Homes I've Had

21 different dwellings in 35 years.  This is only counting the places where I have lived for one month or longer and have received mail.  I have moved an average of every 1.7 years in my life.  That number seems a little scary to me, especially considering how not great I am at moving.  I KNOW that this explains my current yearning to buy a house and settle down in one spot for a while.  These are the places I have lived:
1. Sandborn, IN: This is the house that I was actually born in and where I lived until I was almost 4 years old.  I hardly remember it at all other than a few of those vague sitting at the top of the stairs pictures in my mind.  I could however tell you the entire layout of the house for some reason.
2. Yorktown House: I turned 4 in this house and lived there until I was 11.  I only remember my parents fighting in this house, and it was the setting of their divorce.  The house was lovely, but definitely tainted by all the sad memories I associate with it.  There were many many happy times too, like the garden in the backyard and the awesome tree for climbing.  We had a street full of kids our age to play with and a dead-ended street to ride our bikes down.  It was a great spot really.
3. Muncie House: From 11-13 I lived in this house with my Dad, Stepmom #1, Brother, and Stepsister.  This was the house where I got to come home after school and be by myself.  This was the house where my dad redid our closets so that we could crawl from ours into our brother's.  This was the scene of my greatest and worst prank ever.
4. Yorktown House: When Dad & Stepmom #1 decided we needed more room, we moved to this house.  I lived there from 13-18, and had a humongous 13'x13' room all to myself.  This is where I hatched my plans for the future.  This was where my brother got kicked out a mere 2 years after we moved in.  My last year in this house was spent alone with my Dad, who started my senior school year by getting a divorce from Stepmom #1.
5. Minneapolis Dorm: The start of college.  I met lifelong friends here.  I did debaucherous things that should probably be forgotten, but really just make fun stories to tell amongst old friends.  I learned how to take care of myself away from my parents, and learned to live far away and love it. I came home at Christmas to be in Dad's 3rd wedding.  I knew I would never go back to house #4 to live again after that.
5. Florida House: The summer between my first and second years of college in MN, I lived in Florida with my Aunt and Uncle.  I worked 2 crappy jobs, made friends, and had a great time.  I wrote loads of bad poetry by their pool and smoked secret cigarettes.  I learned so much about myself that summer, and seriously fed my love of writing and travel.
6. Minneapolis Dorm: My 2nd dorm in MN was also so much fun.  I had a great time living there and found myself in trouble with paying for school.  I was in denial, but would eventually figure out that I would have to come back home to IN.  I finished the school year and then moved into our...
7. Minneapolis House: I spent one summer living in this crappy little house with 6 bedrooms and 5 roommates.  We had a whole lot of fun and did very little other than that.  2 German friends came to visit us there, and we taught them about being poor American college students.  It was FUN.
8. Cadiz House: I moved from MN into my mother's house, where she still lives.  I sunk into the worst depression of my life and contemplated suicide.  I worked the worst jobs of my life and partied like it was my 3rd job.  I spent a month traveling abroad with my earnings, and finally figured out that I had to make a change for me.  So I moved into my Dad's...
9. Florida House.  I spent the summer living with my Dad in Florida.  He had moved into a new giant house and was in the process of divorce #3.  I dated a VERY handsome boy and spent many nights watching sunsets and drinking cocktails.  1 German friend came to visit me there and we went to the beach almost every day.  It was fun, but I knew I needed to get serious, so I moved into the...
10. Bloomington house.  5 of my friends were living in this house, so I moved in with them.  They were all getting ready to start their senior years of college, and I wanted to get back in the game.  I lived here for a summer, working and having fun before I moved in with my best friend to our...
11. Bloomington apartment. My first real apartment with just me and my best friend.  It was a basement apartment with horrible cream-ish carpet, but it was ours.  We made so many memories there! The next year my friend Robin moved in, and then I met Andy.  We got engaged in March and then in May I went to...
12. Norderney.  I worked as a waitress at a cafe on this German tourist island in the North Sea.  I didn't have a cell phone, and Andy could only call me on the house pay phone once a week typically if we wanted to talk.  It was a great summer, but I missed him so much. After 3 months I went...
13. Back to the same Bloomington apt, but with Andy living there now! We lived "in sin" with our good friend Heath in the other bedroom of the apartment. We got married the next summer and spent a month living in our friend Gavin's spare bedroom because of a lack of overlap in our leases.  Then we moved into...
14. Our married Bloomington apartment.  It was a tiny 1 bedroom, and it was all ours.  That next summer I went to live in...
15. My Berlin apartment in Kreuzberg.  It was a very odd apartment indeed, but I was there for research.  I lived with this guy named Jacob, but we never really got to be friends.  Oh well.  I was only there for 2 months and then I went back to our...
16. Married Bloomington apartment.  We spent that year gathering credits to graduate and applying to graduate school.  I got into CWRU, so we moved to our first...
17. Cleveland apartment.  It was the 2nd story of a house and really cute with great landlords...and then came winter when our heat just did NOT heat the apartment at all.  Seriously, it barely made it into the 50s inside most days and we had that baby cranked up to the max.  So the next year we moved to our...
18. Cleveland duplex.  It was HUGE.  We shared 5 bedrooms with another couple to keep costs down, and had an amazing first year there.  Annika was born at the end of that first year there.  The second year we lived with another friend who had a baby while there, not in the house, but a new baby came home to live there with ours.  That next summer a different friend came to live with us, and by the end of the year I was pregnant with Mayzie.  The beginning of our 4th year in that house she was born, and then the real madness began of me writing funding proposals and a dissertation prospectus without any childcare.  It got done is all I'm going to say about that. So then we moved into our...
19. Berlin Apartment.  It was in Zehlendorf.  It was tiny: around 600 square feet.  It was owned by a lady who was very particular about her things, which made me pretty much constantly nervous about ruining anything.  But it was great in the end.  We spent a year there, and then moved back to...
20. Andy's parents' house.  Andy was there a month before I arrived with the girls.  We then all stayed for about 2 weeks, until we found our own place...
21. Our Evansville Apartment.  By the time we move out, we will have been here for two years.  It's a nice apartment, but we're ready to be homeowners at this point.  We want a place of our own.
The catch right now: we aren't exactly sure where we're going to be living next year.  Wherever it is, it will be great.  I'm sure of that mostly because I know who will be there.
So that's it...those are the 21 different places I've lived in my 35 years.  Appropriate for the 21st of February don't you think?
How many different places have you lived in your life?
Does this list scare you too?