On Genes and Furniture Placement

My dear husband is a very motivated person. He loves to plan and scheme and to see said plans and schemes come to fruition. Case in point: while we were moving, he brought almost every single piece of our furniture from our upstairs to our downstairs and then again from downstairs to upstairs at my parents' house completely by himself. We're talking dressers, entertainment center, desk, etc. (Well, some call it motivated, others call it crazy.) He truly will do anything once he sets his mind to it. (Once he sets his mind to it, mind you...not when I set his mind to it...)

His rationale was that with the combined forces of a dolly and his smooth moving skills, it really wasn't such a big deal. (Here we differ on a large scale: I have been known to consider it a big deal to get a jar open by myself.) His mad skills involve moving furniture end over end on their way up and down the stairs, making it an allegedly "easy" task.   (As you can see, he and I don't typically use the word easy in the same kinds of sentences.)

The more I get to know my oldest child, the more I see how like her dad she is. Julia is very motivated, very independent, and she very much likes doing things that are her own idea (and little else). Case in point: the ottoman. One morning when the girls had risen with the sun (and thus a lot sooner than the likes of me) I found that they had somehow managed to drag the ottoman all the way up the stairs and get it up on the top bunk. (They = mostly Julia.) While I sat their dumbfounded, Craig recognized her genius. He asked how she got it up the stairs and she replied, ever so nonchalantly, the she had done it end over end.

The funny thing is, she never actually saw Craig move any of the furniture down or up the stairs, because he had done it all after the kids had gone to bed. She just figured it out because her crazy little brain wires are identical to her dad's.

Guess it's true what they say after all: the ottoman really doesn't sit far from the couch.

Some Food Humor to Satisfy the Palate

Lexa's idea of helping with dinner

Tortilla Face

(Scary) Tortilla Face

These girls leave no evidence behind...

The new comfortable way to drink Pero from the couch

Ready for Bed

During all of the moving craziness (when I was apparently not paying enough attention to my children) Julia came home from school one day and said she wanted to get her pjs on. She then proceeded to jammify herself in record speed. When I mentioned that she had done it super-quick, she said, "Do you know how I did it so fast? I had my nightgown on under my clothes!"

 Yep, all dang day under the hot Phoenix sun, J wore two layers of clothes so she would already be in pajamas when she got home.

With all of the pajama wearing and blankie-sneaking 

that goes on with this girl, you would think she
would be more excited to go to bed at night...

Hot Lips

A little while before we moved, I was pulling warm clothes out of the dryer and a tube of Chapstick fell onto the floor. My smart cookie instincts told me to open that tube right up, and when I did, molten hot Chapstick dripped right down onto my tired little feet. I consider it a tender mercy that the tube didn't leak all over my newly cleaned load of laundry.

We were 4 days away from moving, and I would not have dealt well with ruined clothes in that moment.

Moving On and Standing Still

For quite a while, Craig and I have been considering the idea of moving closer to his parents so that we would be more available to help them. (Read: Craig thought it was a good idea and I wasn't ready.) Craig's sweet dad has Parkinson's Disease and his equally sweet mom is caring for him entirely on her own. We were already relatively close to them (about 35 minutes) but knew that we needed to be closer. Until really recently, though, the time just didn't seem right. Then, one day, something seemed to just click and we both knew that the time had come to move on. (Read: I was finally (mostly) ready.)

So began the whirlwind process of refinancing our house so we could afford to rent it out, asking the ginormous favor of my parents to let us move into their temporarily vacant house for the summer, hiring a property manager, looking for renters, renting a storage unit, packing up all of our belongings, rearranging someone else's house to accommodate our needs, and saying goodbye to a house and a ward that we love, all the while wondering how on earth everything was going to work out. Oh, and also trying to find a new house to move into before my parents come back in the fall. It has been a period of overwhelmingly nightmarish and hectic scrambling, the likes of which I have never experienced.

Now that we are semi-settled (as much as we can be while still looking for a permanent house and knowing that we will be moving yet again with in the next few months) I feel like I am in a weird sort of limbo. Not really in my old life, but not quite into my new life yet either. After such an acutely overwhelming experience, I somehow feel...underwhelmed. When so much was going on, I really didn't have time to think about how I was feeling (besides the un-ignorable sensation of constant stress) and now that the rush is over (but with so much still left undecided) it's hard not to feel blue. And knowing that this faith-stretching, prayer-saying, breath-holding time in my life is not yet complete doesn't exactly help the sunshiny rays of optimism shine through to my heart. One of these days I am going to run out of sighs completely.

Thank goodness all of the most vital parts of my life are still in tact: wonderful marriage, amazing kiddos, happy family life. And thank goodness we are living next to a pool for the summer. (Since it appears I have not yet had enough experience in the holding my breath department this year.)

P.S.

The girls are settling in just fine...

...as are their beloved stuffed animals.