All Packed Up and Nowhere to Go

Today is moving day. The day we have been planning for the last month and a half. The day we were supposed to move in to our new home.

Unfortunately we are still here.

The bank had issues.

So now it will probably be another two weeks until we close. I wish I was unpacking. But instead my house is half-way packed and everything I want is in a box (hmmm. . . except for that ice cream. Hmmm . . .)

So we are sitting here in limbo . . . waiting.

For probably another two weeks.

Apparently no one explained summer break to my kids

Today was the last day of school. How do my children celebrate?

By spending all afternoon doing this:

After struggling all year to get Alan to do homework he decides he wants to do it for fun. Seriously. I didn't even suggest the activity. In fact I finally had to tell them to stop doing homework so that we could have dinner. Alan also decided to read 4 books today for the library's summer reading program. It used to be killer to get him to read one a day.

I guess it's only work if someone makes you do it.

The Wall

When we moved into our current home from our last apartment there was a picture I didn't take, but I wish I did. It would been a picture of a pile of sticks next to our front door. Alan was two at the time, and whenever we would take walks he would look for sticks. He would find one early on and then soon he would be carrying one in each hand. When he found a third he would drop one and pick up the next. He always had sticks with him when we got home, but I had made the rule of no sticks in the house, hence the pile by the door. Every day it grew larger. When we left our apartment for the last time, I looked longingly at the pile. Each stick was a special to me. It represented his two year old self. I knew he would grow out of it and the pile would never really return.

I think I skip many of those moments; piles of sticks that look like junk but are in fact part of my children growing up. This time I managed to get a picture of Alan on the wall. It started a couple years ago when I was scared that Alan would fall down and break an arm. But Alan persisted to climb up and sit on the wall. He's gotten to know our neighbors better than we have. And our wonderful neighbors don't mind Alan at all. He always calls out "Hey neighbor!" and they respond in kind. Alan is the social one in our family and is frequently wanting to go see if the neighbors are out. Even when the neighbors aren't home Alan likes his place on the wall. When Alan has a problem with his temper and needs to calm down he knows this is where to go. He climbs up angry and climbs down content. I know there will be walls at our new house but I also know that things won't be the same. I just wanted to remember how things were.

Seven Homes in Eight Years

This summer John and I will celebrate our eighth anniversary and we will move into our seventh home. Considering we've been in our current home for 4 years you can guess we moved a lot in the first few years of marriage. I think every couple is supposed to have stories to tell about their first home. We are certainly no exception. I think our first home is the epitome of starving student housing.

It was affectionately named the Cheese House. I think it was a decent sized house when it was built but to make it more profitable to rent it was turned into 7 apartments. Truthfully we had one of the larger apartments in the house. Anywhere they could squeeze in another apartment they did. Our bedroom used to be the upstairs balcony. How could we tell? Well, the living room window that looked out onto our bedroom was the first clue. No joke. Look.

We also had a patio door with a window that led into our bedroom and lovely shower that you couldn't stand up straight in. But our pride and joy was our refrigerator. The Kelvinator. It helped keep us on budget and on a diet. That blue thing was our freezer. No, we never bought ice cream. There just wasn't room.

OK, truth be told we didn't love the kelvinator. If fact we noticed that one of the other apartments had a normal refrigerator and it was empty and unlocked. We decided that we would switch out the refrigerators in the morning when a friend could come over to help move it. I had some chicken that I had just bought that I put in the empty freezer because there was more room. Of course the next morning when we went to get the fridge we discovered that someone had moved in during the night. Well I couldn't let the chicken go to waste! I knocked on the door met the new neighbors and asked for our chicken back. What would you know, we became great friends. It was even more fun when we ran into them at Stake Conference a few years ago. It turns out we both moved to Arizona.

You can tell from the pictures that the decor was lovely as well. The first time our home teachers ever came over one of them remarked how he could see five different wallpaper patterns from where he sat. I think my brother put it best when he first saw the apartment. John was explaining how he was trying to discretely drill a hole in the bottom of the wall so that he could get the phone line into our bedroom. My brother just looked at him and said "Why don't you just string it through the window? I don't think it will really detract from the decor." We did. And it didn't. By the way, if you ever wanted to see our first home, you can't. It was demolished shortly after we moved out. Big surprise.

Really, it was a great place to start. After this, everyplace was better. Our third apartment we thought was really nice. It had two bedrooms! And it was the first place that could fit more than a loveseat in our living room! It was a little old but really well kept up. We really appreciated the place. I always got really annoyed by the newlyweds who would complain about what a dump the place was. I won't chronicle all of our homes as this post is getting really long, but I'm glad for all of our homes. Really the houses were just wood and brick, but the friendships and memories we've made are really what makes a house a home.

The Best Mothers Day Gift

I got a "love kit" that Alan made at school. Inside were various things he had made with a cute note attached. My favorite was the teapot card he had made. It was shaped like a teapot and inside was this cute poem.

Here's a gift for Mother's Day:

"I'll try my best in every way."

But when you get upset

with ME.

Relax and have a pot of Tea.

Inside was attached, not a tea bag, but a packet of hot cocoa mix. Alan told me "It was going to be tea but I reminded Mrs. E that we don't drink tea in our house." What a fantastic gift to have Alan remember these things and to not be afraid to share them!

Grrrr. . .

If you know us well you know that John and I are a little slow to enter the technological age. We got our first cell phone just a little over a year ago, and we have one of the worlds ugliest and oldest TV's in our living room (but that's another rant). We don't have cable and we don't have Direct TV or any of that stuff. So needless to say we are having to get a digital converter box.

Problem is, we have tried FOUR converter boxes and none of them will work right. Actually the first one worked for two months and the broke. We tried three more, and all of them have a LOUD buzzing sound in the background. You have to turn the volume up really high to hear what's going on over the buzzing. Grrrr. . .

We even considered buying a new TV instead. We thought we could spend $100 for a cheap new TV. Nope. If you haven't gone TV shopping in a while (OK I realize that we are probably the only people in the U.S. that haven't), the best $100 can get you is a 4 inch screen. Sorry I just don't' want to spend $400 on a new TV (seeing as we only spent $25 for our current one).

While I am complaining about digital TV. . . . Two years ago John got me a nice under cabinet TV for me. It was a stretch of our budget for John to get it for me, and now two years later it is obsolete. Oh I could get a digital converter box but come on, I got an under cabinet TV because I didn't want anything on my counter. Come on! I just want to be able to watch Lost! At least the digital switch happens during the summer. Maybe we will take our next step into the modern age before the next season starts.