Baby, Baby...

My phone, FB and residential mail has been increasingly filled with baby announcements and shower invites as of late, simultaneously making me really happy and antagonizing my feelings of wanting to have my own babies. I'm so happy for all my pregnant friends! It's an exciting time. I want to join the club. Your pregnancies are feeding my excitement. Specifically, I selfishly want my Kansas sister to have her baby before we move so I can meet her.

For now I will sit here and drink wine with my family, consisting of my husband and 2 fur children. No babies. NO BABIES. It's fine, haha. Until we get to England. But then there will be several pubs I would like to check out........dilemnas.

I remember when having kids was a distant thing in the far future. "When I'm 27 or 28, I'll have kids. Or something." And that was "forever" away. Well now I'm 28. Closer to 29. I know I'm still "young" (whatever). I'm extending my deadline.

I miss being 22, not even thinking about babies and having what seemed like forever to start. ENJOY YOUR EARLY/MID-20s, KIDS! :-p

But I also love being 28. I'm so much better than I was back then. And I don't view babies as ending your life. I'm ready. But I think me getting pregnant right now could potentially make our move a hot mess.

Maybe soon, you can find me in the pub. With my English baby. They do that there, apparently??  

I know Dave is more excited for the 3-4 year old phase so maybe we can trade off 3 years at a time. I'll take the newborn phase. Planning is important.  

Anyways, CONGRATULATIONS to all my pregnant friends. You know who you are :)

Ok, but seriously.  Where did my 20's go? It's like my alarm is going off and I'm just hitting snooze.

Friends, Canvas & Finger paint

This weekend we went to dinner with Mike & Aimee and celebrated Homecoming with the rest of Wichita's high schoolers at Red Rock Canyon. We toasted to the kids with some dirty vodka martinis. This was unplanned, but fun. My last homecoming was 11 years ago. What??? I will say, we looked less like prostitutes at our dances back in the day....and Dave was unimpressed by the guys (well they looked more like 10 year old boys) not in suits. Maybe he will feel differently when we are asked to pay for our kid's suits and dresses one day :) Then we introduced Mike and Aimee to the game Cards Against Humanity. Fortunately they did not get offended, so we can all still be good friends. Not that I thought that would be a problem. Needless to say, we had a great night with plenty of laughter and outbursts. As if that game isn't good enough, there is something even more special about playing with first-timers :)      

And yesterday...the first day of fall. Autumn. My favorite. I'll give it to Kansas....the weather really attempted to acknowledge the occasion :) It just so happened that I was getting together witth my friend Rachel for our Second Annual craft day. It was so much fun we may even throw in a second craft this season! :)

As I browsed Google and Pinterest for ideas, I have to say I was more drawn to the crafts intended for small children than to the more complicated, adult projects. Maybe my inner 5-year old just needed to get out.  I sent Rachel a few ideas but in the end we decided on this paint project. We made our trip to Michael's to get the whole list of 2 supplies we needed (canvas and finger paint :) We threw in glitter to really spice things up. We grabbed some Chipotle on the way home to fuel our bodies and creative minds (critical for a real artist.....obviously).

It was so. much. fun. catching up and using the right sides of our brains. At first, I thought it was impossible to go wrong with this craft. How can you mess up an outline of your arm/hand (which most of us learned how to do when we were 5) and a bunch of dots? Much to our surprise, the arrangement of the dots do not necessarily look like a tree. It's not a given. Hilarious. You had to be there. But with Rachel's guidance, we were able to turn random dots into trees. I am going to MISS THIS GIRL.

 

There are few people I can talk to about absolutely anything. Well, and not feel weird. We can talk about pregnancy, babies (no I'm not pregnant and no I don't have a baby, but she's about to teach me everything :), our visions of parenthood, sex scandal Dateline stories, school, work, life goals, family, it doesn't matter......so glad we met 3 years ago.  She's like my Kansas sister. We might need to craft over Skype next fall when I'm in England.  :(

Stay Soft

I saw this on the FB yesterday.  When I was in the Air Force, they used to say "10% of the people will take up 90% of your time."  It was true.  I think the same goes for the world.  We can focus so much of our attention on tragedy & evil and forget about all that is good and all who are good.

On a personal level, I have definitely allowed myself to become hard to people I come across.  I've put a guard up because of bad or broken relationships.  But I was just thinking the other day that I'm so grateful for people in my life who knowingly or unknowingly break down that guard by just being great friends.  Great people, really.  They seem like they are willing to risk pain and put themselves out there.  They are vulnerability role models (I just Brenee Brown-ed that).  And then I'm reminded to be softer.

Don't let the world make you hard.  Don't let people make you hard.

Are you hard or soft?

Colorado Flood Experience Part 1

The last time I checked in we were about to list the house. A lot has happened since last Wednesday, but I still haven't gotten used to seeing this:

I read somewhere when I was trying to figure out how to get the house ready that when you put your house on the market, you can no longer think of it as yours. I know the context of that was in terms of decor, taking down family photos (which we didn't really do) and sort of un-personalizing everything. But once the sign went in the ground and the listing surfaced on the internet, a feeling of sadness came over us as we realized we were actively trying to sell our house to someone else. Of course it isn't ours anymore.

We put the sign in the ground and drove away immediately after. We were heading to Colorado for about 5 days for a Running Coach Certification course I've been wanting to do for a long time. And this is where I would get some perspective on "house" and "home."

Fast forward 8-9 hours and we arrived in Arvada, CO where we were staying with some of my family. We had a nice dinner with them but then the focus quickly sort of turned to the weather that seemed to be turning into a problem. Rain, rain, rain. It's kind of blurry now so I don't remember how serious it got that evening, but by the next morning it was bad. My class wasn't scheduled to start until 1 p.m. in Boulder and all morning we watched the news and the flooding that was developing. I hadn't heard anything from the instructors at about 1145 and was about to get ready when I got a call from Lorraine Moller, one of the instructors. She said they had been evacuated from the Newton building and to standby. She called back shortly after and gave me an alternate location to go at 3.  It was a Newton employee's house, still in Boulder.

That afternoon was Dave's first glimpse of his chauferring job that weekend. Getting me there was fairly painless. I got a warm welcome when I walked in the door from several of my classmates who were already there. We all quickly became comfortable around each other and were having a lot of fun in this cozy little setting, curled up with blankets and watching the lecture on a flat screen tv. I kept looking out the window, but honestly wasn't thinking too much about the flooding. By the time Dave came to pick me up at 7, he had a hell of a time getting back. He was frustrated. Then, we had an even better time trying to get out of Boulder and back to Arvada. 2 hours of running into road closure after road closure and turning around to try something new, going further and further out of our way. If we had been returning any later I am fairly certain we would have gotten stuck somewhere. I think my aunt was a little worried when I called and told her we were having problems getting out. Water was rushing everywhere. At one point, we were trying to go down a side street to go further east and all these cars were turning around in front of us. When we got up there, there were no cops or police cars so we decided to creep along and see why we couldn't go that way. All of the sudden, someone was blasting a huge spotlight at us from a house....blinding. I guess that was a resident trying to tell us "bad idea." There were so many road closures that we started seeing ambulances, in addition to cops, blocking off roads.  

Between my aunt and uncle's navigation, my handy little smartphone (that thankfully still worked even though every single person in the immediate area was probably using theirs), and sometimes driving on the opposite side of the road to avoid flooded roads, we got back. That felt good.

For the next couple of days, Dave drove me to class the long way due to all of the road closures. There was only one open road into Boulder. In the evening we would watch the news and see all the destruction in Longmont, Lyons, Boulder and other areas of the state. Sad and heartbreaking. Families evacuated out of their homes, over 1,000 people unaccounted for and fatalities (up to 7 now). Fortunately, for them and us, my aunt and uncle live in an area that was not severly affected along with my cousin who goes to school in Golden.

I also felt very fortunate that despite the weather, we were able to complete our course. Despite everything going on, it was an absolutely fantastic experience. The instructors invited us to return and retake the course during one of the later dates if we would like, but we had a great group of people in our class and I really enjoyed getting to know them a little bit. I'll post more about that later. Here are a few photos of the area just across the street from where we were still able to do our drills for class. The water was up to the road. In the grand scheme of it all, this was minor.

It really felt odd to have such a great experience in the middle of chaos. We also had a wonderful time with my aunt, uncle and cousins.

I felt guilty that I got so much out of that 4 days when so many people lost so much. And when we drove up to the house, I felt so grateful for our home...even with a sale sign in front of it.

Here are ways to help & support the victims of the flooding.

In the midst of crazy, it's wonderful

The last couple weeks: a whirlwind. We have been working so hard to get the house ready to list and I'm exhausted. Dave and I have different styles, though. Dave's routine looks something like this: go to work all day, come home and eat, calmly work on projects. I look more like a freak spinning in circles bouncing from room to room unable to complete my current task before deciding that something else is more important, and so on. More spinning. I have to say, once again, his patience, encouragement and reassurance that I'm working really hard and getting stuff done has been critical. Because in my mind I'm not efficient at this. Because I'm not. He is so sweet. Or fears a total meltdown. Regardless, I must give credit where credit is due.

Newsflash: selling a house is 100% less fun than buying a house.

The first phase was just going through boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff and purging.  You know, the impossible for me.  Then I slowly entered the cleaning phase and really thinking about staging.  I love actually cleaning because I can quickly see the results of the work :) But the less stuff we had in the house and the more I looked around, the more dirt I saw. Then I came up with a growing list of things to clean. 

Somewhere in the middle of all this we took a trip to Vegas. Long story short, we decided to go because we had flight reservations to use from a trip we previously had to cancel and, AND we got a "deal" on a hotel through the Holiday Inn for their Desert Club Resort because Dave has been a rewards member for so long.  So we decided it would be an anniversary trip...one last U.S. fling before moving to England. This deal included a 3 hour presentation about how we should invest in Vacation Ownership (like a timeshare, but SO MUCH BETTER, our shady presenter tried to convince us).  So, turned out we had to go on this tour/presentation or we owed $641 (the original deal was $199 for 3 nights and $100 cash back for attending the tour).   We found out about this ridiculous $641 when we missed our original appointment (we thought it was the next day).  They rescheduled us later in the afternoon.  So we showed up to the appointment a little annoyed.  $641? Really? That's a bit overboard. They called us after our first appointment to see if we attended, but they couldn't bother calling us before to remind us of the time? I smelled scam.

Caveat: I'm going through some of this to serve as a warning to others of what you might face if you decide something like this is a good idea.    

It began with smooth-talking I could see right through but I kept an open mind.  It ended with Mr. Business Man basically telling us we are not taking care of our marriage if we don't get this timeshare, and that it will end in divorce and, ultimately, him being pissed off and telling us that he doesn't get paid if we don't buy (oh no he didn't!).  So. Professional.  This is just a small summary of the obnoxious things said to us. Of course in the beginning he told us there would be no pressure at the end..........yeah, after saying no about 20 times while he continuously asked us how we would like to make the down payment for this $21, 000 investment, we took our $100 cash from one of the girls in the administrative office and ran.  It was hardly enough compensation for the torture.  But it did buy us a nice dinner before Le Reve.   

I really have to do a better job of doing official reviews of experiences and businesses, both good and bad.  This was just so unbelievable and, like I said, hopefully me sharing it is enough to serve as a warning to others who may get pitched the same or similar deal in the future.  Even if it saves one poor soul. In the end Dave tells me he sort of knew what we were getting ourselves into by taking the deal....ha! Oh man, I wish he would have enlightened me before we accepted.  The location of this hotel wasn't even that great and there are great deals right on the strip. 

Ok, that was a long story kind of long.  I planned on doing a Vegas Feedback Sandwich post about how our trip started and ended great with seeing some wonderful friends and awesome Vegas shows, with this rancid piece of meat in the middle.  So that was mostly the negative.  Here are the awesome buns:

Vegas Jump

Terminator

LOVE this lady

Beatles "LOVE" Cirque show

:)

Le Reve 

Le Reve

Who doesn't come home from Vegas a little exhausted? But we got back to cleaning and staging, with a few days left before our realtor, Todd, came over to take the pictures for the listing. Fast forward through a busy weekend seeing friends and watching some important football games, and there I was Monday morning at 0800, a sweaty freak who had been running around the house for a couple hours scrambling before Todd pulled up. I threw a hat on my head, the dogs in the car and asked Todd if I was any kind of normal for someone about to list their house. Of course he laughed and said I was "normal." What a nice guy. But really, we have been so happy with him during the buying and selling processes. If you ever find yourself looking to buy a house in Wichita, you'd be silly to not ask me for his info.  

Even after he took the pictures, I continued to deep clean (I started feeling like I was participating in a competition to be the best house on the market. I mean, that is pretty much what this is...).  But time is up.  We will put the sale sign up this morning at 0800. The house isn't really ours anymore. Time to stop the constant cleaning madness, at least at this pace. As we've worked so hard to get the house in top shape and closer to tomorrow, we've gotten sad about selling our first home. We've created so many memories here as a family. (It's amazing, I think our marriage has even gotten stronger in the last few years, even without holiday inn vacation ownership! Sorry, just a splash of my sarcasm. For now, I still love their regular hotels and they've been good to us during all of our travels around the states).

While we still have some great friends here who we will miss, many of the friends we made over the last 4.5 years have already moved away. Today, we said goodbye to some of the last Air Force friends who got here about the same time as us as they move on to their next duty station. I feel like we're next in the queue....it really is time to go. It is weird to be leaving, but a big part of this lifestyle is moving around and meeting great people everywhere. I am grateful to have good friends here and in so many places...it provides comfort in the process of constant change. And when we're living across the ocean in England, we will become friends with others who are also missing their best friends back home. The ones who can't just drive 4 hours from L.A. to Vegas to visit you for a day anymore. They call this the Air Force Family and I'm cherishing it more and more over time. 

This chapter of our lives is starting to close and it feels surreal.