A big change

I can take one book of my list of must reads. The Urban Homestead. Not because I read it but because we will no longer classify as an "urban" homestead. Yep, we are goin country!
This has all happened really fast and I am still processing it all but by December (if all goes as it should) we will be moved in to a new home.
It started out as a discussion of possibly moving sometime in the future and quickly turned into looking at properties and then before we knew it we found "the one", made an offer, and should be closing on or before Nov 24th! Originally we wanted a little more square footage because when we purchased our current home we had three kids with no plans of any more. When our little man came along that complicated our bedroom situation forcing all three girls in one big room and him in the guest room. For now it works but looking to the future we can't see that working forever. The house we ended up finding and falling in love with did not fit everything we were looking for but we loved it anyway and couldn't pass it by. We were actually driving around looking at another house and about to go home when we saw the sign at the end of a dead end street. We drove up, parked in the driveway and got out to take a look around.
What we found was a quaint 1825 square foot home that sat on a beautiful acre and 1/4 on a quiet dead end street. At first I thought there was no way we could make that square footage work but once we looked around inside we saw the potential and fell in love with the property. It has three bedrooms upstairs and a den downstairs that will be our "master" bedroom. The other thing that we love is that this was the first house the kids were excited about. Up till this point any mention of moving was met with complete resistance from all our children. When they got out and looked at the yard and started playing and catching frogs they were asking if we could move to this house before we even saw the inside! We looked at a few other homes with more SF and even nicer insides but something kept drawing us back to this house.
We are excited to live in the country (but it's actually only 10 minutes from our current home and still close to shopping etc). We (and when I say we I mean the kids and I) already have plans to get chickens and they already are coming up with pony names. There have already been updates made to this 1980's split entry home (kitchen is beautiful) but there are lots of things we want to do to make it our own and we are both actually looking forward to that.
It is out of our current school district so we will have to try and get boundary exceptions because we really want them to stay at their current school with all their friends. There will be some sacrifice in making this move though and it really hasn't been easy for me to choose to leave. Some things I am really going to miss:
Having one of my best friends as a neighbor. Sending the kids next door to borrow a cup of sugar or whatever else I might need. All the storage space in our house and bed/bathroom size. Driving 5 minutes to the grocery store, dentist, pizza place, mall, gym, school, and Costco. The kids having so many friends to play with every day. Being surrounded by Christian neighbors who all have awesome kids. The bus stopping at our front door. Sitting at the park on a sunny day and visiting with a number of supportive neighbor ladies. Spur of the moment neighborhood BBQ's. Being available to help out with child care whenever a neighbor needs it. Impromptu community lunches for the kids in the park.
Although all this makes me so sad to go, I still have excitement about what the future at our new home holds. My neighbor said it well when she said "It will just be a new different."