A New Place to Call Home

Oh, so much to share.  It's been weeks since I've been able to move thoughts from brain to blog.  In the past month we have sold a house, bought a house, moved into said house and began a myriad of home renovations both DIY and contractor led.  It has been an exciting and stressful time and all the while I've tried to maintain some sense of normalcy amid the sound of nail guns and contractors yelling to one another to "shut off the main water" as a pipe burst out of the wall and soaked one of our spare bathrooms.  Luckily the pipe burst before the renovation of that room was complete so no big worry there, it has been fixed and we have moved on.

Buying and moving into this house has been quite the story but I won't bore you with the long drawn out version. Basically it goes something like this:  We really weren't planning on moving so quickly but it was one of those cases where the stars all aligned and everything seemed to fall perfectly into place, so much so that every now and again Corey and I would look at each other and say, "when is this going to go wrong, this is too good to be true". A few months back, before Christmas to be exact we decided that we would like to think about moving into a bigger space.  Not much was wrong with our current house, we really liked it actually but when Baby O came into the mix a house that was already filled to the brim seemed to bulging at the seams and we were starting to feel more cramped by the day.  This isn't to say that a family can't make it in a small space, people do it all the time but we were aching for a basement and for more trees and something that felt more like ours, not just a stopping point along the way.  So we would research online, never really finding that house that made us excited and we would drive around on Sundays with Ollie strapped in his car seat snoozing.  Then one day we took a left turn on a road we had passed many times but never given a second thought to and we discovered a small neighborhood half a mile from our house that we didn't even know existed.  We saw a house that made us both say, "yea, I could see us pulling into this driveway every day for the next decade" and so we called the Realtor and saw it the next day.  When we walked in we had to look past the outdated fixtures and the forest green trim and make it a blank slate.  As they say on HG TV, it had good bones and we could both see that.  So we put in a low ball offer that we eventually negotiated and could still be happy about, we listed our house and sold it in a week and we sat back and said to ourselves "holy crap are we really doing this?".  We knew it was going to be a lot of work but we were up for the challenge.  I engrossed myself in Pinterest and came up with a plan for paint colors and got a little giddy planning out my new kitchen and Corey mulled over budgets and plans and contractor bids and now here we sit in our almost completed renovation.  We still have many walls to paint and our counter tops don't arrive for another two weeks but the contractors will be done this week and we couldn't be happier with our new home. I will share before and after pictures in blog posts to come.

This past Thursday would have been my mom's 59th birthday.  It's also a year to the day since it was confirmed that she had stage IV pancreatic cancer that had spread to her liver. We are quickly approaching the anniversary of her passing. A year later and it still feels like the rug has been pulled out from beneath all of us.  We go about our business day to day, it still seems unreal that she's not here with us.  I still get the urge to pick up the phone and call her to tell her about something funny or cute that Oliver has done and it still feels like a punch to the gut when seconds later I come to the realization of her absence. I'm not sure if I'll ever get used to that.

About a year before my mom passed she had in a way started a new life.  She was an empty nester.  All of us girls had moved out and our sister Karley had also been moved out,  as on her own as she ever can be.  She lives in a small house with a couple of other girls that also have special needs.  My mom had spent the majority of her adult life caring for others.  Caring for 5 girls was no small task and she did a fantastic job.When she found herself in an empty nest she started doing more for herself.  She was working a job that she loved at Mariposa Farms.  She sorted and packed culinary herbs and I have never seen her so happy in a job before.  She was meeting friends and she loved the people she worked with.  They would go out for birthdays and other special occasions at Casa Margarita, a Mexican restaurant in Grinnell.  My sisters and I would joke that she didn't have much time for us anymore because it seemed every time we would call her she was always doing something.  Every so often her response was "well I can't really talk now I'm at Casa with the girls".  We would feign that our feelings were hurt but in all honesty we were so happy that she was taking time for herself and really enjoying her time.

As we tackle these firsts without her; first birthdays, the first anniversary of her death, first holidays without her, we do so with as much grace as we can.  We try our hardest to honor her memory and the legacy that she left behind.  We hug each other a little tighter and try even harder to enjoy the time we have together.

We toast her birthday with a margarita glass raised in her honor, we spend time with our sisters crying but also laughing.

Her most adamant request on her death bed is that she never wanted us to lose our sense of humor.  We have tried our hardest not to and I hope that when she is looking down on us she is overcome with a sense of accomplishment and pride at how we have honored her.