This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of American Family Insurance . All opinions are 100% mine.
The wonderful thing about dreams is there is no limit to the number of dreams you can have. There are a plethora of dreams floating around our house. All it takes is for someone to grab one and run with it to start making it a reality.
A couple of months ago I shared about our big backyard garden makeover. It was a dream I’d had for years, and we were finally making it happen. Then, about a month ago a couple other dreams decided to push their way to the front and it meant we had to put the backyard garden plan on hold.
My husband finally received a job offer, and he’s already on location being the rockstar that he is proving he was the right choice for the job. Another step forward on career and financial dreams. However, now we are in the process of relocating across the state of Nebraska. Moving from the East to the Southwest of the state. It’s going to be a big change switching from big city mentality to small town life, but we’ll make it work.
Over the past month we’ve packed up almost our entire house and stuffed it into a 20×40′ storage unit. This is yet another reminder of my dream to declutter the house and become a minimalist. The kids and I have spent several hours in the car with our dog, cats, and guinea pig while the house was shown to potential buyers, and eventually the home inspectors and appraiser to move forward on the sale.
All the while we were working on the sale of our current home, we were also shopping for a new house in our new town. We’ve made a couple of five hour one way trips down there to tour the homes for sale, as well as fill out paperwork while we were there. Now, beautifully updated house built in 1900 is almost ours! Check out this beautiful bay window area in our soon to be new living room.
Between the uncomfortably long outings, the massive amount of deep cleaning, as well as the time I’ve been unavailable to the kids while focusing on buying, selling, and all of the paperwork involved I’d say the girls have earned some major rewards.
DreamKeep Rewards
Luckily American Family Insurance has us covered with their DreamKeep Rewards program. Thanks to all of the work we’ve done to keep our current home and community in good condition, we’ve earned enough points to cash out on some fun rewards.
Here are just a few rewards available in our current area.
Personally, I’m looking at redeeming that Family Fun Pass. It looks like the perfect way for us to enjoy some quality family time and cash in on some much needed rest and relaxation.
DreamKeep Rewards is available to anyone in Nebraska and Illinois, so, since we’re staying in Nebraska for our relocation I decided to do a bit of research to see what rewards are available in our community. I was pleased to see there were options for rewards in our new community too!
We’ll miss our first home. It’s hard to say good bye to something you worked so hard to build and turn into a reality, but moving on to the next chapter of our lives and taking on new dreams is a reward in itself.
We’ll get back to the backyard plan, too. It’s just going to look a bit different. That’s the special thing about dreams and #DreamKeepRewards, you never know what’s going to happen, but it’s always going to be good.
How will you reward yourself for working hard toward your dreams?
Having too much clutter is like a dark burden on my mind. We have so much stuff that our garage is full. We have moved around a lot and moving homes were the best time to declutter. But once we settle in a home, we start accumulating things again. We find it difficult when we have two kids. Any tips on how you maintain a minimalistic life?
Great question! It’s one I’m still working on. We’re trying out different techniques, such as only bringing into the home and keeping what we truly want/need. We’re still working on weeding through everything in the house, and with the move we got rid of a lot, but I know there is still more work to do to get to the minimalist lifestyle we’re striving for. For decluttering we work on getting rid of things we haven’t touched in the past year, and we also try to get rid of 2 things for every one we bring in. That last one we’ll only do as long as it makes sense. After a while we wouldn’t have anything else to get rid of! But it does at least help us consider if what we want to buy is really something we want or just think we want. Good luck on your decluttering!
Great article!
Sometimes, it takes one of life’s major events for us reevaluate our priorities and take stock of the direction we are heading in.
Moving across the town, state or even the world can really help us refocus our efforts and realign our values with our day to day activities.