2013 – jesser

December 18, 2013

Playing Catch-Up

Well things are rolling along sometimes fairly normally. The kids are doing great, growing and learning by leaps and bounds. We register Ben for kindergarten next month. I can hardly believe it. Tabby has been having fun with spirit week at her school (see green hair above) and even Ben got in on the action.

The kids have been enjoying the season and all of the fun things it has to offer. We saw The Nutcracker with some friends last week. Everyone really enjoyed it. Tabby has been studying Waltz of the Flowers in music class and she and her little buddies could be seen doing hand motions as it played. The kids both took home nutcrackers (joy! rapture!) to add to our Christmas decorations.

Tabby baked cookies yesterday and has asked to make apple cider caramels again. She’s also been asking about Elf on the Shelf which all of her friends have. We do not have one and I made an executive decision that this was not the year to get it. I love the creativity behind setting up the tableaus, but I a) don’t have time and b) am not really into the Santa deception thing, particularly as it pertains to manipulating my children’s behavior.

We have been doing lots on the house situation, particularly as it pertains to getting our house ready to sell. We are finished retiling the master bathroom (a project we should have done YEARS AGO). It was ridiculously tedious because there were tons of things to work around and a diagonal wall. We had a family friend come in and help us knock out the last stage in record time, and despite how the above looks (don’t mark tiles when it’s late and you are STOOPID) …

It turned out really well. AND I’m so glad to have it done. Well mostly done – still have to put the trim back and reset the toilet. OY.

We have also been busy picking finishes for the new house. Above is our fireplace surround tile (bottom) and kitchen backsplash (top). I am very excited to see all of this start to take shape … but it will be a while. We had a snafu with our site plan and we STILL haven’t gone to permitting. It is resolved and we got a nice $25k option for FREE out of the deal, but it is frustrating. It should go in by the end of this week. I am anxious to start seeing dirt flying. Hopefully BEFORE we put our house on the market.

What else has been happening?

Matt and I saw a wholly unsatisfactory Broncos game (they lost). At least the seats were awesome.

It’s been cold (this hampered the tile project) … but also warm.

Tabby lost another tooth, but the tooth fairy still has yet to get ahold of one of Tabby’s teeth – she kept the last one and lost this one before she could turn it in. The note was more than fair payment though, I say.

I made quite a few Sunday dinners, including Pioneer Woman’s pot roast. YUM.

Overall, I’m doing OK and in some ways, improving, I think. I have decided that based on my job right now and our lives that early morning workouts are no longer working for me, so I have been doing evening workouts for over a week now and it actually seems to be sticking. Thank goodness. Not that I’ll say no to a nice early(ish) morning run when it works, but as a rule, this is working better for me right now. Working out just makes me feel good. And I’d been missing it and it seems to be helping.

I’m even looking forward to Christmas a little.

December 6, 2013December 6, 2013

Looking for Christmas

The view from my office is cold and snowy this fourth of December in the hardest year of my life so far. It wasn’t a particularly fun (or horrible) drive to work and I’d much rather be skiing than marketing today. Despite those feelings, I’m glad to see the white stuff again simply because it’s putting me a wee bit in the Christmas spirit.

Since I moved back home with Matt in tow almost 10 years ago, we’ve spent almost every Christmas morning at my parents’ house. We even slept over on Christmas Eve most of the time simply because we could. Christmas is big, important and fun and filled with traditions. And a helluva lot of that centered around my mom and the tremendous effort she put into making Christmas nice for everyone.

I think we’ve all been feeling that if left to our own devices, Christmas 2013 might just not happen – or we might just all jet off to Tahiti. We’re not really feeling in the holiday spirit this year. But of course there are two little people who are counting on their big day being just as big and fun as it always has been. And while I don’t think it will be exactly the same, I am determined to do it up right for them.

So a different plan has been hatched this year. It will be light on the presents but hopefully approaching the normal level of joy. Instead of being at Mom and Dad’s we’ll assemble at our house. I feel like this will be a nice send-off for the little house we’ve called home for the past 9 years. Christmas brunch won’t be at my grandma’s – she moved to assisted living earlier this year – we’ll do it smaller at our house. Christmas dinner will be bigger and my dad will host … with us to help.

I’m sure I’ll cry. Maybe a lot. But hopefully we can bask in the real meaning of the season – a pause to appreciate all we have and celebrate with those we love.

December 3, 2013

Thanksgiving Weekend

The 4 days off went by in a blink. We kicked off the season by cooking Wednesday evening. We were responsible for Cranberry Cornbread Dressing and Sweet Potato Spoon Bread. We made a huge mess of the kitchen and then cleaned it up like good elves.

We had high hopes of turkey trotting like we have for the past several years on Thanksgiving morning, but the kids were nursing colds and we reluctantly begged off at the last minute. Instead we took a walk and drove around the new hood a bit. Then we went up to my uncle’s for thanksgiving. It was a very enjoyable afternoon and evening of family time … right up until I saw the corner of Ben’s eyes filled with what looked like boogers. Ick. Pink eye. We left immediately and I called the docs to get a prescription called in.

Friday was an odd sort of lost day. Matt and the kids demo’d the carpet in our master bath (ick). I took Ben to the doctor’s when his ears started bugging him (ear infection, antibiotic #2).

We planned and cut the hardee board for laydown in the bathroom.

In the evening we went out for a cousins night – where we actually had ALL EIGHT cousins from my mom’s side of the family. We had a nice dinner at Ace and then …

Went bowling! It was great fun – something I haven’t done in ages.

Saturday we devoted the vast majority of the day to helping my sister move. The kids were supposed to have karate, but they were still under the weather and a bit mopey, so we put them up on their own in a corner of her apartment with some coloring books and an ipad and they did their thing while we carried boxes and furniture.

We came home pretty “early” and let the kids play while Matt and I rested up from our crazy day. Then we put the kids to bed and laid down the hardee board. I laid down the thinset – this is my specialty as it is a good deal like frosting a cake – and then Matt came behind me and screwed the board down. This week sometime we need to seal up the joints and actually lay down and grout the tile … but for now we’re showering in the basement (boo).

Sunday I was determined to get the kids out of the house for some fun – they’d been real troopers, amusing themselves while we moved my sister and other boring stuff. So we took them to see the Mythbusters exhibit at our local museum. It was a pretty fun exhibit with lots of hands on stuff.

Like building houses out of brick or wood or straw ala the three little pigs and then testing them in a wind tunnel. You could make an airplane take off on a conveyer belt, time yourself hanging from a cliff, drive “blind” with someone giving you instructions and some other things.

We followed it up with tours around the dinosaur and Egyptian galleries (Ben’s single odd desire).

We spent the next few hours at Ikea. We had lunch and went around looking for things for the new house and picked up a few things for the current house – namely light kits to replace our the fan and special light fixtures in the kids rooms that we will be taking with us.

We finished out the day with grocery shopping, house cleaning, laundry-doing and Sunday dinner … of course followed by Grammy stories.

I was supposed to take Monday off, but instead had a very busy, harassed day. Ugh. So so so looking forward to my week off in January.

November 21, 2013

The Struggle

I’ll confess. I’m struggling a bit.

It’s not dire. I’m not in the depths of despair. I doubt anyone who meets me on a daily basis would even know that I’m different from “normal.”

But I am. I’m more “tired.” I don’t feel like running, even though I enjoy it when I go.

Work is OK, but best when things are really busy. When it isn’t really busy, I stare off into space for longer than I mean to.

Our manic schedule is both a help and a hindrance. I go so so much and then when I stop, I really stop.

I think what I’m truly suffering from is inertia. Or lack there of, really. Once I get going, I go, almost manically. But when I stop, it’s really hard to get me going again.

Last weekend we cleaned out Mom’s closet. The closet she shares with Dad to be exact. I won’t pretend I enjoyed it, but there were funny silly moments here and there. Like when we found an entire gallon-sized ziploc bag of freebie toothbrushes from the dentist. Mom had a sonic toothbrush and never would have used these, but there they were in her bathroom (we cleaned that too). Of course we cried off and on.

I cried when I pulled out the dress she wore to the last company Christmas party. I have awesome photos of her dancing in it with our coworkers, the ones she loved so much. We cried when we saw the last few clothes she bought, never knowing she wouldn’t even get to take the tags off some of them.

I inherited some kickass red platform peep-toe suede pumps. I love and hate wearing them all at the same time.

We didn’t even touch her jewelry or bags or scarves. I look forward to going through those even less. They’re so essentially Mom.

I’m trying not to struggle. Trying to beat this funk I’m in. Some days I do better than others.

November 12, 2013November 11, 2013

About Those Houses

So about the house(es).

11 days ago, Matt and I decided to take Friday off. We’d had a busy week, culminating in our Halloween festivities, and we wanted some time to relax and work around the house. And that’s mostly what we did. A few weeks before I’d seen a flyer from the same builder who built our house, advertising some new models in a neighborhood a few minutes from our house. So knowing that we both enjoy checking out real estate like this (kind of a real live HGTV), I suggested we maybe go see them sometime during the day. But it was pretty far down the list.

We ran errands, had lunch, did Good Will drop off, elementary school pickup and then preschool pickup. As we were on the way to Ben’s school, the idea revived itself as we saw the signs pointing us to the ‘hood. Both kids in tow, we went to check it out.

Now here’s the thing … we have been toying with the idea of moving for a long time. But we love our house and our neighborhood. We once even went so far as to bring in a real estate agent and start putting our house on the market, but everytime we started down that path, we stopped short and went home. Whatever we moved for had to be near PERFECT, fulfilling a pretty substantial wishlist:

more square footage
but with a vastly better layout
better “daily” storage
larger garage
same school matriculation area
proper pantry
good neighborhood feel
good outdoor space

And when we went into these models, we just started checking things off one by one.

So we’ve gone forward. We’ve done research. We’ve started planning and scheming and writing checks and it all seems to be falling into place. We’re putting the house on the market in February. We hope to close by March. Our friends bought a rental place this past summer and we are planning to rent it from them until our house is finished.

In between all of this, we have to get our house ready to sell, including some painting, new carpet upstairs and a reasonably long list of (mostly small) repairs. We have to get our house ready to stage, which means we have to remove almost all of the “stuff” in it. We have to make decisions about our new house, which, while fun, is a bit stressful. And we have to keep working, going to school, turning in homework, celebrating holidays and on and on.

It’s going to be a crazy ride.

November 11, 2013

The Great Purge

I won’t go into gorey details until we’re a bit closer to goal, but long story short, I think we’ve decided to sell our house and build a new one just west of us. It’s exciting but also still really abstract for me.

What isn’t abstract, however, is the fact that whether we move or not, we need to purge. It seems no matter how much I try to avoid bringing new stuff in, stuff builds up. Toys from the kids birthdays, magazines a neighbor drops off, outgrown clothes, CDs from the 90s that probably should have been dumped YEARS AGO and on and on. We regularly take stuff to Good Will, but there are other things that get hidden away and only thought about when you delve deeper.

This past week, we’ve been delving deep.Very deep. Truthfully we started this before we made the decision to move. We took the beautiful but no longer functionally appropriate cabinet and bookshelf that Matt built for Tabby out of her room. It and the matching nightstand went to a friend of ours who will love them. We pared her stuff down and reorganized it and her room feels so much better for it.

We tackled the playroom as well, getting rid of baby toys and some oversized pieces the kids just aren’t using anymore. Some went to our neighbor’s grandkids others to our friend’s little one, now in the stage obsessed with dolls and dress-up. We worked on the main floor closet where we keep a few DVDs and the art supplies and puzzles that don’t live in the playroom.

Wenesday night we attacked Matt’s office, going through a ridiculous amount of old PC games and CDs and magazines as well as papers and office supplies. Thursday night it was my office. Both offices have had full trashbags of crap taken out of them. Some is stuff I intended to do something with, saved for scrap-booking and never got around to actually doing it, other stuff should have been dealt with years ago.

This weekend we took somewhat of a break to work on other things, namely sorting the housing situation out and of course, having some fun with family and friends and the inevitable laundry and grocery shopping. But this week we will be hitting it hard again, tackling our master closets and bathroom, the laundry closet and the garage. Eek.

I do truly enjoy the catharsis of getting rid of junk. I love organizing things better and, assuming everything goes forward, it totally whets my appetite for making the new house as functional as possible. I’ve been making a list of all the things in our house that don’t really have a place: the few paper shopping bags we like to keep around, the recycle bins, the mounds of produce we buy each week, magazines, kids luggage, etc. so that I can make sure it does have a place in the new house.

It’s all a bit overwhelming right now, so I’m eating the organizing and purging part of the elephant for now.

November 6, 2013

Halloween

Halloween was fun. I got up in the weeee smalls and went into work early (partially because I couldn’t sleep and partially because I had a ton to do). The beginning of the week was manic, but it ended well because I took off by 11:30 on Thursday and took ALL OF FRIDAY off. YAY. My first stop was Tabby’s school to be room mommy. We spent some time decorating and then I got to do T’s makeup, which was fun. I improved my game from the first go-around and added blue eyeshadow which was a fun touch.

I’m room mom along with Tabby’s best friend’s mom. I didn’t really know her (new best friend) until we started all of this and it’s been fun. Neither of us are over the top and we’re pretty much on the same chill wavelength. We just did a few games … math, madlibs and mummy and a bookmark craft. Food was decidedly. I made rice krispie treat pumpkins with tootsie roll stems. I initially balked at the idea of sculpting the rice krispie treat and was just going to cut it out with a cookie cutter, but I really hate smashing the krispies into the pan and I think in the end this was easier. There were NONE left, so I guess the kids liked them OK. Other parents brought fruit and veggies and crackers and cheese and juiceboxes and water. Tabby’s teacher was very appreciative of our work. He’s made it into a very nice class and we had fun.

After the school party, we picked up Ben and got to work carving pumpkins (totally procrastinated on that!) and prepping for having people over. We were set for a group of 24 (!!) and we had to haul to get it all done. Matt had his robots in full force. They now number three: silly-string-shooting spider, eerie floating ghost and swooping bat. The bat was this year’s project and unfortunately still needs a little work. It was fun though.

The kids were a quivering ball of over-sugared craziness by the time guests started arriving. Our friend who was bringing toppings for the carnitas I’d made was late and we had to start eating without her … or the toppings. But it was really no big deal because another friend had brought seven layer dip and we just used that as toppings. It was surprisingly good. The last family showed up shortly after dinner and then my dad and sister after that. They stayed to eat and hand out candy in peace while the rest of us braved the ‘hood.

The kids were crazy, running all over the place and having too much fun and sugar. Matt bought LED gloves for us on Amazon and they were a big hit and it also made it easy for the kids to find us. We only did two blocks since it was windy and cold, but the kids filled their buckets. Back at Casa de Nichols, the kids sorted and ate their candy and the adults had another adult beverage. A short while later, we bid our friends adieu.

My kids got their jimjams on and brushed their teeth extra carefully and closed out the evening with Grammy Stories … read by Papa.

October 30, 2013October 28, 2013

Sometimes

Sometimes I start crying for no apparent reason.

Sometimes I feel so normal it kind of sickens me.

Sometimes running helps.

Sometimes nothing helps.

Sometimes I just want to call and chat.

Sometimes I just chat anyway.

Sometimes I see red hair or a dark grey SUV or hear that ringtone and forget entirely for just a fleeting moment that she’s gone.

Sometimes I can laugh at a memory.

Sometimes that same memory has the complete opposite effect.

Sometimes I’m grateful for everything that was.

Sometimes I’m just pissed as hell.

Always I miss her.

Always I love her.

October 28, 2013October 28, 2013

October So Far

So now that October’s almost over, I’ll catch you all up on what’s been going on. Our school carnival was originally scheduled for D (diagnosis)-day. It was cancelled due to the flooding and various road closures in our area and obviously, as everything unfolded, we wouldn’t have gone anyhow. So it was rescheduled about a month later and we met up with our friends to have some carnival fun. It was a bit bittersweet to go … Mom had hoped to go with us and she would have loved it.

They did something new this year. Last year the food was pizza in the cafeteria, but this year they invited a few food trucks onto the blacktop and we could buy dinner from them … and the PTA got 15%. It was great fun.

Nothing active about this – I just enjoyed the colorful kids shoes laying on the lawn (while they went through the obstacle course).

I left a little while in to go check out a townhouse with my sister and missed about 45 min of the carnival and since the sun went down, many good photo-taking opportunities. The kids had a great time and played almost all of the games.

Saturday, we went out to Anderson Farms. We were invited by one of Ben’s classmates and as much as I hated to give up (another) big chunk of my weekend, most of our friends have kids Tabby’s age, not Ben’s and it was important for him.

The kids were thrilled to get out to “the farm.” It’s much more of an enterprise, of course. They had concessions, games, food, etc. Our friends had gotten a “private” campsite and we got to cook dinner around the fire and migrate back to it whenever we got cold throughout the evening.

They had some really cool pedal cars that the kids got into. I was amazed how well they were both able to keep up with kids twice their size/age. And Matt and I got to take a turn on the adult-sized version.

The people who invited us were as nice as could be and we really clicked with them and thoroughly enjoyed the evening. Ben and his little buddy especially enjoyed the DJ they had later on for the teen crowd that came out for the haunted corn maze. They danced their little 4-year old butts off. It was hilarious and adorable.

Poor Tabby coming off a long day including 1.5 hours of karate, was tired early and wanted to just cuddle by the fire. Eventually we had to head out and both kids were asleep before we turned onto the main highway.

Sunday we had another jam-packed day. We spent the morning around the house, working on re-oganizing Tabby’s room. Then we headed off to run a couple of errands and went home to put on costumes and head out to a party. On the way, we stopped by to visit my grandma. We wanted to see her and have the kids show off their costumes. Unfortunately, we were running late so it had to be a quick visit.

Some of our camping buddies had a great Halloween party. They had great food and planned tons of fun activities for the kids – apple bobbing, donut (on a string) eating, candy-corn relays, etc. They have an awesome backyard and the weather was amazing. It was a very good way to spend the afternoon and early evening.

October 27, 2013

Camping Catch-Up

Life has been moving along. I’ve really been intending to do lots of things … but I find between work (where I’ve been playing catch-up) and lots of other things, my energy is pretty drained by the end of the day. I’ve been doing good to get dinner on the table and keep up with the family. I think there’s a bit of depression in there, honestly, but I’m allowing myself to be a bit off right now. I don’t have to be super woman. It’s OK. Anyhow, back on topic.

We had two great camping trips this fall that I haven’t talked about. The first one was a group trip (they’re all groups, but this was a BIGGER group). We had 6 campers (pop-ups, hardside campers, an RV and a teardrop) plus a family of tent campers. It was a great site.

Across from where we parked the trailers was a huge hill and about 2/3 of the way up was an abandoned wooden corral that the kids took as their fort … and at the top of the hill …

A gorgeous view of the lake and the mountains. Then just a quarter mile away

The lake! Where all the kids, both the dogs and a few adults took a chilly dip.

The kids ran feral. We rode bikes. We played Cards Against Humanity. We saw a wedding from afar. We got rained on. It was easy and fun and nice.

The next trip just a few weeks later was very different, but no less fun. It was, however, a bit chillier. We saw flakes falling down as we headed up on Friday night, but by the next day it had warmed up and got pretty nice.

We went for the fall color, but there wasn’t a ton of it available. It didn’t matter though! It was still beautiful weather.

We were a Mueller State Park and the staff there put on some fun activities: paper making and a nature hike. We also went on quite the long hike of our own.

My dad and sister joined us, but somehow we didn’t get them in the photos. We didn’t do so well overall with photos this trip. This was far more about the feeling for me … very restive and nice.

And thus ends our epic camping season. It was a decided success and we’re anxious to start panning for 2014.