houses, one of them a permanent Airbnb residence for bachelorette parties..haha.
I loooove having a backyard. It’s even better than I imagined! I love pouring a beer, sitting in the backyard, and watching the sunlight in the trees. It’s the best therapy.
Milo loves playing back there, so in those dreaded hours between nap time and dinner (4-6 pm…why are you so dang difficult, every day??) I’ll let him run around in the backyard while Dayton bops in his exersaucer.
We also have twice the square footage now. It was a little bonus for moving a bit further away from the hubbub, but our house is nearly twice as large now that we’re in the suburbs! What do we even do with all that space? Well, to be honest, there’s still a lot of unused space in our home…but I have a feeling we’ll utilize it as the years go on. (I’m definitely not against empty closets and unused garage shelving for now, though. It feels nice!) But the bigger home means we can enjoy things like a garage, a laundry room, a permanent guest room for when my family visits from Dallas, and office spaces for both Nate and myself. It’s such a luxury.
But for SURE the best thing about our move to the suburbs? Meeting all the families with young children. We somehow lucked out and moved to a street that has young children in nearly every home. It still boggles my mind how many kids there are living on our street!
In the evenings we’ll all be outside playing, and the adults will typically gather on someone’s driveway while the babes are raiding a garage of toys. I’ll sometimes go back inside and grab a beer and a Yeti koozie and enjoy chatting with my friends while I watch Milo play with his friends, and Dayton just sits in his stroller and gazes around at all the action.
Actually, I just realized that within the past year, 4 women on my street have been pregnant (including me with Dayton), so that’s 4 new babies in 12 months. It’s such a fun place to live for this phase of life.
I can’t even believe how much fun we’re having living in the ‘burbs. Of course I miss certain aspects of living closer to downtown, like walking to coffee shops or easy meals-to-go from amazing restaurants. But the truth is that Nate and I aren’t in that phase any more. We don’t get to go out and enjoy quiet meals together, and so even if we lived near all of those amazing restaurants, I wouldn’t be able to frequent them.
Is it hard to do food blogging now that I live further away from Austin? Not at all! I actually think it’s easier, because I’m more intentional with my restaurant visits. I batch them and visit 3 or 4 places in one evening. The hardest part about keeping up with visiting cool new places in Austin isn’t my location in the city…it’s coordinating breastfeeding and childcare.
PS: I often get asked where do all the families with young kids live in Austin? Well, all over! You can raise a family anywhere! I have found that there’s a large concentration of families in Georgetown and Round Rock, the two suburbs north of Austin. The northwest hills area is also popular for families because of the larger houses and lots. Westlake is really desirable for their school district, so lots of families with older children in middle school/high school love living there. And southwest Austin (Circle C, Shady Hollow, Oak Hill, all the way to Dripping Springs) are packed with families with young children.
PS: here’s a tour of our old home, and some thoughts about life with kids vs life before kids.
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