Instead of downsizing, we bought a bigger house. Our family uses the space, even if cleaning is endless and bills are higher.
Many of his colleagues and our friends were downsizing, but we decided to buy a bigger house.
We wanted to plan for our future, and 10 years later, we're happy with our decision.
When my husband retired from the Navy, we were in our mid-40s and ready to settle into civilian life. While many of his colleagues were downsizing and preparing for their "empty nest" years, we were heading in the opposite direction.
We had waited to start a family until the last few years of his naval career so he wouldn't miss too much of their young lives. With two preschoolers at home, our lives weren't slowing down; they were picking up speed. So when it came time to decide where we wanted to settle down and what our future might look like, we did the unexpected: we bought a bigger house.
We wanted to set ourselves up for the future
At the time, we got a lot of questions: "Isn't that too much house?" "What will you do when the boys leave home?" and "Won't you just be downsizing in 10 years?" My husband was starting his second career as a teacher, and I work from home, so the extra space felt practical. After decades of having our plans dictated by the military, we were finally putting down roots — and we wanted room to grow. I also didn't want to move again.
We weren't just thinking about the little kids we had, we were thinking ahead to the teenagers and young adults they'd become. We wanted a house where they could have friends over, a backyard big enough to plant a garden and still have room to play, a workspace for me, and enough room so that we could all have privacy when we needed it. And with 42% of young adults living at home these days, we thought: why not plan for that now?
It took a year, but we found our home
We searched for a home that could serve us for the long haul — a place to raise kids and, eventually, age in place. We considered neighborhoods, school systems, healthcare facilities, and the number of bedrooms we'd need, but we also looked for features like a first-floor primary bedroom and laundry.
We cast a wide net, spending a year narrowing our options, scrolling through hundreds of listings, and visiting dozens of houses across three states before we finally found one that checked all the boxes. We were home.
Ten years later, with our boys now 13 and 15, I'm more convinced than ever that we made the right decision. The house that felt too big the day we moved in now feels just right. With their bedrooms upstairs, the boys have space to spread out, and we're not on top of each other.
During the pandemic, my husband and I must have said a hundred times, "I'm so glad we bought this house." Even now, during school breaks or sick days, there's enough room for everyone to retreat when they need quiet — including us.
It's not lost on me that we've given our kids a sense of permanence. This is only their second home, and it's the place they'll remember best. There's comfort in that, for them and for us. During my husband's Navy career, we were lucky to stay on the East Coast and only moved four times, but "home" was always more about being together than where we were. Now we have both.
We're in no hurry to move again
Of course, a bigger house comes with tradeoffs. The utility bills are higher. The cleaning sometimes feels endless. And no, we don't need this much space every single day. We occasionally discuss whether we might want to move somewhere smaller when the boys leave for college.
But knowing we have room for them if they need a place to land — whether between college and a first job, or to save money while getting on their feet — will likely keep us here. And when they eventually fly the nest for good, we'll still have a home that works for us until we're ready for the next chapter of our lives.
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Yahoo
a minute ago
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My youngest is off to college, but I reject the term 'empty nester'
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New York Times
4 minutes ago
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The Madden Sisters Don't Want to Be Institutionalized
One hot June night, Carrie and Kristy Madden sat in their modest home on the outskirts of Los Angeles waiting for their caregivers to arrive. Their living area hummed with fans and the patter of a Dodgers baseball game. 'What time are they supposed to be here today?' Carrie, 60, asked around 7. 'They didn't say,' Kristy, 64, answered. Muscular dystrophy had afflicted the sisters since birth, weakening the muscles in their trunks, arms and legs. In middle school, each could manage an awkward walk. Now neither could stand for more than a minute. Each woman had worked a full day that Thursday, writing emails, making phone calls and chatting with colleagues. But they needed help with the essentials of domestic living: bathing, dressing, cooking and cleaning. Neither could raise her elbows more than a few inches or drive to get groceries. Lifting a pot of water onto the stove was impossible for them, as was sweeping a floor. 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Gigi said, yawning. Carrie joked that she should make a flan. Kristy would remain in bed until Gigi arrived the next morning. If she wasn't sleepy, she might read a novel or watch a Japanese movie. But that Thursday, she, too, was exhausted. The night before, her sleep was troubled by a recurring nightmare. She was setting up a webinar for work, but the system kept glitching. An unseen crowd waited at their screens. Desperately, Kristy tried again and again to fix the problem — and failed. The nightmare, she guessed, was provoked by a real webinar she attended that day. It detailed the historic cuts that Congress planned for Medicaid as part of the One Big Beautiful budget reconciliation bill. Almost 20 million seniors and people with disabilities rely on Medicaid to meet their needs, but Congress intended to cut Medicaid's funding by $1 trillion over the next decade. 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The sisters grew up on the edge of Glendale in a family that included six children — three of them born with muscular dystrophy. Their parents worked in a plastics factory in Burbank. After they divorced, their father moved out of state and stopped paying child support. Their mother struggled to make ends meet, though she worked hard. In the late 1980s, she was diagnosed with cancer. Carrie began working after college as a receptionist for a local business and ultimately landed a job processing claims for Aetna-Prudential while she lived independently in a subsidized apartment with the help of an I.H.S.S. worker. Kristy, however, was essentially bedridden for years after her college graduation, wounded by a bad fall in the old family home, which was full of tripping hazards. One sibling died by suicide; the others left Los Angeles. As their mother battled cancer, she fell behind on her mortgage payments and property taxes. She and Kristy lived on Social Security payments, eating the cheapest meals they could find, often McDonalds or cups of freeze-dried noodles. Then Carrie's home health workers left California, and she hired her mother in their stead. Many states have H.C.B.S. programs that allow such family hires if the caregivers and consumers live in separate homes, an option that offsets the caregiving industry's persistent labor shortage. Carrie's mother loved the work, and the income saved her home from the bank. It also allowed her to buy more nutritious food. Kristy began healing faster. I.H.S.S. came to their rescue again a few years later, after their mother developed dementia. Physically, Kristy couldn't provide the proper care for her, nor could she live alone. So the family sold the house in Glendale, which their mother bought in 1965 for $23,000, and used the proceeds to pay for a three-bedroom home in Chatsworth, where the trio could live together. They spent roughly $65,000 renovating the new place so that all its rooms were wheelchair accessible. And after they moved in, they hired Gigi and Felix to care for them all. At first, they paid the Valbuenas directly, but when the money from the sale of their mother's house ran out, they could stay in their home only because I.H.S.S. covered the Valbuenas' wages. At that time, California, like most states, required H.C.B.S. recipients to hold less than $2,000 in assets, though the value of the recipient's home could be exempted. When retirement savings and other assets are exhausted, however, middle-class Americans may also use Medicaid for H.C.B.S. programs — as long as they can prove that their assets were spent on qualified health care and living expenses. 'Mom was so frightened of being put in a nursing home,' Carrie recalled. 'I never wanted her to be alone.' Because of Medicaid and I.H.S.S., she lived with her daughters until her final days. Now, Carrie and Kristy's own future looked less certain. Both women had jobs — Kristy was an organizer for the California In-Home Supportive Services Consumer Alliance, and Carrie directed the Aging & Disability Resource Connection program. Their house was paid off and held in a family trust. Together, the sisters earned roughly $6,000 a month, but their homeowners-association fees and utilities cost more than $900. That left them with about $5,000 a month to pay for all their essentials, including food and medical supplies not covered by Medicaid, as well as property taxes and maintenance on their home. 'At the end of every month, we're flying by the seat of our pants just waiting for the next paycheck,' Carrie said. The sisters didn't see how they could shoulder the expense of the roughly 80 hours of domestic work performed by the Valbuenas every week, which ran to nearly $7,000 a month. None of their siblings could step in to provide care; everyone was grappling with the difficulties of illness and aging. But without daily assistance, the sisters couldn't remain in their home. Their situation looked dire, yet Carrie knew better than most how good she and Kristy had it. Through her job, she was constantly exposed to older and disabled people who need help. She had spent hours on the phone earlier that day with people who were desperate: A 57-year-old woman with mobility issues and diabetes needed help finding any kind of shelter; she was living on the street. A 39-year-old with multiple sclerosis had a manual wheelchair that was falling apart and also needed housing. Carrie expected that the historic cuts to Medicaid would also translate into funding cuts for nursing homes and other pieces of the social-safety net. Within a couple of years, she feared, the people who called her office would be far more likely to wind up homeless. Early the next morning, Gigi unlocked the Maddens' front door and entered the house. 'Hello, dammit!' Carrie called, using one of their inside jokes as drove her wheelchair into the hall. 'Hello, dammit!' Gigi answered cheerfully. 'Good morning, Gigi,' Kristy added from her bedroom. Though Carrie couldn't dress herself completely, she was stronger than Kristy, and she could safely slide from her bed onto her chair alone. Carrie usually caught an early train into downtown Los Angeles for work, but this Friday both sisters were working from home. Still, Gigi helped Carrie wash and dress first, while Kristy waited in bed, watching the local news. 'What do you want for breakfast?' Gigi asked. 'Caviar,' Carrie answered. In the kitchen, Gigi laughed as she washed MeowMeow's bowl. She was a master of multitasking. She could dress both sisters, make them separate breakfasts, prepare their lunches, launder their clothes and linens, feed MeowMeow, clean the litter box, water the roses, run errands, clean the home's two bathrooms and its floors, unload the dishwasher and tidy both bedrooms all before 2 in the afternoon. For most of these services, I.H.S.S. paid Gigi $18.75 an hour, but some of the tasks, like watering the roses, she did out of kindness. This day, Gigi also left food prepared on the lowest shelf of the fridge, where the sisters could reach it while she worked at Walmart over the weekend. Gigi understood that their success in doing things alone was often a matter of inches. Food left on second shelf in the refrigerator might as well not exist; they could never reach it. Carrie could get in and out of bed alone only if Gigi left her sheets, nightgown and dressing stick arranged just so. After Carrie was settled at her desk, answering work emails and nibbling peanut-butter toast, it was Kristy's turn. 'Gigi,' she called. Gigi entered Kristy's bedroom with a broom in her hand. While she swept, Kristy sat up in bed and used her dressing stick — a wooden pole about the length of an arm with a metal hook on the end — to manipulate the joystick on her wheelchair. Nudging it this way and that, she turned the chair 180 degrees and lined it up next to her bed. Kristy relished anything that boosted her independence. But this trick, which Carrie had taught her, was risky. The dressing stick could get stuck and send the wheelchair speeding away. Kristy felt safe doing it only with Gigi nearby. When Kristy had the chair in place, she slowly, carefully, slid back onto her wheelchair. Then she drove into the bathroom, where Gigi helped her wash and dress for work. A few weeks later, President Trump signed the Big Beautiful Bill into law. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the act will reduce federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over a decade. This change will most likely hurt home- and community-based services, said MaryBeth Musumeci, a professor of health policy at George Washington University. 'When you take this much money out, states have a limited menu of what they can cut to balance their budgets,' she said. 'Finding your savings, you're going to be looking at cutting optional services.' An analysis by H. Stephen Kaye at the University of California, San Francisco, found that every state and the District of Columbia cut spending on H.C.B.S. programs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, either by dropping per-beneficiary spending or by paring the number of beneficiaries served. It was too soon for the sisters to know how the bill would affect them in California. But Kristy tried to stay positive. 'The way you keep going when you have a disability is you think about the most bright thing and you cling to it for dear life,' she said. So she and Carrie held fast to the idea that if they kept their jobs, reduced their caregiving hours to a bare minimum and poured all their income into its cost, they might persuade Gigi and Felix to keep helping them. The sisters knew how to subsist on next to nothing. They'd done it before. Yet it wasn't clear that this plan could work. I.H.S.S. also provided the Valbuenas with health insurance and other benefits. Felix was recently diagnosed with diabetes. If their work with the Maddens shrank, the Valbuenas might need to find other jobs that provided them with health care, and the demands of their new employment could reduce their ability to help the sisters, no matter how genuine the affection between the two families. Replacing Gigi and Felix could also prove tricky. It was hard to hold on to reliable caregivers, the sisters knew, when you couldn't pay for at least 40 hours a week. Carrie was undeterred. 'I'm going to find a way to get to work,' she said. 'If it kills me, I'll find a way to get up in the morning.' When she lost in-home services for several months during her late 20s — her salary rose just high enough to disqualify her for I.H.S.S. — she focused on maintaining a professional appearance while resigning herself to the increasing dirt and mess in her apartment. But Carrie was 60 now; age and muscular dystrophy had sapped more of her strength. She could no longer open a jar on her own or pull her pants all the way up to her waist. Pushing herself to the breaking point carried serious risk. She fractured her back in her late 30s when she fell while standing in a bathroom alone, and the injury took years to heal. Realistically, she understood that determination might not be enough. 'If I can't get dressed in the morning, I don't see how I'm going to continue working,' she admitted. 'And that's the craziest thing about this — that I'm a taxpaying citizen because I have I.H.S.S., and you take that away from me and then I'm a greater burden to society.' Whatever happened, the sisters were adamant that they would do anything to avoid being placed in a nursing home. Rationally, the Maddens understood that there are institutions where residents are looked after with affection and care. When their mother's sister became a ward of the state, she was placed into a facility where the staff were kind and attentive. She made friends there and took excursions into the neighborhood, using pocket money to buy cookies. Because she loved coffee, the staff let her drink a fake version all day, enjoying a nonstop tea party. But Carrie never forgot the facility that her aunt was moved to after she was hospitalized. Carrie had trouble entering it because the front was not wheelchair accessible, so she got a delivery man to let her use a side door. Inside, she found no staff at the nurses' station, no staff on the floors. Someone somewhere banged tunelessly on a piano. She passed through a large room where people in their 20s and 30s were lined up in wheelchairs. They seemed perfectly healthy, but they looked numb. They were silent, not even talking with one another. Finally, she found a nurse to show her the room where her aunt was staying. The beds were packed together so tightly that Carrie could not get her wheelchair close. 'I love you,' she called out to her aunt. Carrie wanted to hold her hand. But nobody would help her adjust the beds properly, and her aunt never responded. Outraged and heartbroken, Carrie left. The next day, Kristy called the facility for an update and was told that their aunt had died overnight. When I asked Carrie if she would go back to the facility with me, she refused. It had been some 20 years since she was inside, but she never wanted to see it again.
Yahoo
4 minutes ago
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Air traffic control team members outraged after shocking image leaks from annual union trip: 'Needs to be investigated'
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