the move

I have started about 5 different blogs and finished zero—pull up a chair and I will try and get it all in... fair warning, it might be all over the place.

First of all, let's all recognize that I am not a great blogger these days…
Honestly I seem to only check in when my world is falling apart or to do a 2 week re-cap.
I know both are annoying to read--
So I will try and work on that.
...But in the meantime, I 'll stay true to course.

Because I am a “call it like I see it” type of girl, I’ll go ahead and admit that these past few weeks go down as some of my less favorites…  which maybe I have said that a lot lately?
I’ve lost my groove, I think… but I am destined to get it back.

First I’ll start with the good stuff:

Mom and I spent a couple of days re-vamping the rental with new paint about 3 weeks ago—and after three full days of work, 6 gallons of “pebble grey” now cover the walls; and the house that we have dreaded moving into feels like my actual temporary home.

My sister threw us a huge bone and watched the boys for us so that we could paint with far less mess—and she even jumped way outside of her box and made us all dinner one night also.

Lance and David spent two full weekends moving our stuff, and aside from my allergies being out of control for 6 weeks straight, we were moving and grooving in decent weather. 
Blaine came over and helped them load the big items, and Melvin met them here to help unload them.

We are blessed.

But of course there’s also troubles:

My mom and sister were diagnosed with the flu-- a week after sitting in the hospital all day for her diverticulitis.
Allison got better but mom got worse and eventually was diagnosed with a double pneumonia.
She is always my right hand man—so not only was I a ball of stress worrying about her, pestering her about breathing treatments, and drinking more water—but I spin in circles without her assistance in times like this.

Added to that, my kids stopped minding me and Maddox became super anxious about moving—begging us not to do it.

I am not sure where I have gone wrong with this parenting gig, or how to get it back…  and I am not sure how to comfort something that is going to happen whether he’s on board or not…
But it is like all of the sudden I don't hold any seniority, no one has respect for me, and “minding me” is a foreign term.

They (and by "they" I mean Maddox) went from being so moldable and coacheable --to defiant, pestering, whining, tattling, complaining, mean, aggravating, and hard.
And Beckham follows suite.

Tomorrow will be better, I promise myself.  Tomorrow I will be more patient.  Tomorrow I’ll have control.  Tomorrow I won't yell.  Tomorrow they'll be more rested.  Tomorrow....

But then "tomorrow" is worse than the previous and I am losing.

I am losing not only at allergies and health scares, and at parenting too, ...but also at this house selling stuff.

The realtor has promised me that the house was going perfectly—yet I have feared it falling through since the day they found us and asked to buy our house.
It was all too easy.
We don't have a "realtor"... even though the one we had it listed for this summer has been nothing but amazing and helpful to us, when we have questions... we are still virtually on our own, and relying on the buyer's realtor for our information.
Despite my fears, she assured me that we were ahead of schedule, that the house could close early if we wanted to… and there were no hitches in our future.

And then the appraisal crashed us down to reality.

So first of all, we were all sick—like poop-your-pants, vomit in Kroger, sick—and I had completely forgotten about the appraisal.

Guy A rings the doorbell and I answer with my hair wadded on the top of my head, swaddled up in my bulkiest robe and mascara smeared below my eyes.

I apologized to him and said, “come on in”.  He said that he only needed on the outside but wanted to tell me that he was there.  I laughed and dramatically ran the back of my hand down my non-figuresk body and said, “oh, you didn’t want any of this?” to which he blankly replied, “no.” and went on with his business.

20 minutes later the doorbell rings again.

I answered it to man B in dress clothes with a clip board and he said, “I am here to do your appraisal”.  I told him that his buddy was already here, and he looked at me like I had 3 heads.  He said that he worked alone and there should not be anyone else there, so I laughed and said, “well then maybe I’m being robbed out back?!”

He too, had zero sense of humor but went with me to solve the mystery and apparently Guy A was the surveyor and actually was not trying to steal the grill or the fisher price bubble blower—and guy B took about 4 pictures and left 4 minutes later.

No lie.

We all started feeling better, but the kids were still acting like ferrel cats and then I got the phone call that guy B appraised our house $3,500 less than we needed.

So I obviously started to hate guy B, his clip board and his slacks….

I hated the buyer who refused to meet us half way or pay a dime less than the appraisal—on a house that HE wanted and wasn’t even FOR SALE…

I got testy with the realtor, because I felt like we were in a corner, with no one on our side-- and when I feel trapped, I go into survival mode…

And Lance, in true-Lance-fashion, was right behind me playing damage control; smoothing everyone back over, thus leaving me alone in the corner for crazy people.

So last Wednesday my stress-odometer was tapped out.

I strapped the kids in the car to drive.
As I passed through Southlake, I got a huge whiff of chlorine for some reason…

I miss summer.  I miss Candace.
I miss being tan, with no allergies, and my kids water-logged and exhausted.
I miss not spending every second worrying about this house.

I just wasn’t in my groove of life, in my little happy box—where the world can storm all around me but I still feel content, I was just off and no matter how hard I tried, “tomorrow” didn’t fix it.

We surprised Lance for lunch and I ran to Home Goods and found a steal on some curtains.

The bank was just as surprised as we were about the appraisal and offered to order a second one, which would most likely set back our closing.

It was the only chance we had.

Since we were 90% out of the house at this point, and over a thousand dollars into the move—Lance made the executive decision that we were going to go through with the sale either way…
Huge loss or not.
We were not moving our stuff back in.
I.   Hate.  To.  Lose.  Money.  Hence the fact that I don’t gamble—so I have been sick about it.
But I decided to trust him.

I confided in my closest friends and my mom and then finally asked for prayer.

Yesterday I got a phone call from the second appraiser.
If I were a single girl, I’d say there was a spark with Guy C and myself.
Since I am not, I’ll blame it on the prayers, this guy finally having a sense of humor, and his observation of my desperation—after talking to him for about 15 minutes, he asked me not to worry about his part that I could stress about anything but him—and he would do his job.

Today we found out it appraised!!!!!

And I literally screamed!
And jumped—and then remembered that we can’t jump in this house without everyone feeling it—and then cried!!

They have moved our closing from tomorrow to next Thursday so I am not going to relax for another week…
I am even a little nervous putting this all out into the universe without it being closed, honestly.
But *hopefully* the end is near.

Which brings me to my final unposted blog:
The move.

Historically, I hate change.

I think I missed our first apartment for the first three years that Lance and I lived in Haslet.
Still to this day, I will sometimes day-dream about that one-bedroom on the third floor, with the windows open, the sound of the fountains down below and it always being immaculately clean.

I laugh about the special order furniture that kept us in camping chairs and cardboard boxes for the first two months there-- and the enormously over-sized bedroom furniture that I bought just two months before we moved out-- and had to get down 3 flights of stairs when we left.

We got married while living there--
We made life-long friends there too.
It was our first house together...
But it was just an apartment…
A really nice apartment...
Of only 800 square feet.

Almost seven years ago, we chose Haslet to be our home.
We chose the community before we ever picked a house.
We loved having everything at our fingertips—close enough to ‘home’ but not far from ‘the city’.

As soon as we became a family, however, we realized that getting back home was in our cards.
With that said, moving is no surprise.
We even got an "extra year", when we didn't send Maddox to kindergarten this fall.

We have known exactly where we would build and have been paying for that piece of land in the country for a year and a half now…

But it still change.

It is a closing to the first house that Lance and I bought together.
The biggest purchase that we have made to date, in our married lives.

Our neighbors have become part of our story too.
Especially Buster and Kelly, who we hate to leave the most.

This house is like a song-- with every little piece of it attached to a memory.

I can still remember where Lance was sitting when I handed him the card telling him we were expanding our family.

I can still see him standing at the half wall, later that same night, re-reading the card and crying.

Those walls have absorbed more fights than I care to admit, heartache, disappointments, late-night talks, threats that I was going to leave and pinky swears that can not be changed.

It is the house we brought Maddox home to, perfectly clean and sparkling from my mom who had busted her tail making it perfect for me.

It is the house that Beckham learned to pull up, to crawl and walk-- all on record breaking measures-- completely documented and blogged.

We filled that little space with more laughs than it should be able to hold, happiness, hope, love and encouragement.  We have tickled and giggled and played to the brim.  Shot more goals, flipped off more couches, and stirred more cups of chocolate milk than I can count.  It has been truly lived in by a couple of best friends, who are annoying and weird and hysterical... and their boys who made their mark in every square inch with melted icecream, urine, vomit, and crayons.

I know it is just a house, but it is where we made a home... and I kind of feel sad that they will probably not even remember it, aside from pictures that they'll see/

And for some reason, if I am completely honest, it also bothers me to think about it being someone else's place-- which is dumb.
The walls in the boys rooms will soon be painted with some shade of beige I am sure…
covering up the imperfect animals that my mom and I free-handed and painted, to match the over-priced bedding I just *had* to have.

Their room will probably hold a hard bed with itchy bedding and they'll have no idea the nights I found Lance asleep on the floor beneath the crib, scared the boys would fall out and break their necks--
or the amount of rocking, and singing, and story-reading, and prayers that I have poured into it the space between those 4 walls.

In my head, the front room that originally served as an office when Lance worked from home, will probably return back to that-- the stripes muted back to a business neutral.
As an office, it is where I would sit too, bothering my husband so that he couldn't work--
hashing out baby names and my irrational fears and tears of losing my pregnancy, and the wild dreams that I was sure was going to unfold, as we became rich and happy and blessed.

It is the same office where I paid our bills, drained our savings, and somehow managed to keep our credit scores perfect, (even five years later) when Lance lost his job, facing the reality that we were not rich, only clinging to happiness, but were somehow still blessed.

And then it was a playroom.
With toys, and swords, and fights and balls, and movies, and more PB&Js than are probably recommended.
It was our boys' place to be wild….er …than they are in the rest of the house.
And their spot for their creativity to explode.

But it is just a house.
Home is honestly where we are together.

And as crazy as it is to admit,
this pitiful little house, sitting right across the gully from the land that will soon hold our forever-home, already feels like home.

I can not wait for Thursday.

I am getting my groove back!