2012 Grand Review: New House

I love summaries. So here's mine from 2012! I'm calling it a "grand review" because I'm going to break it up into several posts, rather than making it one obnoxiously long post.

After a ridiculously long wait of about three years, we sold our house in December of 2011, which propelled us into another long wait of home shopping. By April 2012, we closed on the new house and Jon began gutting the entire thing! Since he is amazing, and the hardest worker I know, he basically finished the house overhaul in six weeks, allowing us to move in by the end of May. 

It was crazy and chaotic and I realized I don't do well with that much crazy. I also discovered my most loathed paradox of life--sometimes when your dreams come true, rather than the expected feeling of elation, depression happens. The big, classic, letdown of something long dreamed about and idealized, becoming a reality--and reality is messy. I was caught unaware by this letdown, which maybe added to the depression, because frankly, I felt guilty that I wasn't elated and shouting praise to God every second for giving us what we wanted.  

Thankfully, finally, after six months of settling in, and wrestling with my inner crazy and life's paradox, I am truly soaking in the blessing of this place and enjoying it for all the marvelousness it truly is.

Throwing hammers into the wall for fun. Before tearing it down.

This boy gets the hard-work genes from his daddy! He loved helping!

Family Room: Before

Family room: after. With family in it.

My little art model-man helping me choose color schemes.

Living Room

Thanksgiving in our new home, and SO thankful!

The blessing of an amazing view and a pair of stunning pine trees in our own backyard!

Town Mouse, Country Mouse

This will be me--a town girl, living with country mice--if we get the house we have an offer on right now. The one I lost three hours of sleep over last night. The one that feels like a mountain retreat with a breathtaking peak view; that is completely, miraculously, in our price range.

It's been thirteen years since I've lived anywhere remotely country, probably about ten years since Jon was a ranch worker, riding a horse with a lasso (I'm imagining the lasso--not sure if that's totally true) herding Longhorn Cattle.

Our last house was so bug-free it was an event when we had a housefly inside. I'm certain this house will come with much more than that--spiders, beetles, woodpeckers, mice...

If we get this house, we will have what we think we want. Forest, meadow, acres, view, yet close enough to town to remain actively engaged with school, friends and family.

I might fall on the floor in mourning if this doesn't work out. I'm ready to embrace all that comes with country-living, including mice helping me put on my earrings.

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Hopefully the Last Post About Packing, Ever

I am DOG tired. Dog tired as in--I want to lay on my kitchen floor with my legs curled under me and my head on the floor and fall asleep in the sunshine.

This move has been wrecking me. In the past, Jon and I get all macho-tough-guy about moving and we're like, "We're going to ROCK this packing!" We get prideful, like packing snobs, because we think we are so good at packing. We have phases, systems, detailed labeling of boxes. And we're fast. We make the boxes our biatch, yo.

Not this time. This time I'm a sniveling little baby, who half the time is living in denial that packing is even an activity to do, and the other half I'm blatantly procrastinating by checking facebook 100 times a day and overdosing on TV in the evenings. I've been in some existential crisis over this moment in our lives. I won't go into it all, because I'd rather be laying on the floor, but for a while I was stumped about why I felt so crazy about this move. Stumped because we have really wanted this move to happen. Selling our house is good for so many reasons. Yes, packing and moving stinks for anyone, but still, why the existential crazy-crisis? I think I've figured it out.

I had been working so hard to order my life to make room for art and writing, yet still play with my family and friends, all while having a clean house. I was fighting for it, and succeeding sometimes. To me, it was all about order, and packing up a house to move to a yet-to-be-discovered location, screamed loudly in my ears, disorder. I'm afraid our fuzzy future and chaos is going to steal my creativity and my time to invest into that part of myself.

Somehow, just by recognizing this fear, I've been able to release it a bit. I have to stop being so dependent on order and comfort and predictability. I guess I thought I had a handle on that because of the nature of Jon's work, but apparently I'm not at the master level of openness yet. My friend Michele reminded me of Ann Voskamp's physical motion that helps in the act of letting go. Clenched fist, opening and releasing that which we hold tightly. I may or may not have paced around my house doing this over and over. Okay, yes I did. While deep-breathing like a bulldog. :)

Now I'm going back downstairs to finish packing the kitchen. I'm still going to keep my labeling system:

All-caps in the upper left hand corner of the box. KITCHEN.
Listed below it in small-caps, all the contents in the box.

Don't make me let go of that!


***Bulldog Illustration

I lost it. Then I got it back.

Advent, that is. And my sanity.

We were tearing our house apart, preparing to move on December 8th. Then our buyer's buyer's loan got weird, then okay, but we won't move for two more months. I say I "lost" Advent because I felt like I didn't have room in my head to move our house and peacefully reflect on Christ's birth through anything that took planning and intentionality.

Now that I've regained my presence of mind after freaking out about our contract falling apart, I've taken some big breaths, stopped packing and started enjoying--CHRISTMAS!!

In the last couple days we've:
Decorated a little tree
Decorated our big tree
Listened to an obnoxious amount of Christmas music
Read Christmas stories by the light of the tree a couple times--with lots of blankets and stuffed animals
Drove around looking at Christmas lights
Made a gingerbread house
Played a lot with the "little people" nativity set

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around how to practice Advent with our kids since they are at a great age to begin this, but it's a new tradition for me. I'm drawn to it because I love the idea of preparing mind and heart before the actual holiday celebration. So far, I have a couple books of poetry that I've been reading and reflecting on myself:
Accompanied by Angels by Luci Shaw and A Cry Like a Bell by Madeleine L'Engle

I think I need some candles? Some specific scriptures to read with the lighting of those candles on specific nights? I know we've missed like half of Advent already, and I know it only takes is a quick Google search to figure out what to do, but I'm still reveling in the freedom to celebrate Christmas in our house one last time--and the feeling of sanity.

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Goodbye, House

In less than a month we will move out of our house. Over the past years when talking about the idea of moving I've said things to friends like,

"It's just a house, I'm not crazy attached to it, I'll be fine when we move."

"It's not like it's our dream-home, it's a great house, but when we move, I won't be crushed."

"It's a roof and walls."

That was my idealistic, unattached, overly-positive self talking. Now that moving is a near reality, I'm trying to allow myself to honestly feel the transition and all it means. It means leaving the place I've watched my babies grow out of their babyhood and into childhood. These walls encase precious memories of playing sports in the living room with my son, dancing in the kitchen, playing pirate ship in the loft. The floors have been witness to both kids' first steps, wrestling matches with Daddy, games of hide-and-seek, potty training. The roof has sheltered all kinds of noise, lullabies sung late in the night, countless boy sound effects, parties with friends, Jon and I living life together and weathering storms together. During our longest storm of the "never-ending job hunt", our kitchen seemed to be the setting for many moment of truth conversations where one would bolster the other with, "it's going to be okay" and "don't loose hope".

In reality, I am leaving a roof and walls for a different set. This house hasn't done anything another house won't be able to do in the future, but this has been a dream-house for me. I've lived out dreams in this house. I've grown my own dreams for myself and my family while living in this space. This house is unique in the time we've lived and loved under it's shelter. And for that, I'm sad to say goodbye. Now to start packing...
And try not to freak out...

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Airplanes: A love story

After a year and a half we have a contract on our house and we will move into a different house in another part of our city. We've lived here for over five years and one thing I will miss deeply is living under a flight pattern for our city airport.

When I was a girl and my family was shopping for a new home, I recall two big rules for choosing a good location: 1. Not backing to a busy street. 2. Not near an airport.

I've since learned rule #2 does not apply to me because the sound of an airplane rumbling toward our house sends me flinging curtains aside and shouting, "airplane! come look!", every time. 

I think this love came upon me by proxy through my toddler Jack a few years ago.  Like many toddler boy fascinations--construction trucks and cars--airplanes were one of them. We would gawk in wonder, time after time, pointing up. "Ah-plane", he called them. Now that he is five and Nora is two, and not as taken by them as he was, my love for planes endures and is outlasting even their wonder.

I've been wondering why. Why, after seeing maybe hundreds of airplanes fly by in the past five years, do I still look with anticipation to see what is flying by?  I keep rolling metaphors around in my head trying to pinpoint the reason for my endearment. I feel like my adoration is deep and subconscious. So far, I have enough reasons to start an entire blog on airplane love, so I'll try to summarize. Ready?  This is going to be one of those "write to figure it out" experiences for me.

I love the sound, the power of jet engines zipping souls through the air in encapsulated safety.
I love their lines and the gray silhouette against the sky. Blue and Gray.
I love what they represent in my memory: vacation, adventure, the world.
I love riding in them and seeing the ground below as a quilt.
I love the history of their invention and development.
I could go on...and on...like I said--airplane blog.

Airplanes, to me, are moving art merged with scientific marvel in my favorite canvas, the sky. When I look at the sky, in any state, my soul stirs. The variegated blue inspires creative thinking. Gray churning clouds remind me of my powerlessness, and conversely, God's power. Like a canvas, the sky is often a starting place for me in prayer. Airplanes flying past my house pull my eyes upward to the sky, reminding me. I remember God is present and surrounding. They remind me of God's immensity and how He gifted humanity with creativity and ingenuity enough to create something so intuitively illogical as a giant hunk of metal floating weightlessly.

Airplanes are part of my scenery, mixed with my natural surroundings. We live deep in suburbia where the minimal vegetation is still young and tiny. We sit on a slight hill overlooking a sea of rooftops with a backyard void of plants. Being a naturalist at heart (but now pretty citified if I'm honest), what I love about our setting is when I look out any window in our house, I see three quarters sky. Rooftops and sky.

A plane's low hum draws my eye to the sky. I am reminded to dream big, to pursue the impossible in my own world, like the Wright Brothers did in theirs. I'm reminded that God surrounds me in my pursuit of living and loving; there always in the endless blue, gray and black.

Our new home will most likely be away from my beloved place under the air-traffic. I guess some airplane art on my walls will be a tiny consolation for me.

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