By ALEXANDER SIMONE

Staff writer

When Karson Taulbee and her family decided to move to Marion from Colorado, she was looking to be closer to family.

With a 2-year-old daughter and 4½-month-old son, it was important to Taulbee that her children grow up around their relatives.

The move happened recently, but it was something the family had been debating since daughter Lilly was born.

“When you have a small child and don’t get to see your family very much, they miss large gaps where they change so fast,” Taulbee said. “That probably was when we started thinking about heading back this way.”

Now that they live in Marion, Lilly enjoys being able to see her cousins and play with goats at her grandparents’ farm.

Lilly has a big yard to play in for the first time in her young life. She already is taking advantage of it by sledding and building snowmen at the new house.

Their community of Windsor, Colorado, near Fort Collins, was small for its area but quickly growing, Taulbee said.

Marion is a stark contrast from life in Windsor, where the Taulbees had a very small yard and saw limited rain. Windsor’s annual rainfall is 15 inches, while Marion averages 34.6 inches a year.

“Everybody’s irrigating a desert so their grass grows,” Taulbee said. “At some point, it’s like OK, why have we decided to do this as a society?”

Taulbee and her husband, Peter, planned their move quickly when they finally chose to return to Kansas. She gave birth to her son in August, the family spoke with a real estate agent to sell their Colorado home in mid-September, and they were living in Marion before Thanksgiving.

“It’s an easier time to move with your kids when they’re little,” she said. “Well, to a point.”

The Taulbees rarely made it back for Christmas when they lived in Colorado because Peter worked at a hospital.

“It’s been great just because we have been back here,” she said. “Since we moved out there, we had only been back for one Christmas, and we usually would come back at New Year’s to celebrate Christmas.”

Peter is licensed as a psychiatric nurse practitioner but plans to go back to medical school, which increased the importance of having relatives nearby, Taulbee said.

“It all kind of came about at once,” she said. “To swing med school when you have a family, you need a little more support than when you don’t have a family.”