Living the Dream

It's hard to imagine we've almost been in our house for eight years. That's twice as long as the previous owners. We bought our first house as newlyweds, began renovating it, and have since brought home two babies. Six months after we bought the house, we finished painting all the kitchen cabinets and drawers and were able to park our cars back in.

At the time, it only took 1.5 hours to clean the garage and pull both of our cars back in. Our overhead storage rack was completely empty and we didn't own nearly as many tools, gardening equipment, our chest freezer, a bike trailer, or eight total bicycles (children's + adult's). I was impressed then and vowed to always keep our garage clean enough to be able to pull two cars into it. 

Nearly eight years later, I've kept that vow, and done an even better job than I thought was possible. What's better than parking two cars in the garage? Parking THREE cars in the garage! Now FYI we have two-car garage door. So the opening is only big enough to park two cars. So....how did we do this? 

I blogged about the first part of this project last fall. You can read about my Garage Saga series here to catch up if you didn't already read it. 

Yesterday, the rest of the dream was completed. After about a year of research, we finally pulled the trigger and purchased the car lift. Originally, it was going to be installed in February, but we conveniently received a notice from the city a week after we made arrangements that they would be doing alley construction for the next month. We called the installer and requested a later install date. 

In the end, the city construction finished the weekend before the original install date was scheduled. But the rescheduling worked out anyway because we needed the extra time to clean out the garage to make sure the lift fit.

Whenever I told people we were getting a lift, they'd get confused because nobody really knows what a car lift actually looks like. This is what a car lift looks like. It's basically a mechanical elevator for a car. 

The same two cars from eight years ago, now stacked on top of each other. 

No, this is not at a mechanic shop.
Our two car garage is now a three car garage! 

I've upped my own antes now. Must keep the garage clean enough to always park three cars in it now. 😂 I didn't think I'd care for the car lift as much as my husband, but after seeing it installed with our cars all neatly parked inside our garage, I really, really love it. 

Also as a side joke, I bought myself a Hotwheel. We were picking out cars for my son for his birthday, and I decided to get one I liked, too. I picked it because I liked the color and it looked pretty chic. 

When I got home, I decided to Google this car to see how much it would cost in real life. $1.695M you guys. I never thought I was a car person, but man, I sure know how to pick a car 😝. I didn't even notice it doesn't have a windshield until I read the description on the website: created to deliver nothing but the purest driving experience. For the rest of us realists, this translates to: you will feel all the wind in your face and possibly eat a bug or two when driving. 

Don't think I'll be getting this car in real life anytime soon...but it's a pretty little model to look at. 😁

The Hare's Real Problem

One of my teaching analogies I use is retelling the story of the tortoise and the hare. I don't need to retell the story because by the time my students are old enough to understand this analogy, they know the story. When I ask my students what the purpose of this story is, they typically respond with, "slow and steady wins the race."

And that's what we were taught growing up. However, over the years, I've begun to question this proverb. Is it true that if you work slowly and steadily, you will eventually finish your project or reach your goal? Yes, absolutely. Progress, however slow, is still progress. But this proverb fails to take into account some other facts of the story.

The hare is faster than the tortoise. That was, is, and always will be a fact. By sheer ability, the hare is faster. The hare was created that way, and he is faster than a tortoise. In most retellings of the story, the hare gets a great lead in the beginning because of how fast he is. He looks behind him and notices the tortoise is nowhere to be seen. He is obviously ahead of the tortoise and has an easy lead. 

Then, the story goes to say the hare takes a nap and falls asleep under the tree. Most renditions of the story paint the picture that the hare taking a nap means he is lazy and not hard-working. This is where the tortoise keeps going at his slow pace, overtakes the hare, and wins the race.

bye bye, hare

Is the hare actually lazy though? I'm sure it was work for the hare to reach where he was along the race path when he decided to take a nap under the tree. Even if it may have been "easy" for him, it took energy and effort to get that far in the race. Could he have made the decision to rest a while and take a nap? Sure. Was he in the lead and ahead? Yes. Therefore, you cannot attribute the hare's decision to take a nap as being lazy.

You know where the hare went wrong? His nap was too long! He fell asleep for so long that the tortoise was able to catch up and slowly amble to the finish line. Although let's be honest, however slow the tortoise was moving, in reference to his ability, it wasn't ambling. He was probably moving at his fastest pace possible.

Taking a break is not a bad thing. Relaxing is not wrong. Sometimes, loafing is necessary. But the problem is, so many of us do not know when to resume. Could the hare have just run the race, finished it, and won without stopping in the middle? Yes. Could the hare have still won the race with a shorter nap in the middle? I believe so, yes. But sadly, the hare did not win the race when he took a nap, lost track of time, and did not finish the race in time. 

I don't think we should be told to be like the tortoise. Sometimes, for things we struggle with, we do need to be like the tortoise and trudge on through it, even if it's something we don't like. But I also think we should learn a lot from the hare. Take advantage of your big leads when you have one. Use your talents and gifts in your favor. And don't be afraid to take breaks or rest when you want to. 

But, you must know when to resume.

The Hardest Part of Parenting

I used to think the hardest part of raising kids was sick kids. Sick kids ARE super frustrating. Especially when it's puke going everywhere you don't want it to because they do not know how to drop everything and run to the toilet. Non-sick kids are also frustrating when you see them stick their fingers into their mouths in all places after touching all sorts of things and you can just envision yourself in 24-48 hours having a child wake up in the middle of the night screaming because his/her throat hurts and the cold is coming. Sick kids take a lot of love and effort. But that is not the hardest part of raising kids. 

The actual hardest part of raising kids is disciplining them. And I don't mean discipline like raising your voice at them, sending them to time out, or even spanking them. Those are easy. 

We were going to bed the other night and my daughter picks out her clothes for the next day before bed. She opened her drawer to grab her socks and finds that her brother's socks are in her drawer. She's also holding up the pair she wants to wear which also belong to her brother. And she knows this.

I told her to hand me the pair of socks to put back into his sock drawer. She hands me one pair and clings to the other she wants to wear. I ask for the second pair. She unwillingly hands them over and then bursts out in tears. This is where the hard part begins. Because you see, she is wrong. She is absolutely wrong and she knows it. And yet, she is the one crying. I was also at the end of a long day myself after not feeling great, watching the kids, and then teaching my own students. By 8:30 pm, I was ready to get the kids into bed and do my own thing, whatever that meant. 

Her beloved pair of socks with the rainbow trim...I remember pushing her in her stroller at about 9 months old buying this pair of socks so I do not discount her sentimentality one bit.

So first, I had to ask her to complete her outfit selection for the next day, because since she took out the pairs of socks which were not hers and handed them to me, she had not moved an inch. So I firmly asked her to finish picking out the rest of her outfit or there would be consequences. 

Then, I held out my arms, she came over, and I gave her a hug. I. gave her a hug because I wanted to and not solely because I knew that's what she wanted. There are times when I don't want to give her a hug even though I know that's what she wants and needs, but I'm not ready. 

As I hugged her, I began asking her a series of questions.

1. Whose socks are those, yours or your brother's? Brother's.

2. Since they belong to him, who gets to wear them? He does. 

And then I explained. 

They used to be your socks when you were little. But your feet got bigger. So now he wears them because they fit him. They don't fit your feet anymore which is why you don't wear them. You wear socks that fit your feet. I continued by using an analogy to some of my old toys. It's just like when we go to grandpa's house and play with Mommy's old toys. They used to be mine, but I am not a little kid anymore so I do not play with them anymore. You are a little kid so I have passed them onto you to play with. She loves playing with my old things so I think this made my point very clear.

She then asked me if she could have rainbow socks. I told her we could get some for her birthday. So now I have to go find some rainbow socks for her that aren't absurdly priced per pair. And I actually will because part of parenting is following through with what I say. Well I know what's on my to-do list for the next month...

You know why this is hard? Nobody modeled this for us. Had this happened to me as a child, I would have been told, "Give me the socks. They're not yours. Stop crying. Go to bed." End of story. 

Sure, that's discipline. But that's easy discipline. Easy discipline doesn't raise capable adults. Easy discipline raises resentment, frustration, and manipulation. Being a parent now, it's up to me to end the cycle at the next generation. If I want my children to think independently, use good logic, and have wisdom in their decisions, I need to model it, and it starts now. 

I don't always respond like this. There are many times when I revert to old habits that are "familiar" and the situation ends up a little bit different. But this is what I strive for, and this particular incident was probably one of my finer parenting moments. 

That is the hardest part of raising a child. 

Vintage Valentine's

I recently rediscovered my collection of Valentine's Day cards over the years. Believe it or not, the oldest cards in my collection are from my pre-kindergarten class! That's.... about 28-29 years ago 😱 As an adult (with my own pre-k age child!) it's easy to wonder why in the world I kept these. I actually know why in the world I kept these. Each of these cards stood out to me for a reason and that's precisely why I saved them.

1. Barbie

This first collection is comprised of Barbie valentine's. I was a huge Barbie fan once upon a time. Loved the clothes, accessories, and play sets, but was never a fan of the actual doll herself. I preferred stuffed animals. These three cards I kept precisely because I liked Barbie. 

Barbie cards surprisingly have not gone out of style. They are still handed out in classrooms today in the year 2023. But these three? Vintage. Definitely vintage. The one on the left was my favorite. 

2. Cute

The second category I saved was the cute category. Bears were my thing back in the day 🧸. They still kind of are, but I've been mostly converted to penguins 🐧. 

The two cards on the bottom are from preschool! They both have names on the back and I even know exactly who those people are. One was from a boy. After preschool, we didn't go to school together but our schools were in the same district. We ended up at the same college and hanging out with the same friend circle. One was from a girl. We actually ended up going to high school together and graduated in the same class. Both of these people are still friends with me on Facebook so they have potential to read this blog 😝 although I have a feeling they won't remember. 

3. Sparkly

I couldn't resist a sparkly card. And clearly, that is the only reason I kept these cards. 

The top center was a power ranger card. If I turned it over, the card itself is very blasé. Literally the only reason I kept that card was for the pink power ranger sparkly heart sticker on the back. I don't remember who Todd is at all. Sorry. 

On the bottom, we have N'Sync, Britney Spears, and someone doing an extreme sport. The actual sport is called skysurfing. I didn't even know that until I just looked it up...now...decades after receiving that card. Britney Spears was never my thing. I knew her by name but that was about it. Of all my mix CDs and music tracks, I had one song she wrote. I didn't even recognize her face in 5th grade when my bus driver showed me a picture. 🤷🏻‍♀️ N'Sync was also not my thing. Knew a couple of their songs...but never had one on any of my CDs. 

4. Repeats

The only reason I kept these is because I had so many of the same/similar designs from multiple years. I guess the dogs are kind of cute, but I think I kept the duplicates from sheer chance of receiving so many of the same design.

These are in fact from five different people. 

5. Magic Eye

Magic Eye was a big fad when I was in school. I used to love checking out the books from the library and holding them really close to my face (and smelling all that library-book-weird-smell that some books from the library have) and then moving them further away until my eyes saw the 3-D image bulging from the page. It took me a long time to finally see my first one. You had to really master the eye focus as well as the speed to back the page from your face. But when you saw it, they were the coolest thing ever.

Turning these into Valentine's Day cards was pretty genius. I will say that the little ones on the cards never worked as well as the ones in the books. 

6. Glow-in-the-Dark

Who doesn't love a cool glow-in-the-dark card? These just happen to be planets, which I don't particularly care for, but the glow-in-the-dark texture and feature was what captivated me. Luckily, these planets are still planets according to today's science. 

Sadly, nobody's memorizing "My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" anymore.  Nine pizzas has just turned into nachos. Or if you're into Dr. Seuss, Mallory Valerie Emily Mickels Just Saved Up Nine Hundred Ninety Nine Nickels. 

7. Teachers

Very rarely did we ever get cards from our teachers. I only saved three anyway from the 20+ teachers I had from pre-k until 5th grade. 

The top card was from my 4th grade homeroom teacher. I wonder if she picked that card on purpose for me because she knew I excelled at math. I'll never know, but her handwriting was beautiful. 

8. Friends

These three cards I actually kept because of the people who gave them to me. Nothing particular about the cards really appealed to me. I guess they do all have dogs in common, but that technically wasn't the reason why I kept them. 

These three cards were given to me by three friends who meant a lot to me in my elementary school days. One of these girls was my "first friend." I don't remember how we met or became friends, but I remember being friends with her by 2nd grade. The second girl and I became friends in 2nd grade because we were in the same grade. She had skipped 1st grade so we ended up classmates. She moved the same year I did, except she moved out of state completely and I just transferred schools within the district. We reconnected in middle school/high school periodically but our lives had moved on to different places. I remember being friends with the third girl but I don't remember specific details of our friendship. I know we were on the same Destination Imagination team for at least one year. There may have been two but those memories are foggy. 

9.

I honestly can't remember why I saved this card. The only reason I can think of is that it was one of the extras I had from one year. My mother wrote my name on this card so I'm assuming she must've written it on my other cards that year. As a parent now, my initial reaction would be, "Why in the world is the parent writing the child's name on her Valentine's Day cards?" And that reaction would be completely reasonable and expected. My four-year-old can write her name. I'm pretty sure I should have been able to write my own name 24+ times on little slips of paper.

But the reason why I will choose to keep this card now and forever is because it has my mother's handwriting on it. I'm glad she wrote my name on it instead of writing my name myself. As weird as it is, you don't think about these things until you think about these things. Had I been the child who had signed my own Valentine's Day cards, I wouldn't have this memento today. 

Maintenance

Every now and then I take my house for granted. I forget to appreciate the actual aesthetic beauty that it is. I forget to remember the glass mosaic tile that is in our bathroom shower. I forget to appreciate the house for what it looks like now vs what it used to look like when we bought it. 

I said to my husband recently, “Our house is in much better condition now than it was when we bought it.” His reply was: Oh, definitely. 

Now our house isn’t newer than it was when we bought it. It has aged another almost eight years since we took over ownership. And our house is entering its fourth decade since being built. The previous owners also only lived in the house for a mere four years. So how is it that it looks and feels so much newer than it did? 

Well, the easy answer is we renovated. We painted. Replaced flooring. Changed out tile. Smashed bathtubs. Removed cabinets. And made it look the way we wanted to. The hard answer? We took care of it. 

Regardless of how the house looks, care and maintenance is crucial. Without care and maintenance, a magazine-worthy house can turn gruesome in a very short amount of time. The kitchen is one of the hardest places to keep clean. Every time you cook, grease splatters, water spills, little bits of food fall out of the pan. It’s inevitable that your counters, stovetop, and probably your kitchen sink are going to need a good cleaning every so often. Growing up, we papered the back of our stove. It prevented grease splatters from staining the backsplash. I continue this tradition now and have repurposed years and years worth of brown packing paper. 

 

This is what our stove usually looks like. Brown paper on the back, dirty pots (only when I cook!) on the stove and some splatters here and there. The brown paper gets really messy after a few months and I do change it out regularly. That’s when the magic happens. 

When I remove the brown paper thats’ stained with splashed grease oil, and overall yuck, once again, it reveals the beautiful clean backsplash being protected behind it. 

If my kitchen looked like this all the time, we'd be starving because in order to keep it this clean, I'd never be able to cook.

Whenever I see the kitchen clean and uncovered, it reminds me why I put up the paper for the majority of time. I know I can’t enjoy all the backsplash behind the stove, but realistically, if I didn't put up the brown paper, the backsplash wouldn't look like this without it. I am preserving it for the next owners. I have no idea who they might be. It might be my children. It might be a complete stranger. But either way, they won’t see the remnants of life stories we lived in our house through fat, oil, and grease.

Daily Musings

January has flown by. A few weeks ago I made the comment to a friend that 1/24th of 2023 was over. And then a few days later, or so it felt, 1/12th of 2023 is now over.

I knew this was going to be an interesting week by Sunday. The forecast was iffy, and that meant potential school closures and my classes would be affected. It also meant I was stuck at home with my children for the entire week without being able to go anywhere.

Now I realize, I "stay home" with my children every single day. However, when the roads outside aren't covered in sleet and ice, we can go to the grocery store, we can go to the library, we can go visit friends. It makes a big difference to the mental state of "staying home" with my children. On weeks like this, I am literally at home with them from the time I wake up until the time I sleep. As much as I love my children, that is not my idea of being a stay-at-home mom. 😅

We started the week yesterday with a moment. My son had used the potty and earned the privilege to flush the toilet himself. We had washed our hands and he was all set to come back down. Except he wouldn't. He wanted to cling to the side of the sink and stay like this. I asked him if he wanted to come down. No. I asked him if he wanted to stay. No. I asked him if he wanted help to come down. No. 

He stayed like that for a while until I decided it was a safety hazard and made him unhappily come down. Somehow, somehow, we made it through the rest of the day without nap time. 

Today's adventure was a little more exciting because of outside precipitation. My children asked to go outside and after an outerwear disagreement, they finally conceded to put on the necessary layers I was requesting and went outside. 

I set out the patio umbrella because then the kids could play in peace underneath it without having to hold up their individual umbrellas. My daughter made a small snow/ice mound and my son wandered around next to her. This was great fun for them until he stepped in her snow mound which upset her and then both kids ended up inside again with me.

They lasted about an hour outside playing. I'd say that's pretty good considering the temperature is quite cold. I'm not entirely sure what we are doing the rest of the day. I might do some story time. I might do some age-appropriate "homework", and I may let them have a lot of tv and screen time later. Who knows. 

They're already asking me for lunch and it's 10:00am. Oh boy....

A Wood-Filled Weekend

With a sequence of events, we need to clear our some more space in our garage. One of the main things that needs to go is a bunch of wood we've saved up over the years from various projects. Before just getting rid of all of it or giving it away, I thought we should try and finish some of our own projects which have been on our to-do lists for years and years now. We accomplished both of these projects this past weekend:

1. A "box" to cover the vent hood pipe that goes into the ceiling in our kitchen. 

In April of 2021, we made the decision to vent our range hood vent outside instead of having a recirculating one. It was one of the better decisions we've ever made for our house because I love it so much. I can cook and vent the smells outside and you can't smell anything after a few hours. I don't regret anything about the project except the person we hired. For the last 1.5 years, we've been staring at a really ugly ceiling patch where the pipe connected into the attic. The pipe is also not centered, but that is secondary to the ugly ceiling.

My husband has mentioned wanting to build a box around it to hide the pipe from the beginning to fix both problems. We were finally able to use some leftover MDF board from previous projects to build a three-sided "box" to place in front of the pipe on top of our cabinets. I had used play-doh a long time ago to trace the edge of the trim against our ceiling so we could cut the appropriate edge to cover there as well. 

After a few coats of paint and primer, we had ourselves a white cabinet box to make our kitchen range hood look centered and neat. 

We will hopefully add some trim around the top of the box to match the traditional style of our kitchen as right now it looks too clean and modern. But for now, this box fixed our main issues. Total cost* of this project: $0

2. Utilizing the other half of our second blind corner cabinet.

For my birthday in 2020, I bought blind corner shelf pull-outs and had them installed. To this day I still love using them and they have been super helpful. We have one other blind corner cabinet but the same pull-outs would not work in the other cabinet because it was a smaller cabinet. 

However, this cabinet had space behind it we could use.

The open cabinet is the one with the blind corner.
We've never been able to fully utilize that space. 

This is the backside of the cabinet which allows us to
make a cut to use the blind corner.

We had talked about cutting a hole from behind and adding another door to create another cabinet in our kitchen essentially. This project never came to fruition because I wasn't convinced we had a way to cut open the cabinet to make a clean rectangular opening. This past weekend on Friday morning, I asked my husband again if we could do this project. I was also more convinced to want to do it as a way to use up some of the wood we had stored before we got rid of it all. 

By Friday evening, after the kids went to bed, we got right to work. It took us the entire evening to get the hole measured, prepped, and cut, but we did it.

Really clean cut with a multi-tool he purchased last year.
I have no problem with spending money when it can earn its value.

The next day, my husband spent the whole afternoon making drawer boxes for me. That evening, we had one installed with the sliding tracks. It took much more time than we anticipated because the drawer slides were nearly impossible to separate. We looked up Youtube Videos from different people with three different methods on how to remove them. After a lot of pulling, tugging, and frustrated grunts, we were able to separate the slides and have them installed on their respective halves. 

On Sunday afternoon, my husband finished making the cabinet door completely from scratch! We used an old piece of plywood originally from the house we had saved from a previous renovation. We added some trim to fit with the style of the rest of our house. I primed and painted Sunday evening and by Monday morning, everything was installed and complete. 

Comparable pull out shelves like this would cost $100+ each...(yes, we've looked into it.)

Yes, I've already filled them up. Will need to reorganize the
pantry now that I have more space. 

The secret passageway has a proper entrance! 

Total cost* of this project: $30.90 

I'm really pleased with the way this project turned out. I know we waited years before turning this cabinet into a reality, but now that it's completed, it's really exciting to add another 4 cubic feet of storage space!

*Cost refers to new dollars spent. All other materials we had leftover from previous projects.