Awfully quiet around here

Oh, my friends. All those dreams, all those plans. Then reality hit in the form of (since January)...

...House purchase delayed for one week
...House painting, cleaning, floor installation - in 10 days or less
...Move
...10 days in new house during which we could not walk on new floor
...Week long delay in moving internet and phone
...Unpacking
...Weekly overnight trips for loving husband
...Family trip to Vienna
...Colds for me and Pumpkin
...Flat tire on the bicycle
...Grandparents arrive from North Carolina
...Birthday celebration (Pumpkin is 2!)
...Record-breaking 7 days of illness during which each and every member of our extended household gets sick and stays sick for at least 5 days. Each.

We're still in the middle of that last one. I'm just starting to feel like I might one day get a grip on things again - like life might one day be something other than a series of life-changing events. It just might be possible that there's a year or two in a row somewhere in our future that doesn't involve a move or a new job or new school or new family member. They're all wonderful things, but it would also be nice to catch a breath and take a minute to enjoy it all, too.

For now, let's take a minute an enjoy a house that's more than less unpacked. A house that's full of people I love - three generations of them, no less. A house that's going to be ours for a nice long while. A house where we can all stay in our pajamas for, say, three or four days in a row. Oh yes, and this yummy cup of honey lemon tea that will surely kick the doo-wop out of my cough!

Friday Moment

Inspired by Soulamama's {this moment}.

Over due

No baby yet. Most of you can stop reading now. The rest of you - I subject to another project post. Seeing as how all I can do right now is count days (we're at 40+2 today), calendars seem just right.

For the past three years, we have been totally addicted to a perfect refrigerator-sized calendar from Granit, a Swedish paper-goods/lifestyle store with outlets in Norway as well. It's a full year on one page and we've gotten quite used to it - although not particularly good at our days of the week in Swedish. Now that we're not visiting Oslo regularly, where my friend lives around the corner from the store, we were forced to find an alternative. Here it is.

This was inspired by the one issue of Martha Stewart Living that I picked up this year, in which they featured the post-it calendar. It was fun to put together using some painter's tape and I like the big format on our kitchen wall. I miss having the whole year to look at, but down on the bottom right, I put three post-its for upcoming months so we have an idea about what's coming up.

It's not an ideal solution. The March calendar should go up today, but will probably take me a week to get around to. But, for a temporary place, it's a good temporary solution. As for next year - we'll have to see about visiting Oslo again or requesting help from our personal shopper!

Mama Corner

This year, we are living in a rented furnished apartment in Hyde Park. The location is great. The working part of the family can walk to work in ten minutes and the working-at-home part of the family has plenty of kid friendly resources within walking distance as well. What we don't have is much of our own stuff. Buying things is on the "don't do" list because one way or another, we are moving to a different home next year and the less we have to move, the better. That means plenty of time for dreaming and a need to be creative about how we use what is available to us.

Here in Hyde Park, a wonderful caregiver has come into our lives. She watches Peanut in her home on Friday mornings so Mama can get some library time. It turns out, Mama is getting as much care as Lucas. The hours in the library are truly valuable to me since they took so much work to organize. More than that, though, we have found someone who cares for Peanut and watches out for Mama as well. Over the holidays, we got to pick up a beautiful rocking chair to borrow for the next few months. It's taken up residence in our living room and has accidentally created a Mama corner.

Since Peanut was just a little tiny thing, I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to create good play areas for him. I've never thought much about creating a good space for myself. This space just happened and it makes me happy over and over again. The radio is within reach, so I can listen to my talk radio quietly without disturbing the rest of the family. It is also easy to play soft music for Peanut when he nurses at night. The bookshelf has a couple of less full shelves, so there is space for pens, pencils, glue stick, scissors, journals, and plenty of reading material - as well as a beverage. The window is right there for gazing out and daydreaming. For now, the Christmas tree is there as well, with it's lovely fairy lights and decorations. This rocking chair turned a corner into my corner and I love it. It's the perfect spot for reading, knitting, sewing, nursing, reading stories, and just relaxing.

It didn't take much to create a wonderful Mama Corner in this home of ours. Do you have a special spot in your home?

House Weekend

This is our house. It's an old house, built just before 1910. We've been living here since May 2006. It's home now, and we enjoy it.

Unfortunately, any house needs work. This is especially true if you move in with almost exclusively borrowed/second hand/cast off furniture that you've bought in the "If we don't have a couch we'll have to sit on the floor" mode of shopping and would like to make it homey and nice. We've made good progress, but it's tough to find the time for planning and little projects that make a big difference. About a year ago, we introduced the House Weekend. We pick a weekend (usually three or four over as many months) and devote it to working on the house. We'll allow ourselves one evening out with friends, but otherwise turn down all invitations and make no plans to do anything other than work on the house. It sounds kind of boring, but it works.

Since it's been a while since we did any concentrated work on the house - something about getting married and a perfectly insane fall semester at work slowed us down - we started yesterday with a giant inventory. We walked through the house with a pad of paper and just wrote down everything we dream of doing in each room of the house. Now we've got a starting point for setting priorities and getting things done. Not such a bad system, really. Of course, my favorite was my comment about our kitchen. Everything goes at list writing time, so I said, "Rip it out and start over." I don't think that's going to make our final cut. I tried...