Thoughts On Closing Another Chapter

 I cannot help but be a bit reflective as our family begins its next journey in another home in another new town. In the past nine years we have lived in five different states (Ohio, New Mexico, Oregon, Indiana, and North Carolina) and six different cities/towns (Cuyahoga Falls, Las Cruces, Portland, Camby, Charlotte, and now Denver). Each of those experiences has left an indelible mark on the six of us and has been a clear marking of closing and opening a new chapter in our lives with each home we have inhabited. 

As we spend the last three days in this home with the bare essentials (we began moving our stuff into the new house last Friday when we got the keys) I find myself going over the different experiences this home has been ground zero for. I also find myself reflecting on the difficulties that we have incurred while living in this home and in this part of town. 

I know that there will be things that I will miss about this house as there are things I miss about every house we have ever lived in, but there are also things that I will not miss (just as there are things to varying degrees that I do not miss about our previous houses). I know for sure that I will miss the birds that we have surrounding our house. Our current home in Charlotte backs up to woods outside the property line and is a very wooded lot itself. The amount of birds that sing in the trees and fly by is immense, and their distinct sounds have been such a large part of my life here. I know that moving forward (into a new development with only baby trees spread out among the houses) this will not be the case. I will miss the vibrant green hues that the leaves of the trees provide. I will miss watching the seasons come and go right from my own backyard. I will miss our front porch too, but not nearly as much as our back deck. Our deck is where I wrote my grandfather his nearly weekly letters for months. It is where I would go to recharge my batteries and restore myself to partial sanity when I was on the verge of losing my shit. I will miss having fires in our wood burning fireplace. I will miss the large living room windows. I will miss our very kind neighbor who has been such a sweetheart time entire time we have lived here. To some degree, I will miss our neighborhood. 

But....there are things that I know I will not miss. I will not miss how dark this house is constantly because of the trees surrounding the property. Some rooms require lights 24 hours a day because they sun rarely touches them. 3 of our 4 upstairs bedrooms are so dark that it is hard to tell when it is morning in the spring and summer because the leaves have bloomed on their respective trees. I will not miss how this lovely home has not been taken care of over the years, and now needs a ton of work it will never get because the money it would require to restore it is not worth the investment to the rental company who would have to pay for those repairs. I will not miss the windows that do not open, the kitchen appliances that do not fully work, the screens that do not fit the windows properly thus letting in bugs on the ones we can open. I will not miss the popcorn ceiling that is falling down in the kitchen. I will not miss the bathroom sink that leaks. I will not miss the sound of gun shots heard in the neighborhood and the ones that were fired on our street. 

As I look back over the last two years I think about all of the good memories. I also think about the things that I could have done better as a mother, wife, and homemaker. What did I let slip through the cracks? Why did that happen? What can I do in the new house to prevent it from happening there? I will not lie, there are definitely areas of homemaking/motherhood that I have not been so successful at here these last two years, and I am nervous that I won't be able to fix them moving forward. I am hoping that this fear is exactly what propels me to make sure these bad habits/routines done continue in the next chapter of our lives. 

Only time will tell, I suppose. For now though, I plan on spending the rest of this week reflecting on all of our experiences here - both the good and the not so good. It is the only way I will be able to fully close this chapter and open the next one. 

Let The Moving Begin!

 We get the keys to our new house today, and I am stoked. We plan on taking about a week to move in, so that we don't feel rushed. 

Andy and Sarah have picked out paint colors for the new rooms, and I would like to get them painted before the bigger furniture is moved into the house next Saturday. Andy has chosen a gray/blue for his walls. I love the color and will definitely post what it looks like once the color is on the walls. Sarah is choosing to paint her walls a soft green, and I will post pics of her room as well once the paint is on the walls. I do plan on painting most of the rest of the house, but I want to wait until I get a feel for each room. I am pretty sure I am going to paint the living room a gray color with an accent wall a color to be determined (but I am thinking lime green - which will match the accent pillows on the new couch being delivered to the house on May 20th.)

We plan on filling the van up with boxes and making several trips this week over to the new house. It is about a 30-minute drive to our new location, so we won't have the ability to make too many trips over during the week as our Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are pretty booked already with regular life stuff. I do think that the trips we can make will be helpful in getting a good amount of our smaller household items over to the house, making it easier for Bob, Josh, and his friends (who have offered to come help us move in exchange for some steaks and beer afterwards) next week when they are filling up the moving truck. 

I cannot explain how excited I am about this house. I have always wanted to live in a brand-new house, and now we are. I love the fact that we are the first people to live in this home. Everything is new and fresh. 

Let the moving begin!

Sometimes There Are No Words

 

Sarah, working with a guide dog named Fransisco in New York. 

Sometimes, there are no words to adequately describe the emotion that comes from a photo. Sometimes, all of the things that came before the photo - the years of hard work, the ups and downs, the hope, the determination, the never giving up, the sweat, the tears, etc...don't convey to anyone who hasn't walk the journey with Sarah. 

This moment? The one in the picture above? This moment is worth a thousand words. 

This is my girl. 

Off She Goes

 Yesterday, Sarah flew into LaGuardia Airport as one of two invited guests (and their O & M instructors), to be a part of a pilot program that the non-profit Guiding Eyes organization is hoping to launch. She will be working with the organization to create a transitional program to better help visually impaired individuals transitioning from a cane to a guide dog. She currently has her own application pending for a guide dog through this same organization, so she was super stoked not only to help pilot this program, but to also possibly be in the same place as her own future guide dog. (The average waiting period once your application is approved is 12 months to be paired up with your own guide dog, so it may not happen for her this summer, but she is hoping that being part of this pilot programs, and the fact that she is going to college in the fall might help to move her application to the top of the pile thus speeding up the 12 month average wait.)

Sarah will be in New York until Thursday when she will fly home and land back in Charlotte at approximately 9:30 pm. Her days are jam packed with activities, and I am sure she will be coming home with many tales to tell. She has already sent text messages to the family multiple times with lots of exclamation points in them as everything is so thrilling for her. 

Sarah is now at a point in her life where all of her years of hard work trying to learn to be an independent individual are about to pay off. Between getting a guide dog, traveling alone, and going to college she is on the brink of one of the greatest chapters of her life. She is at the launching point of independence which is such a huge feat for her. I could not be more proud of her. 

I am so excited to see where these next few months take her and what doors open up for her. She certainly deserves all of the good fortune coming her way. 

Lost Without Him

 I ask for him to meet me in my dreams. I look for him there, but it is rare that I find him.

 I thought when he went away that the connection we had here on earth would carry over; I was so certain of this that I did not give it too much thought about how I would feel without him with me among the living.  I believed wholeheartedly that the anchor that our relationship supplied me with would last for all time, but I am finding that this is not the case.  I am unbound and a bit lost without him. 

I know that I am not the first being to ever lose "their person", and I do not pretend that this is the case. I do wonder, though, how others deal with the deep ache that sits in my chest, and has done so since the night he crossed over from this world to the next. I thought that time would make the ache hurt less, but this also has not been the case. It has been four and a half months since his passing, and I still hurt as much today as I did on November 24th. I would venture to say that I hurt more now because at least then I had the false belief that we would also be bound together. 

Sometimes I feel myself spiraling downward in time and space. I don't know which way is up. I hope that I will not always carry this feeling with me. It hurts a lot, and I don't like hurting. It doesn't feel good. 

Yes, I have our shared memories. I know this. But without that connection he just becomes someone regular, and he was anything but that to me when he lived. I feel that I need to feel that connection with him as much as I need water, shelter, sunlight, and food. It is essential to my well-being. 

I hope that I can find it again because I feel lost without him. 

Moving Preparations

Prior to our moving plans, April was shaping up to be a pretty busy month. We have a trip to Ohio planned, a trip to Tampa planned, Bobby is traveling for business, and Sarah is traveling to New York to work with Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a non-profit organization that pairs visually impaired individuals with a guide-dog. 

On top of that there are the usual activities such as soccer practice, choir, youth groups, etc...

Thankfully, even though we get the keys to our new house on April 21, 2023, we don't have to be out of our current house until May 8, 2023, giving us time to move ourselves slowly given the amount of things planned for this month outside of the move. We are all excited to get into our new house though, so I doubt it will take us until the 8th of May to move out of this space, but knowing that we have that extra time is very, very nice in the event that plans go awry.

As with our last move, I will be packing up the house in between schoolwork with the girls and all of my other normal chores. Since Andy is in Ohio working for the next month or so, Josh is going to recruit some of his soccer buddies to help us move our big items which we are incredibly thankful for. 

Our game plan right now is to move over the small stuff a van load at a time as time permits, to paint, and figure out how we want to set up the house (there are still a couple of rooms in question as to what we would like their purpose to be). Once those things are done, we plan on renting a moving truck and hauling off all of the big stuff in one day. 

I plan on scrubbing this house down as I pack up each room, so that once all of the big stuff is moved we can just be done here. 

We'll see if this is actually how things go down, but for now this is the plan.

We are all so very excited to move into our new property. 

A New Home

More updates to come in the next month, but we found our next home. It is a new build in Denver, North Carolina. It has 5 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and is a smudge over 3000 square feet. The lot sits on a bit of a hill, is a corner lot on a cul-de-sac. There are sidewalks on both sides of the road (which is something we do not currently have, and is a huge plus for Sarah), a community pool, fitness center, and community gathering place. We get the keys on April 21, 2023.

We are so excited for this next adventure, and will be sure to share each step of the journey as it comes!