Painting and Parenting

Getting a house ready to be sold is not my favorite thing.  I like to think that we’ve kept up on projects through the years.  Goodness know it seems like we’re always working on something.  But now that we’re thinking about strangers walking through and evaluating everything and hopefully coming up with offers to buy the place?

Well the To Do list is daunting.

Little nit-picky things like paint touch-ups.  Great big expensive things like replacing most of the carpet.  Random things like replacing a light fixture that we haven’t used in ten years but the next owner might want to.  And sad things like painting over the pink, polka-dotted walls in Reagan’s old room with a neutral color.

Actually I managed to paint over the polka dots without too much pain.  Reagan hasn’t lived her in almost two years and if she were to move back we would paint over the walls because she’s not so much a pink and polka dots kind of young lady anymore.

Also?

Those walls were grimy.  Adults rarely touch walls and so once you paint a wall in your bedroom, it stays more or less in good conditions for years. Kids and teens see walls as vertical floors.  They lie on their beds or rugs and put their feet on the walls, manage to get hand smudges in unlikely places and just are generally hard on a paint job.  Not to mention the tape and other adhesives for posters and such.

So while painting those walls was a little hard, it was also necessary.  What I was not prepared for, was painting the closet.  I had mostly forgotten about this:

I think Reagan was in kindergarten or first grade when we had some friends over for dinner.  Their daughter, Ressa, was in Reagan’s class and the girls disappeared upstairs to play.  When we went up to check on them, we found them doing this.

I was furious. Furious!

Reagan was thoroughly lectured and I’m sure it included a phrase along the lines of “this is why we can’t have nice things” and … well now it all seems really stupid.

Why was I so mad?

I mean, no - it’s not okay to draw all over the closet door.  But really? Big picture?

Not worth getting furious over.

But these are the things you learn on your first child.  They teach you what is worth making a fuss over and what isn’t.  Rich and I are both oldest children ourselves and we turned out (mostly) ok so I feel safe saying that being the “practice kid” isn’t life shattering.  And there are plenty of mistakes to be made on subsequent children so it all evens out in the end.

Apparently I got over being mad about drawing on the back of closet doors because the art work seems to have continued for a few years.  It included memorials to several pets that came and went.

 I sat on the floor in front of that closet door yesterday and really, truly cried.  Cried over the fact that my kids aren’t little anymore.  Cried for the mistakes I’ve made.  Cried over the fact that I have to paint over this lovely childhood memento when I really don’t want to.  Rich came in and I told him, “I just can’t do this.”

But I can.

And after taking a lot of pictures, I did.

Which led to the discovery of something worth getting upset about.  Turns out that washable marker - even 13 year old washable marker - cannot be easily painted over.  It bleeds right through.  Two coats of primer and six coats of paint later, you can still vaguely see a cat head.

Parents of Littles take note:  If your kid draws on the walls, don’t get bent out shape over it.  In fact, tell them to have at it.  And then hand them a Sharpie which is MUCH easier to paint over.

Turning North

Life.

It’s a weird place.

You’re going along, doing what you’ve always done, thinking what you’ve always thought and then BAM! A figurative detour sign pops up and suddenly you’re in uncharted territory.

In this case, the detour sign is pointing us north.

We’ve lived in our home for 15 and a half years.  We moved in with two toddlers and our third was born a year later.  Our loyal and beloved poodle lived her entire life (15 years and 4 months!) in this house.  It’s the longest I’ve lived in one place and it’s home.

Except.

Last fall I got restless.  With Reagan moved out and Hayden headed for the door, three stories with five bedrooms and four bathrooms started to seem way too big.  Without little kids to play in it, the yard seemed like too much work.  I started to want something less; something different.  I began perusing real estate sites from around the country.  North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Oregon … I didn’t know what I wanted for sure except that I wanted to be on the water.  Living in Colorado and Nebraska my whole life, I’ve never had much opportunity to have a water view and I just really think that would be lovely.

So I spent a couple of months scrolling through Zillow and comparing home prices and dreaming.  I’d plop down next to Rich and make him look at my laptop with me or call Faith over to look at a particularly pretty old home and that was enough to satisfy the itch for now.  I finally decided to put away that particular dream for a few years.  Better to get Faith through high school and attack my new job and help the kids with college rather than consider running off into the unknown.

But I prayed about it.  Something along the lines of, “God, I really like my life and I’m thankful for what I have but someday I sure would like a house on the water.”

What?

We’re supposed to pray about everything.  It never hurts to put in a request.

And then, at the beginning of the year, Rich was contacted by a recruiter for a job in Thief River Falls, Minnesota.  I was horrified.  I seriously wanted to say, “Don’t answer that!” Because, Minnesota?  

It’s cold there.  Like, really really cold.  

And I don’t like cold.

Also? We looked up the town and it’s small and remote.  I feel like Lincoln is small and there are nearly 300,000 people here.  Thief River has under 9,000 and I’ve never lived anywhere like that.  Since the nearest “city” (Grand Forks, ND) is an hour away and it’s not terribly big either, I kind of panicked at the thought of being in the middle of nowhere.

But we did decide to answer it.  Because when an opportunity presents itself, it’s small minded to immediately shut the door on it.  Better to see where it leads at least.  Sometimes great gifts come in unassuming packaging.

And that was the case here.  Turns out that the job being offered was a great opportunity for Rich.  Something that he is eager to do and that will really let him stretch his wings and utilize his skills in a way he hasn’t been able to do before.  It was pretty exciting actually.  

After he made it through the first two rounds of interviews, the company flew us up to look at the town and I have to say - it is lovely.  Everything is so well kept up.  Even the smallest, oldest houses show pride of ownership.  There’s a darling little downtown area and … the high school.  Oh. My. Goodness.  I have never seen such a school in real life.  I half-way expected Troy Bolton to jump up on one of the tables and start singing.

Look at this lunchroom:

 And this is the lobby of the theater.  In the high school.

And, because I’m a girl and because Faith is a girl, of course I checked out the restroom.  Because, as any girl knows, the restroom is super important.  And this restroom?  Again - in the high school.  Is a good one.

A good job, a lovely town, an amazing school - the choice seemed pretty clear.  But just in case we had any doubts, it turns out that Thief River Falls has homes on … wait for it … a river.  A deep and wide and beautiful river that the residents spend the summer boating and kayaking on.  A river full of water.

Just like I prayed for.

So now we are madly fixing up our home and getting bids from contractors and moving companies. I’m researching dance studios and trying to figure out where to live and Rich just just bought a 4-wheel drive car.  We’re getting Hayden set up to live on campus next year instead of in our basement as we’d planned. Honestly, the To Do List is overwhelming but it’s getting done.  It has to.  Rich is moving in two weeks and I hope to have two kids (Hayden will live with us for the summer) two cats and myself up there by early June.

Lots to do.

And lots to blog about.

Faith's Homecoming 2014

Faith is not really little so much anymore.

She’s at least 5’8” though I don’t have an exact measurement because she doesn’t want to know how tall she is so she won’t let me measure.  She’s in high school and has a high school social life.  She turned 14 last week.

14.

She’s so young for her grade, that her age never seems that old to me.  I mean, some of her friends will be turning 15 in the next few weeks so she seems young by comparison.  But still … 

14.

Doesn’t it seem like we just celebrated her Golden Birthday?

I think so too.

Tonight was Homecoming.  We don’t let the kids date at this age so she went with a group of friends.  We found her dress when we were in Denver last month and I just love it.

It’s so cute and so flattering (though when you’re a tall, teenaged dancer there isn’t much that doesn’t flatter) and the color is just perfect for her.  It even looks great from the back so she chose to wear her hair up to show it off a bit.  This is a good thing.  Her hair is long and blonde and lovely but getting it to hold a curl is near impossible.  This is what it looked like just after we took the sock bun out.

If we could get it to stay like that … sigh.  Safer to put it into a cute pony tail which showed off the dress and if she loses her curls, will still be styled.

I really thought I’d have more pictures.  The friends were meeting at a nearby restaurant and I thought the plan was to take pictures before they went for dinner.  Turns out that even an unusually nice October day is still too chilly to stand around with bare legs in little dresses.  They stood there through a few shots and then ditched the moms and headed in.

I’m glad I got a few at home before we left.

See that scab on the side of her knee?

That’s from a zombie attack.

She went to the Pumpkin Patch with some friends last week.  During the day it’s designed for family fun, but at night everything is scary.  There are zombies who walk around and try to freak people out and one of them (who looked to be about 10) approached Faith’s friend who screamed, of course.  Then he turned to Faith who took of running … and promptly tripped over a pile of pumpkins and went sprawling.  According to her friend who was laughing almost too hard to tell the story, there were arms and legs everywhere and a group of “cute guys” sitting near by laughed.

If that had happened to me at 14 I would have made the situation a whole lot worse by bursting into tears and/or getting mad.  Faith managed to laugh along with everyone else which is, of course, the quickest way to get over embarrassment so good for her.  Not so good were the bruises on both hips and the hole in her leggings and the blood dripping down her knee.

Ah well.  It made for a good story.

And I think she pulls off the Formal Wear/Zombie Victim combo nicely, don’t you?

Bookmark

It’s time.

I am admitting to myself that I am no longer a blogger.  I loved it for a long time, but currently my attention is a whole lot of other places and it shows.

So this is a good time to stick a bookmark in this site for another day.  Possibly I will blog again in a different season.  Or perhaps I will post time to time as a scrapbook alternative for my kids.  We’ll see.

I’m going to deactivate the OFD facebook page, but have no plans to take this actual site down.  It’s our history and my recipe book and it doesn’t take any work to keep it up, so it will stay.

If you’ve stumbled here looking for something specific in my archives, they’re arranged by topic, or by date in the menu option in the bar above.  If you want to see my personal favorites, they’re all right here.  Recipes are, of course, In The Fridge.

Thanks to all of you who have visited here through the years.  If you’d like to keep in touch, my personal facebook page is here and the link to the right for sending e-mail will continue to work.

Hugs,

Mindee

Kittens Are My Favorite

I know.

I said I’m not a blogger any more, and yet this looks suspiciously like a blog post.

It isn’t.

It’s just me marking a moment in our lives for posterity, which is a totally different thing.  To prove it, I changed the date of the the “Bookmark” post so that it remains at the top of the page and I’m sliding this one in underneath it.

Because this is not a blog post.

It is just a small announcement that we have a new kitten.  There is only one good thing about having as many cats suffer untimely deaths as we have had and it’s that we have gotten to have a lot of kittens.

And kittens?

Are the very best thing.

Sure, puppies are cute too and they have puppy breath and soft puppy ears and round puppy tummies.  But puppies don’t come already housebroken.  Nor do they hang off of window screens or do mad acrobatics.  

Or purr.

Not being able to purr puts puppies firmly behind kittens on the list of the best things.

This is our new kitten.

You’ll notice that he is definitely not Siamese which is quite a departure for us.  The thing is, that I can not find a breeder of Modern Siamese cats, which we prefer over the traditional variety, within 500 miles.  The one we got most of our cats from retired.  We prefer the Modern variety because they’re super cool and the shedding is very minimal.  But 500 miles is a long way to go for a cat and the prices of them have really gone up.

The last kitten we got, Caspian, is a regular Siamese and while we like him very much, he sheds all over the place just like any old cat does.  So if I have to have a cat who sheds, I’d just as soon rescue one from the shelter which is what we did on Friday.

Rich actually is the one who picked him out and he did a great job.  This little guy is active enough to be fun, but also pretty chill and confident.  Which means he’s been very comfortable with everyone and doesn’t go hiding under the furniture all the time.

Which is a very good thing, because it turns out that small black kittens blend in really well to shadows and are kinda hard to spot.

The only thing that really got a reaction out of him was The Poodle and then he puffed right up.  

It took us two days and way too much discussion to name the little guy.  Amongst the names considered and discarded, were:

1. Hendrix
2. Johnny Cash (because he’s a man in black)
3. Batman
4. Edgar (as in Allen Poe)
5. Angus (of AC/DC because he’s back in black)
6. Gotham
7. Michael Jackson 
8. Allistair
9. ZZ (as in ZZ Top because he’s a sharp dressed man)
10. Loki
11. Thor
12. Sirius Black

We went round and round and I really thought he was just going to end being called “Buddy” or “Cat.”  Then Rich and I were sitting on the couch watching Sherlock Holmes and I was thinking about names that go together like Sherlock and Watson and Calvin and … Hobbes.

We absolutley love Calvin and Hobbes around here.  Rich had amassed the entire collection in a pile of paperback books which my older two kids read until they were shreds.  Although the strip was retired nearly 20 years ago, I still hold out hope that Bill Watterson will revive it one of these days.

So I turned to Rich and just said, “Hobbes”.  He thought for a couple of minutes and it was totally obvious that that was this kitten’s name.  He even has a patch of white on his belly that he likes to have scratched.

Now if I can just figure out how to make him stay little …