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!  ;)