MommyCoddle

Little things, two of them incredibly cute

Oh, people. Remember my list of "Things That Are Stressing Me Out"? Well, last night at dinner the girls said to me, "Guess we can cross off 'check if sheep are pregnant', and 'find out what I need for lambs' birth', and 'set up lambing pens' "!

Totally unexpectedly, and probably for the best, I was greeted at my bedside very early yesterday morning by my breathless husband...."You've got lambs. Two of them!" He was on his way to work and just as he was pulling out, remembered something he forgot, and as he stepped out of the car to get it, he knew that the sounds he was hearing from the sheep shed were most definitely NOT Penny or May.

We have babies, people! 

I pulled on my boots and went out to the barn in the dark of yesterday morning to discover two sweet and still-wet baby lambs being every so carefully cared for by Penny. 

Those first few hours were nerve-wracking, I tell you. Watching them struggle to nurse and latch on. Me, lying under a very patient Penny and making sure her milk was starting, trying to direct teats into tiny mouths...(yes, I may have over-managed this a bit.), but little by little, under my nervous eyes, all is well. Though one is smaller, they both seem to be nursing. Dan and I took turns checking on them throughout the night and we made it with no problems. 

I couldn't have asked for a better mother. Penny is patient and calm and just the right amount of protective--that stamp of her foot at the cats wandering into her pen, or when too many people are visiting her, lets us know she needs her space. 

And the babies, keeping with the tradition of naming them with the same letter as their mother, are being called Pete and Paige. A boy and a girl. 

Next comes May. Maybe Penny's little ones will trigger something in her. She is definitely keeping a watchful eye on everything. 

Spring is most definitely just around the corner.

In other news....

I was most-honored to be asked to write something up for new-to-me site 3ThingsForMom. Joined by other lovely contributors like Heather of Rookie Moms and Pilar Guzman of MS Living (hello!?!) I shared my 3 things this week--a truth, a tip, and a find. I think some of you may recognize my truth. It was a lesson that needed some serious re-visiting in my life these days. Be sure to check out Lauren's lovely site. It is a well-crafted collection of mama-wisdom. 

My favorite way to procrastinate is to pour my energy into all the wrong things. Case and point, I'm about to do a major move and redesign of this blog. I'll be moving to a new host which requires pushing the figuartive "big red button" and moving my eight years of writing over to the new space. So if things look wonky or strange for a few days, bear with me. I hope to have things ironed out soon. 

We have a moving date! The Woodlawn house will be HOME beginning the weekend of March 9. Ack, just over a week away. Perhaps it's time to pick out a faucet for the kitchen sink? We're living in the land of chaos, but every time I step foot in that sweet old house, my heart thumps in my chest with anticipation and joy of calling it home. I can't wait to share more of the process and projects with all of you! 

Happy weekend. Happy March 1st. More soon....

 

Woodlawn // weekending 2

I don't have much to show in pictures for the weekend at the house. Because painters are still finishing up and cabinets and floors were late...blah, blah, blah, we're pushing back our move-in date a few weeks. 

So mid-March is the new goal.

This weekend Dan did lots of unglamorous things like installing toe kicks under cabinets, moving around electrical outlets and fussing with toilets and sinks.

But, BUT we did get some shelves, people! 

Dan was disapointed with the cabinets around our refrigerator and didn't like how the fridge stuck out past the side panels. It set the top cabinet back way too deep and made the fridge look like an oversized giant (well, she is pretty giant, I admit.).

So he robbed my open shelving, which at the time, I thought was going to make me weep. But I got the "just trust me" answer in reply to my whining. 

In the end, the man was right. He routered and joined the open shelving to the existing refrigerator cabinet to make a more custom look that fits pretty much perfectly and looks SO much better. 

And in return I still got my open shelving above the sink, swiped straight from the barn. And I love it even more. My favorite look in a kitchen is a more pieced together electic look versus an "everything matchy-matchy and just-so". So the shelves couldn't make me any happier. 

In the meantime, Birdy has become master sawdust vac'er. The girl can operate a shop vac like nobody's business. 

It's a life skill, I tell you. 

Woodlawn // kitchen update + lists

Oh, people. I think I may have just completed my most overwhelming, crazy week ever. Not only was this the week we flew in Dan's amazingly talented carpenter-brother for a week of hard-core kitchen bootcamp, it was also the week I started a new job with BabyCenter, had vets coming to our house for every species of animal, dentist appointments for all my girls, and began to really feel the stress (and my unpreparedness) about the fact that I have two plump sheep in the barn who could quite possibly give birth at the end of the month, just as we are getting ready to move. 

If stress burned calories, I'd be set. 

But, you know I'll look back on all this some day and laugh, right? And I'll have great stories, right? And it's all worth it, right? Saturday night, Dan sat, exhausted, at the dinner table after working since the wee hours that morning and said "you know what, I changed my mind, I don't want to move." (For the record, he'd had wine, but no coffee yet, and he had to go back for another several hours of work before he could collapse into bed.) 

But, we are moving people. And we'll get past this and it will be worth it, at some point. I'm just having to keep my eyes focused on that tiny bit of light at the end of a very long, uphill, in a snowstorm-tunnel that we're walking through right now. 

There are much worse things to have overwhelming your life. I'm not losing sight of that.

Moving on....phew! So, we made progress this week! 

The kitchen cabinets FINALLY arrived on Friday, the absolute last day they could arrive without Dan's brother's trip out to help being a total bust. (Martha Stewart would not be pleased with the disorganization of "her cabinet makers".) 

Water lines and electricity were moved and added. 

Floors were finished. 

Late nights were pulled. 

Counter tops were installed.

Sinks were found in the discount bin (yay!) and installed.

Lunches and coffees and mid-morning breadkfast sandwiches were carted back and forth.

Meals were eaten on top of washers and dryers and sitting on steps and five gallon buckets. 

Yesterday morning after Dan dropped his brother off at the airport, we all met back at the house. And our tiny crew of workers broke down boxes and swept sawdust and opened and closed the refrigerator door a bajillion times and got pretty geeked out over crushed ice. 

We're moving forward. The press is on. The kitchen isn't finished, but it looks like a kitchen! Once the kitchen is finished the next big hurdle is bathrooms. God love 'em, not a single bathroom works completely. We will have to shower in one, go the bathroom in another, and wash hands in the kitchen sink. 

But hey, I've lived a long time with my shower that requires a wrench to turn it on and another tool to adjust the temperature. I can live with this for awhile, too. 

More soon, my friends. And most importantly, thanks for following along and letting me unload my overwhelming moments.

Woodlawn // weekending

Another weekend at Woodlawn means a few more steps forward on progress. And as with any remodeling project, there have been bumps in the road. 

I've been scheduling the arrival of everything from flooring to appliances and kitchen cabinets. And even with my cushions for setbacks and issues, things are still "lost" or there's "no word from the manufacturer".

The flooring debacle was a huge headache. Now the dishwasher is MIA. And the kitchen cabinets have no expected arrival date, despite the fact that I was given next week as an arrival date and I just bought a plane ticket for Dan's brother-in-law to come out and install them...with a cushion for "issues". So we're sweating a few things around here. 

Not only have I memorized the number for Home Depot, I've also memorized the number menus. Press 3 for kitchens. 5 for flooring. 0 for customer service... 

In the meantime, we keep taking little steps forward.

This weekend and last, we investigated a leak in the den. Expected with any old house. 

We moved a few things into the attic which means the girls rediscovered some favorite toys that had been stashed away. And I had to shoo little hands from opening up boxes of packed up, too-small clothes and shoes. The rediscovering of these things is like a mini-Christmas.

So we're moving forward. Little by little. I feel like we are on the cusp of things getting really crazy. Good crazy. But crazy nonetheless. 

Hope you all had a good weekend, too...more soon!

Woodlawn // The kitchen, before

There were a lot of things that had to fall into place before we could even consider that we might be able to live at Woodlawn. So many question marks that we even felt nervous driving back that long driveway to poke around the place. I won't publicly confess how many drive-bys I did for those months we spent in "house limbo".

On one particularly brave day, we actually peeked in the windows. Heaven forbid! But I got a glimpse that day of some pretty good things going on inside, despite the disrepair. So when we finally had the chance to actually walk through the house without feeling like a couple of burglars scouting out the place? That was pretty exciting. 

When we first went through the family had yet to move everything out. Later there would be dumpsters, auctions and sales. 

But underneath all that I was seeing was what I knew had been the most beautiful home. Elegant. Lovely. Full of life. 

One of our first big projects at the house has been the kitchen. The red linoleum countertops were reminiscent of the ones in the house I grew up in, but all nostalgia aside, I was easily able to see them go. 

All of our remodeling plans for house have been basically squished into just a few weeks. Decisions I feel like most people spend months making, I've had to make in days and weeks of time. It's been a wee bit stressful. And completely, "Is this really happening?" strange and amazing.

 

But now, plans have been finalized. Cabinets have been ordered. Flooring picked out. And I'll share all that soon. For now, I'm just grateful that I can finally sleep at night without dreaming of soft-close kitchen drawers, refrigerators, and paint chips. 

The long way home

There's a road the girls and I travel pretty often around here. We call it "taking the long way home".

In the humid, unbearable days of summer, I've been known to pack the girls in the car for a chance to sit in the cool of the air conditioning for a few minutes. Cooling our bodies, renewing my sanity, we'd take the long way home. 

In the fall, we'd take the long way home--an excuse to escape through the woods and note the changes in the colors of the trees. After a storm, we'd take the long way home--to see how high the stream got. 

The road is mostly unpaved, winds along the creek and is tented in trees. It passes by the farm where Emma rides each week. And takes a sharp turn at the edge of a hill that I've heard my grandfather refer to as the best view in the county. 

After so many trips down this road, the girls and I have each sort of chosen a house along the way that's our favorite. Elizabeth loves one that "needs some work." Because she likes to work. Emma's picked one with plenty of room for horses. And secretly, I have this little favorite one, too. 

A white house with green shutters that sits way back off the road. You can't see much of it from the road, but I've always felt like it looks like something set in a dfferent time, a different place. It's been my favorite all along. 

At the beginning of this summer that house became empty. The husband and wife that lived there for years, passed away. The rest of the family was ready to let it go. And through connections and family and God's good grace, that little house, that favorite of mine, found it's way into our little family. 

The process has been a long one. Since the beginning of summer we've been talking and waiting, planning, then waiting. There were long conversations leaning against fence posts. And in parking lots of the convenience store at the corner. Things to arrange. Ideas to throw around. Hurdles to overcome. And lots and lots of waiting.

And then that same week that we were dealing with the stress and sorrow of the rabies incident, it all fell through. We had to walk away. And honestly, I was pretty devastated. It had been such a long road. I thought we were so close. And then everything fell apart. But I had to trust that there must be something else. And that this was the right thing to do. 

But something about the walking away turned everything around. And within weeks there were a few more conversations and a handshake and here we are...we're leaving Thomas Run and moving a stone's throw away, to that house I've always loved.

The local history books tell us it's name is Woodlawn. It smells like my grandmother's house and reminds me of the home I grew up in. In its day it was immaculate. Turns out my grandfather played tennis on the courts there (now buried under grass) with Monroe, whose silver tennis trophies covered almost every bookcase in the house. And family friends used to go there to play bridge. And Emma went there with our neighbor once to collect a load of hay. Today, Woodlawn needs some love and attention. But her bones are beautiful.

I've been waiting a long time to share this news. I suppose after such a long, emotional journey to get to this place it's still hard to let myself believe this is really happening. But with paint colors picked and a gutted kitchen and boxes being packed, it seems as though it's really happening. And my heart, that I've been holding close despite it's thumping in my chest with excitement, can finally be let go.

We've found the long way home, indeed.