New Life- Week 53 (Until We Meet Again Grandpa Clifford)

 As I prepared to write this weeks' blog, I looked over the pictures from this week and couldn't help but think, "Wow, that was all this week?"  It seems like this week has been about a month long.  It started on Monday with what turned out to be a minor crisis with the house, rather than the house suddenly collapsing as we were fearing for a while.  While I as on the phone dealing with that, we got the news that Grandpa Clifford had passed away.  We had found out just over a week earlier that he had stage 4 colon cancer and at that point the doctors gave him about a month to live.  Unfortunately, he only made it about another week, but we are all so tremendously grateful that his remaining time on earth was pain free.

Much of the rest of this week has been spent preparing to go to the funeral.  I have spent lots of time on the phone with various family members, we made all the travel arrangements,  and I am trying to get things settled enough at the house that we can be prepared to leave.  Our city is still cleaning up storm damage and unfortunately our final city pickup is scheduled to happen while we are gone.  We spent yesterday prepping for that and cleaning up our yard as best as we could in between down pouring rain.  On the subject of storm cleanup, we were driving down my sister's street this week and past a park where they are storing storm debris they are collecting.  This is just one of many piles, but it was probably 20 ft high and deep and at least 50 yards long.  I had to stop and take a picture.  We used Merrick for scale but it still didn't do it justice.

On top all this, yesterday we picked to our neighbor's dog and are dog sitting while she is away. AND we built new shelves in our master closet yesterday.  I would really love to figure out a way to at least get the backs of my cupboard painted before we leave town so they have the whole time was are gone to cure, but I also have to pack for my whole family, school the children, and continue to watch the neighbor's dog.  I just don't know if it's going to happen.

Also, I just realized this is week 53 of our new life.  We have officially passed the one year mark.  How did we get here? And will things every go back to normal?

New Life- Week 51 and 52 (Moving Day)

 It's been two week and what is there to say?  A lot actually, just not a lot of time to say it.  I feel like over the last couple months I am really mailing it in when it come to writing the blog or missing it altogether.  It's just that the last two months have been some of the most stressful of my life and there are simply not enough hours in the day to get everything done.  

The root of all the stress? Moving. And not just moving, but remodeling and moving.  Our 8th move in our 15 years of marriage. The last two months have gone by in such a blur as we have spent every free and some not free moments working on the house.  Finally two Fridays ago we unloaded our PODS.  We still were unable to move in though.  The house was still too torn up, we didn't have stair rails or toilets and we didn't have time to move all the stuff from my parents' that we have been using for the last two months.  At last, last Saturday we finally, and officially, made the move.

Over the last week, we have done nothing but try to dig out and figure out how to make our house feel like a home, despite it still being a construction zone.  I have been trying to celebrate small accomplishments, like having three working toilets, Jeremy having his office set up, and finally getting the tv connected and taking a moment to sit with our feet up.  One big thing that did happen this week was that the city came and cleared our storm debris.  Seeing them push our huge pile down the road was such a relief.  I know that things will settle down.  One day we'll have doors on my kitchen cupboards and the playroom won't be full of boxes.  In the meantime, we are just taking it one day at a time.

P.S. totally unrelated, but we did a mini photo session today so Lollie could update her picture frames.  How cute are my kids!?!?