Dear Reader:

At the time, it was a great idea. I moved back home to Connecticut in 2001 to care for my mother and take a breather from Washington, where I had started my advice column. Who knew I would fall in love? And remarry? And have twins and another baby—all boys? Now I want to move back to DC with my new family, but finding a great house in a neighborhood that has good schools is giving us migraines.

Got any advice?

—Pining Away for DC

Carolyn Hax wants back in town.

“I miss it,” says Hax, who started Tell Me About It, her advice column, nine years ago in the Washington Post; now it’s syndicated in 210 papers. “I miss my friends. I loved my office at the Post. I’ve been writing out of a spare bedroom for five years.”

Now she needs bedrooms for herself and husband Ken Ackerman, a private-school administrator on leave, as well as for Percy and Jonas, three, and two-year-old Gus.

Hax, 39, has developed her column into a witty, wise, and often acerbic splash of reality for the lovelorn and emotionally entangled. What has she learned after reacting to internal and external turmoil for nine years?

“People make their deals,” she says. “A deal that one person makes is unthinkable to someone else. That doesn’t mean a thing. Life is about compromises. The happiest people are comfortable with their compromises.”

Hax would be comfortable in a four-bedroom house near a good nursery school. A Metro close by would be nice—but she’s willing to compromise.