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!?!?

New Life-Week 50 (Elsie Turns Three)

 This has been a big, busy week for lots of reason, but today I want to focus on Elsie.  Elsie turned three this week and it's pretty surreal.  I truly don't know what happened to the last year, I think it got lost in a pandemic blur.  Somehow or another, time did pass and now we have a big three-year-old on our hands.  As birthdays go it probably wasn't the most exciting ever, but Elsie seemed to have a great day.  I had planned to open presents later in the day, but our birthday girl wasn't having any of that so while she ate cake for breakfast I quickly wrapped her gifts from Merrick and Carrigan (Paw Patrol figures naturally).

Since she had some new toys, Elsie didn't seem to mind that we had to do some regular things on her birthday like school and walking Millie.  She did get a midday surprise when Nana brought her a birthday Happy Meal. After all the regular stuff was out of the way we opened the rest of the presents.  As you might of guessed, she got Paw Patrols, Paw Patrols, and more Paw Patrols.  After presents and some playtime, we had pizza for dinner (her choice) and then the cousins came over for cake (Paw Patrol themed naturally) and ice cream and more presents.

All in all it was a pretty good birthday.  We love our Elsie girl so much and are so happy she came along to complete our family.  Life sure wouldn't be the same without her.

New Life-Week 49 (Recovery)

It's been a long, strange week.  Monday we finally made it to our house.  It was in rough shape.  We had a huge (probably 50 foot) limb come down across our driveway and yard.  We lost an entire tree in the backyard.  We had dozens and dozens of other large and medium sized branches all over our yard and driveway.  We spent Monday cutting and clearing.  There is still a lot more to do but the driveway is at least clear now and our PODS can be delivered this week.  Friday and Saturday we finished painting and did some clean up and it's starting to look a little more like a house on the inside as well.  When the ice melted our flooring finally made it in and now that we have power back, our flooring work is scheduled to begin on Monday.  There is still  much to be done but once the flooring is in, we will move in (scheduled for Friday) and then keep working after we move in.

While we were working this week I mostly ignored my children, as I pretty much have since we started work on the house, and let them play out in the backyard and explore (yay for a backyard that they can do that in!!!).  They decided to turn lemons into lemonade in the back corner where we lost our whole Japanese Maple.  They used the stump and a fence board to make a teeter totter.  Between the storm and my kids, my beautiful yard isn't looking so beautiful right now but the kids are having fun and I am able to get some work done so I would call it a win! 

New Life- Week 47 and 48 (We Interrupt Regular Programing)

You may have noticed that I didn't get my weekly blog post done last week.  There was truly no time and I really didn't have much to say.  Every free moment was spent working on the house.  Last weekend we had a dumpster delivered for the weekend and had to get all the flooring we had removed loaded, plus I had to go get my Covid vaccine, and it was the super bowl.  It was a busy weekend to say the least.  I just have to say though, before moving on from the dumpster talk, that Merrick was a MAJOR help with getting it loaded.  He almost single handedly loaded all the wood into the dumpster.

This week the work continued until it came to a grinding halt.  Thursday our floors were supposed to start being installed and Wednesday night we found out that, while they were supposed to be in over a week before, they were not in and are completely MIA.  At this point we are in a bit of a panic because we are supposed to move in next weekend to avoid paying for another month of storage.  On top of that, Thursday night we started getting ice and snow.  Over the next days it was much more ice than snow and we are in the middle of the worst ice storm in 30-40 years.

The vast majority of our town is without power.  In our family, my parents (and us by extension) are the only ones in the family with power.  It has been days for everyone else without power, with no end in sight. In the middle of the night on Friday Emily's family had a tree limb come through their skylight.  Last night they decided they couldn't take it anymore so they came down and spent the night.  We had 13 people in my parent's 1400 sq ft.  As for our house, we aren't really sure how it has faired.  We can't get up to it at this point.  Our neighbors checked on it yesterday and said we had a big limb down in our driveway and yard but they didn't think it hit the house.  Scratch that, I just got some pictures from my friend who lives right around the corner and it doesn't look great.  Hopefully tomorrow we can go see it for ourselves and hopefully it won't get worse in the the meantime. 

Today is Valentine's Day.  This is not how I imagined it going.  At this point I think we are going to have to postpone our traditional love hunt.  I don't see how we can manage a scavenger hunt in the currently circumstances and Merrick's gift was not delivered because of the storm.  Life will go on and we will just have to feel the love in a different way today.  Ultimately I am just glad we are safe and warm because that's more then a lot of people can say.