House Hunting...

For those of you who don't know, or just come here infrequently, I've been wanting a house for awhile. John and I will have been married 17 years on March 4, and over the years we have lived in all kinds of places...Let's see...apartments, rental houses, duplexes, townhomes..we owned our mobile home up in Pierz, and 13 years ago we owned a home in Winter Park, Florida for almost a year. That house was terrific, and to this day, I wish we'd held on just a little bit longer and tried just a little bit harder to hold on to it... maybe we'd still be there.
But I guess that wasn't meant to be, or at least not then anyways. Sometimes you just have to do things the hard way. And finally, I think we've paid our dues...I started back to work last summer and between the two of us, it appears people actually want to give us a loan, lol...I would always tell John to just give it a try, to look into it, but he always hesitated, thinking that the credit wouldn't be good enough, not ready yet, etc...and then it was...
I've wanted to get the boys a home of their own for as long as we've been down here. Up in Pierz, our house was the social house, the one where everyone played, traipsed through, etc...where moms would stop by at the end of the day and collect their little ones. Then we moved here, and don't get me wrong, the boys really like this area, but now we're the ones always going off to someone else's house to hang out or spend the night. We just don't have the room without everybody tripping over each other. When the boys heard we were going to be house hunting, they got excited..their own rooms?
Yet now that the thing I have wanted for so long appeared possible, I got panicky. I am a natural born panicker and I really hate that about myself. I can appear in control, but if something goes wrong I am immediately a wreck. Tonight for example, my new schedule at work showed me working a couple of hours I normally don't have to. It's not a big deal, but of course that's all I thought about the rest of the night. Grrrr....Wherever I go I find a new thing to worry about, then I move onto the next place and start again...Do my neighbors like me? Will I get a certain day off 5 months in advance? How did Z do on his test? I give myself such fits, not to mention driving my husband nuts.
So as I began to panic, John started panicking. We didn't know what to do about a lease, what kind of house we wanted (townhome, twinhome, bank-owned home, etc...), and everything else that goes with it. We looked at various homes and as we did our lease started to run out. Finally, we decided to sign a new 6 month lease so that will give us the summer to start looking, to get everything done right..I hope...or are we just putting everything off so that we will get all stressed out again later? In the meantime our direct neighbor is moving out in the next couple of weeks and the fun begins again, wondering who will replace her... will they have pets? kids? Did I mention I panic much....I guess I am just wondering if there is something in me that can't handle true happiness, if I just self-destruct when things get too good? Was it all talk about the house? Why did I balk when I had the chance right now?