Messy Apartment

Have you been on a virtual house tour before?  The ones with the pillows on the couch placed just so and the not half-dead plants?  Well, this is not that.  If I wait until things look like that you will never get to see anything because it's just not going to happen.  This isn't Pinterest, y'all, this is real life.  I've tried to cute things up, but I still have a lot to work on.  In the words of my daddy, "I ain't but one (wo)man and I can't do but one (wo)man's job."  Tired of waiting, I just grabbed the camera after nap time today and took a few quick pictures because you have to start somewhere, right?  

Here we are, come on in!

As soon as you step in the door to your right you see our living room.

To your left you see the dining room/kitchen.  And Mayhem.

Living room again.

This is my kitchen.  And laundry.

Y'all, if you have a dishwasher go kiss it.  Right now!  That thing is a luxury and you better appreciate it.  I've been asked if I'm cooking less since I have to hand wash everything and no, I'm cooking just as much, I've just really reallllly pared down the things I use.  3 plates, 3 bowls, 3 glasses.  No point in any more unless I have a party or something, which really isn't likely.

The stove is from the 70s.  It's a HotPoint which is the kind we took out of our house when we remodeled.  It must be a good one since it's still going.  Needs recalibrating though because it is HOT! I have no idea how to do that.  It's a pretty basic model, no timer, no window, just the knobs to turn it on.

Like my "H" world book and NatGeo wallpaper?  I just ripped 'em and taped 'em up.

Mayhem again, eating his snack.  My ironing piling up on the chairs.  Christmas books we haven't read and such on top of the freezer.  Our portable home office temporarily residing on the table.

If you look straight ahead from the door you're looking down the hall to the bedrooms, bathroom, and the rug I'm giving to my sister Haley.

Mayhem's room, as close as I can get it to his old room.

The closet doors are ordered they say.  Please hurry!  My eyeballs are suffering!

Bathroom, obviously.

Sink, cabinet, mirror.

Toilet shot!

Mine and Boots' bedroom.  I have intentions to make a headboard after Christmas when things settle back down.

Basket of blankets, Christmas stuff, boxes of books that need going through.

Looking toward our closet and the door.

Oh, yeah.  My curtain rod fell off the wall the other day.  Almost a week ago.  Really need to get on that.  But I'm sick, y'all!  I've got the bronchitis and an infection.  Went to the doctor yesterday (first time in 4.5 years), 3 shots, antibiotics, cough syrup.  Mayhem is not a good nurse.  He refuses to let me sit with a blanket.  I can't figure out what he's yelling while he's pulling it off of me.

Looking back up the hall towards the door.

Our closet.  It's pretty big.  I've got the dining room table, 6 chairs, and the china cabinet packed in there.  Our clothes really need organizing.  Everything is just throwed in there and lucky to even be hanging.

That's it!  Thanks for looking!

Got any suggestions for living in a small space?  Or do you know somebody that lives in the state of Alabama that might want an alarm system?  Ours is still in our old house and I don't like paying for something I'm not using.  Really gotta get that thing moved.

Moving/Moved

Two weeks ago we moved.

I bounced out of bed for the last time in our house that was no longer really our house and tried to hold myself down quietly while Boots and Mayhem slept.

It drizzled rain and I feared we wouldn't be able to get anything done besides pack all our worldly goods in boxes and wait for it to dry out while simultaneously unpacking things we needed while we were stalled.

The preacher called to tell me that he was praying for us because he knew this would be a hard week for us and to tell us he loved us.  I cried when we hung up.  I cried that last Sunday night at church all over everybody I got ahold of, too.  I'm pretty sure people thought I was cracking up, but I love my church and I am really sad to leave them.

We were able to move though.  We got 80% of everything packed in a cattle trailer and loaded on a trailer, hauled down the road, and unloaded all in the same incredibly long, stressful day.

Frank escaped outside through all the doors standing open and hid so we had to go back for him the next day.  When I say we I mean Boots, and he got clawed up one side and down the other for his trouble!

The next day Mayhem and I promptly came down with severe sinus congestion so unpacking was pretty difficult and Halloween was barely thought of since he had a fever for about 12 hours at one point.  The best we could do was cough and sniff while he pranced around in his little costume for a few hours.

Blame it on the dust, hormones, exhaustion, hunger, and being physically uprooted, but I was weepy over everything it seemed.  I fell to pieces seeing pictures of not my house anymore with someone else's things in it.  The way I was crying you'd think we were forced to move and hadn't wanted this to happen!

I was out of my element for a few days with a not yet functioning for me kitchen and being unable to find my dishes much less use them.  The hot water heater takes its job seriously and determined to scald me past the point of being sanitary.  Good thing I was the guinea pig that took the first bath, right?

Things are going well so far though and we are comfortable and happy.  I've got all the boxes unpacked and have been doing lots of organizing so maybe I will share pictures of this place soon.

20 Months of Mayhem

(Not our door, btw.)

(Also not our corner.)

It was raining the day we took these, hence the dreary looking background.  Speaking of backgrounds, we moved!  More about that later, hence my "whatever" slash totally ok with imperfection pictures.  I'm tired, y'all.

Boys are wild!  Or, at least, this one is.  Tuesday night we came home from the store and while I put up the cold groceries he poured out the jug of laundry soap on the brand new carpet in our apartment.  After several hours of time spent with the carpet cleaner his near-perfect imitation of my "Oh, nooooo!" was hilarious.  Days later Boots and I are still laughing about it.

His vocabulary has exploded in a sputtery, not quite English sort of way.  He's saying so many words now, but they aren't perfect or clear usually.  It's ok though, I'm his mama and I know what he's saying.  "Outtt-side!"  "Nesssss!" for mess (I hear that one a lot.)  "Weeread" when he wants to read.  "Momo" for more.  "Spay" for spray.  "Wawa" for water.  "Jooooo" for juice.  He starts hooting Ah-ah-AH-AH! at me when he wants up or out.  The answer to every question is "unh-uh."  I try to be sure and pronounce things correctly so hopefully he won't speak this way forever.  But it's pretty cute right now.

He's still obsessed with trucks and asks, "What's that?" to things I have no clue what they are sometimes.  Road equipment and stuff like that.

Climbing on top of everything...

Since we've moved it seems like I have become more his number one person than ever almost.  Mama mama mamamama!  No one else will do!  Especially at 5:30 in the morning when I'm trying to have my few minutes of alone time.  Thank you, daylight savings time!

He is sleeping well though, and still eating everything in sight.  Besides a little sinus cold things have been pretty good in the Mayhem department.

(His daddy wants you to know that he hates those jeans Mayhem is wearing.  I thought they were cute.)

Remembering

This time of year (Halloween through first week of November) makes me think back on the brief history of Boots and me.

2007- November-- we were at a U.S. Band concert at the college I went to (he and a friend crashed) and after talking about it we have decided we probably stood right next to each other-- this was before we met.

2008- Halloween-- the first time I ever laid eyes on him, but we were both distracted by other people at the party.

2009- November 4th-- We had been dating a few months at this point and went to a Sister Hazel concert.  He told me he loved me for the first time at the Mexican restaurant.

2010-2014--- married.  The End!  Just kidding!  But seriously, we've settled down and haven't been that exciting.  Maybe next year we could do something different and record-worthy.

Why Are We Moving?

The inspiration to write usually strikes at an inopportune time, at least for me it does.  IE- when I'm just about to fall asleep at night, driving down the road, or in church when I'm trying to pay attention to the preacher to name a few instances.  I either don't have a way to record my thoughts or I try to force them back down to where they came from because I have some other thoughts taking priority at the moment.  Sometimes this works and I can dig it back up later, but usually this method kills whatever was brewing inside my head.  I don't know whether I should be upset or just "que sera sera" it and move on.  All that to say that I've been working on this post for a while, chewing it over in my head.  Ruminating on thoughts and words.

Why are we moving?

I get this question pretty regularly now and there have been times in this super-long, drawn out process that I have stopped whatever it is I'm doing and stood there dumbfounded almost because I just had to think this thought and ask myself, "Why are we moving?"  And then half a second later, "Oh, yeah!"

Let's start at the beginning, shall we?

When Boots and I were planning our wedding one of the big decisions for us was where are we going to live?  I could either quit my job at the funeral home and try to get another job at a funeral home near where he lived if I moved his direction, but I'd only be working there a few years until (hopefully) we had a baby.  I liked where he lived, but I didn't really want my resume to look like I was a job hopper.  I wanted some established roots before I quit.  (Me quitting work to run our house and raise our babies has been the plan from the beginning and somewhat of a guiding force for big money decisions.)  So we thought about Boots trying to get a transfer up to the county I lived in that was two counties away from where he lived so that I could keep my job, but who knew how long that would take and we didn't want to risk being married and living apart. 

Our only option left was to meet in the middle.  Literally.  We bought our house in a small town that was close to where I worked (20 miles) and in an area Boots could still be even if a transfer to that county took forever.  And that worked fine for us.  We rocked right along with our plan, both of us working and looking ahead to someday when, SURPRISE!, Mayhem.  Cue the sweating and stressing over our living situation once again. 

Don't get me wrong, we love our little house.  We've redone it and fixed it up so that it's pretty nice instead of pretty nasty like when we bought it, but we are right "in town" and not out in the woods like we were when we were growing up.  Having to keep a boy fenced in and constantly watched while he plays outside just doesn't rate very high for us.  Not to mention the huge, gigantic, enormous (I'm not kidding, when we bought our house 4 years ago one of them measured 15 feet around) oak trees in our backyard that prevent any vegetation besides kudzu and ivy (poison or English, you can pick!) from growing.  I really want a garden (and chickens, but we're in the city limits) and it is impossible without some major MAJOR tree work.  These trees also cause me great distress every time I hear there's a storm coming or the dreaded t-word (tornado) because if one of them falls on the house and we are home we are dead.  Dead!

I want a simple life- a garden, chickens, land to turn my wild young'uns free on so they can grow up like I did playing unsupervised in the woods and creeks without fear of being run over or snatched up.

We want Mayhem to go to a good school.  The high school I graduated from is failing, the elementary school where we are is excellent, but the high school here is something I hear lots of bad things about.  Either of the schools that my two aunts are at would be ideal; we'll have to decide which one is closest to wherever we buy to live if we're not still in limbo by then.  Private school is the last thing on either of our minds, with homeschooling barely edging ahead.

In irony, while we are looking for this utopia we'll be living in an apartment in town.

The town we are moving to is close to back to where Boots came from, it is the city he graduated high school from, the school where one of my two aunts that lives down there works.

More irony, if Boots takes a particular position with his job that he's wanted for years we would have to move back this direction in another year.  It's all very confusing and it definitely feels like we are starting over in the middle.

There was a brief moment where we seriously thought everything would fall through and we wouldn't be able to sell our house.  I had some fast thoughts about what life right here for the rest of our forever would be like and it wasn't too bad.  We would have the trees cut down, I'd break the ordinances and build me a chicken coop, I'd get my old job back when Mayhem started school and he could go to the Christian school (private, yes, I know!) right down the road from the funeral home, and we would keep going to our beloved church.  Nothing would change much.  Everything would work out fine. 

The wrinkles got ironed out though, so those ideas weren't entertained long

We haven't even left yet and I am already really missing our church and our friends.  Every time I'm there I think, "Is this the last time I'll be here?  The last time I'll get to see these people?" and I have to make myself not think about it and direct my thoughts to something less tearful.  I'm not looking forward to the day we have to say good-bye.

19 Months of Mayhem

Mayhem photo overload because I have no self-control:

Those eyebrows!

I'm sorry (not really!) if that was excessive.  He's just so dang cute I want to squeeze him and pinch him sometimes!

Let's see, what has he been up to lately... We've got some new words!  "Nool" for noodle (we eat a lot of pasta, apparently), "mimmee" is milk (see also trying to climb up the fridge by pulling on the handles), he says "noooooooo" when he doesn't want to do something like get dressed or a particular stuffed animal is not what he wants to cuddle with when he's trying to go back to sleep.  Poor stuffed animals, getting thrown around in the middle of the night when all you want is to be held tight!  He says "onno" at random times, repeatedly, but I'm not sure of the exact baby-to-English translation of that one.

Brushing his teeth was a bit of a struggle, but I bought baby toothpaste (it's tooty fruity flavored, probably not found in nature) and have convinced him that we are tickling his teeth so now it is much easier to get him to brush his teeth.  And much harder to get him to stop brushing his teeth.  

I had no idea that favorite colors would be a thing this soon, I kinda didn't expect that until about kindergarten or so.  A few weeks ago I bought a 100-count bag of plastic balls and turned his playpen into a homemade ball pit because I have a somewhat irrational fear that the ball pits at public play places have used druggie needles in them.  And probably abandoned nasty diapers.  Let's not think about that!  So now the hated, dreaded playpen has become a mesh-sided rectangle o'fun!  Back to the favorite colors part: he will throw the balls out (of course), but the majority of the ones he throws out, sometimes all of them, are orange!  Does that mean he likes the orange ones best?  Maybe he hates orange?  Maybe he just notices the orange ones better?  There's red and pink in there too amongst the green and two different shades of blue.  Children are complex.

He's still really enjoying Frank being in the house.  He offers Frank crackers and tries to poke his sippy cup of milk in Frank's mouth.  A few mornings ago I put olives in our eggs for breakfast (kinda salty, needed some tomatoes), but Mayhem didn't like the olives.  He dropped one over the side of his high chair tray and told a waiting, scavenging Frank, "Yum yum."  Ha!

He gets really freaked out when Frank sneezes or coughs.  Like hysterical crying.

He's still afraid of dogs, but has no fear around chickens.  

Last week when asked what the cow says he replied with a shut-lipped "mmmmmmm."  This week, cows say "ommmmm" or "maaaa."  We're getting there!  But the newly discovered moon is a "moo."

Sometimes when he hears something he'll poke his finger on the end of his nose and listen intently.  He thinks he's got his finger on his lips like I do when I'm "shhhh-ing", but as long as the finger isn't in the nose he's too cute for me to correct.  

I don't think I could stand it if I had two.  I'd probably just melt!  ;)