Breakfast at Charly’s

[This was written about, oh, two weeks ago? I started writing it and then fell dead asleep in the chair. -A]

It has been what, a million years since I’ve posted? Yes, yes. It’s been a million years and there’s so much to catch up on. In fact, now that I’ve checked, I see that it’s been a month. What a month it’s been!

The kids are out of school (1 month, 3 weeks, 6 days until school starts) and we’re busy with summer activities. Well, we’re busy with summer activities and getting settled in the new house.

We moved about two weeks ago and I’m still getting things in order. I’ve dug through almost every box, reorganized them and am trying to find a home for everything. I’m trying to get things in a general home and then I’ll go back through and fine tune everything from the bottom floor up.

We got the keys on the first of last month and before we moved here I did a lot of prepping. I painted the kids’ rooms, the living room and the dining room. I’m amazed at the color I chose for the living room (Olympic’s Chilled Wine mixed with Benjamin Moore paints) because it’s very bold and until now I’ve been very afraid of color. At the old house I lived with cream-colored walls for almost a decade and in the apartments we had the same deal for six years before that. Fifteen years I lived with cream-colored walls and now I pick to take the leap? The girls’ room is Lily Lavender and Iain’s is a shade of blue that goes well with his Sponge Bob sheets but whose name I can’t remember. I split the living room into two colors to split the room a bit. It’s a very large room at around 12 x 25. I need to touch up the ceiling where I smudged the wall colors but I’ll get to it when the room is fairly close to being organized.

Once I finished painting I was finished painting. I swear to God I had had enough by the time I finished Iain’s room. I decided to do the painting myself but I totally appreciate why people pay for someone else to do it. I obviously survived but it sucked. I think what made it suck even more is that not only was I the only one painting (outside of my friends who came over one weekend and lent a much appreciated hand with the living room and dining room ceilings), I was also trying to pack the other house and coordinate things for the move. All this and I had to take the kids to school and back and care for a four and a half year-old. I was, to say the least, a touch stressed.

Moving day was long and, um, long. Now that is a time where you scrimp and save your pennies because I’d rather paint a house three times over before I’d want to move my shit. It took them about four hours to empty the house and about an equal amount of time to shove all our shit in here. After all that we still had a decent amount of crap still at the old place that we’ve brought here in batches. The fact that I’ve gotten through all the boxes and most of the other crap in the last couple weeks is fairly impressive. Yes, some things went back into storage in the basement but I physically sorted through every box and basket that entered this house. I reorganized a lot of things so that they were packed with some consistency (i.e. old photos together, antique cameras together etc.) should I need to find something. I have a lot of memorabilia that I need to one day organize and put into scrapbooks (the kind we had in the old days with photo corners and not the kind where you spend more time cutting out cutesy crap from rainbow paper than actually scrapbooking) and photos that need to be put into albums.

Kelly, Mike and the kids came by for a BBQ today. The kids went in spurts as far as getting along but they survived each other. Kelly helped me organize my books in the bookshelves we got at Ikea yesterday. Did I tell you we went to Ikea? We did so much walking I thought my feet would fall off. We ended up with many things we needed for organization and to fill in the gaps where we were missing items. Some things were left back at my mother’s house or tossed because I didn’t think we’d need old utensils to add to my mother’s raging mountains of over-consumption. Had I known that we’d drop that toxicity like a stick of enriched uranium, I’d have kept a few more things. But, whatever. Simply minor inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.

[Now we continue where I left off. -A]

Since I wrote what I did above, we’ve put away a bit more boxes, have organized a few more things and even had our furniture delivered. I’ve lost a lot of steam as far as finding homes for the last bit of things still left out on our counters and in the living room but I’m hoping to get through that this weekend. Jeff was working a lot of hours over the past two weeks and while I’m thankful for it, it does slow things a bit down on this end.

Finding things a home seems to be a bigger issue with me than I thought. I got so thoroughly irritated with the amount of clutter in the old house that finding a home for everything here has taken on a new level of importance. It will happen but it’s not happening as fast as I’d like it to so I’ll sit here and blog about it instead. Who knows, maybe another trip to Ikea is in order to finally solve the storage problems. Well, by problems I really just mean tools to organize ourselves better than we’ve been in the past. I’d like a place to put toilet paper away in the main floor bathroom without just putting the bulk package on the floor. Things like that.

Part of the reason I’ve not gotten over that remaining hump of things to put away, aside from Jeff’s hours, is my doing more things with the kids. I’m feeling like a better mom lately. We were going to set up a pool we had from the other house but after I took it out of the box, I found that we were missing some very important pieces — the plugs to prevent the water from pouring out of the pool. I don’t know what could have happened to them because we had never used the pool. Both the plugs and the instructions were missing. Since my kids are the luckiest on the planet, I ordered them another. We finally set it up the other day and they’ve been having lots of fun in it. Sadly for them they’ve had to exit the pool a few times because they were getting out of hand but that parenting thing gets in the way of unbridled tomfoolery sometimes.

We’ve had violin this summer and it seems like Gracie is enjoying it even more. I asked her what she’d rather do in the winter — continue with gymnastics or take private violin lessons — and she chose the violin. I’m going to ask her summer teacher if she has room in her schedule for private lessons at her home. I know she does them but she also teaches at the local music store and I’d rather pay her the money directly. She’s very sweet and more than qualified since she is going to a local university on a full ride scholarship for violin. Very, very cool. I’m sort of torn about gymnastics because I worry about taking away a sport in the winter when we get stuck indoors and sedentary but she doesn’t seem to be all that bothered if we have to miss and I don’t want to pay the money if she could take it or leave it. Thoughts?

Did I mention that I’ve finished my school supply shopping with the exception of one item? Yes. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am DONE. I was at Target the other day and they had some sales going on with 24 pack Crayolas going for $.22 a piece. There were a bevy of other items on sale and I said fuck it. I had the kids’ lists fresh from the school’s website and I tore through the lists, smiling widely as I plucked the sale items from the bins. There is one item on Iain’s list that I’m not quite sure about and that’s a book bag. He has a backpack but the list specifically mentioned a book bag and stated that backpacks would not be allowed to be worn all day. I have no clue what they are aiming for but we’ll see. Next up will be school clothes which I’ll tackle next month. I don’t look forward to spending the money but I’m fairly frugal so it shouldn’t be so bad. Who knows what prices will be like this year compared to last with this economy.

Tomorrow (today if you’re reading this on Friday) is Gracie’s summer music class concert. She’s really looking forward to it and I should be getting to bed. We have to be there earlier than usual (like two hours earlier) so I won’t be able to mess around most of the morning like I normally do.