Good-Bye B, Hello One Eleven

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Hi Everyone. My sincerest apologies for being absent during such a monumentally bloggable period of our lives. When, in the period of one month you are tasked at selling a house, buying a house, installing over 1000 square feet of wood flooring, packing, moving, having ear tubes installed, keeping a 3-year-old from completely freaking out that you are moving all her stuff and making her sleep in a strange place, preparing for school to start, celebrating an anniversary, attending a weekend-long bachelor party, tending to an extremely short-tempered toddler and continuing to go to work every day, it has clear and direct impact on one’s ability to give you timely and relevant updates.

So yes, we have been in our new house for just over a week now. It is great and beautiful, and needs lots of work. But it is home, and we are all excited to be here. The list of projects is so numerous and sundry that we do list triage everyday – reshuffling item priority based on the previous day’s activities. Example: “Install spring loaded hinges on the two gates” was moved to the top of the list above “Install doorknob and deadbolt into empty holes in backdoor” right about the time that Porter was found wandering in the street…for the second time. Our garage is a warren of boxes and plastic tote bins filled with items we have no hope of ever putting away without a substantial increase in kitchen cabinets. Cabinets, that if the estimate we just got back for the dining room is any indication, we will never in a lifetime be able to afford.

Secondly, today we officially closed escrow on the B Street house. Knowing that this moment was upon us, we headed over yesterday as a last opportunity to take it all in; one final time. I shot tons of pictures, and we each wandered around and soaked up the memories of the life we all lived there. Porter loitered around the berry bush looking for that one last score, Steve walked quietly from room to room, Stella sang songs at the top of her lungs in the empty garage while listening to the echo of her voice, and I took a long hard look at the beauty and splendor of that lovely kitchen. Although I don’t think I could ever adequately convey the overwhelming emotional impact, I can say this: at one point each of us cried. And the overwhelming realization settled in as we all walked away, that it would be the last time we would ever see that house as our own.

It is a little late, but I want to extend a HUGE thank you to everyone who donated their time and physical well being to helping us over the last month: Brian & Andrea, for helping lay floor and negotiate the logistics of the heaviest set of french doors that were ever manufactured as well as the afternoon shift on move day; Dore, for the kid wrangling, heavy lifting and advice on where the bed should go (you win, it’s under the window); Anthony, for the last minute donation of a table saw when Steve’s died halfway through the flooring exercise; but most of all, thank you to Bill and Judy, for continuing to be our benefactors, for dropping everything and driving up to help us pack, move, renovate, wrassle the childrens and even manage to coordinate it so that the two of us could go out in the middle of all this madness and have a nice dinner to celebrate our 7 year anniversary. And, especially for pushing themselves to the brink of complete physical exhaustion. We never could have done any of this without you. Thanks again, to them and everyone.

natalie steve stella and porter(click the photo to take one last look…)

The Maker of Mayhem

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At his 15-month check-up, we found that the fluid behind Porter’s ear drums still hasn’t cleared out. This, coupled with the fact that he is still yelling at us in some unintelligible Eastern European dialect meant we were directed by the pediatrician to take him to an audiologist and ear-nose-throat specialist. After a string of hearing tests and some poking and prodding, it was determined that he would need tubes. As the ear-nose-throat doc so scientifically put it: “Once that fluid sits in the ears for a while, it turns into Jell-O; we call it glue ear, because once it’s there, there ain’t no getting rid of it without forcibly removing it.” I could tell from his explanation of the procedure that he has done it no less than a gazillion times. I don’t know if it is because every child in Humboldt County has “glue ear” or if it is because we found the most popular doctor in the area, but we couldn’t even get in for the procedure for 4 weeks.

Both the audiologist and the ENT indicated that although both ears have fluid, the left one is definitely the worst, and where he is experiencing the most hearing loss. Given this knowledge, we are now known to talk loudly and slowly as though he were 80, and use insanely crude and ridiculous sign language. We are also getting used to saying catchy things to each other like, “Make sure you are talking into his good ear.” Our sensitive and nurturing tendencies shining through, as always.

We are confident this will be a fairly routine procedure, and are looking forward to having his hearing back at full speed so that he may actually begin using speech and language and quit barking at us like an angry, pint-sized dictator. Who can’t speak English. And has no patience. And throws things.

What he lacks in speech and hearing, he is making up for in physical activity and his iron-willed determination to get his way. Do not leave this child unattended. Ever, ever under any circumstances. Ever. I realized – a little bit too late – that I needed to be photographing all of the various and sundry predicaments he gets himself into these days. Missed, were the photos of him disassembling, climbing into and frolicking in the ashes of the free-standing fire pit. Or the photos of him eating handfuls of catfood. Or the photos of him “typing” on the computer (read: banging fists wildly against the keyboard).

As for that last item, it was accomplished because of his new favorite pass-time – climbing onto table-tops. He is wicked fast, and once up to his desired elevation, begins dancing around in sheer delight over his accomplishment.

porter

porter

There are days where I am almost certain his head is going to explode because of his rage feuled tantrums over fairly benign issues. On this particular day, I didn’t have the strength to get into another battle of wills with him over whether or not he could abscond with an entire package of toilet paper. I managed to negotiate him down to a single roll. Of which, he made quick work of shredding:

porter

porter

And if you have the audacity to deprive of utensils at mealtime, you may as well just call CPS right now, because you are obviously THE WORST PARENT EVER:

porter

And this day? This day, all he would eat was cup after cup of frozen berries. I think I managed to cut him off somewhere around his 4th serving. (I can only assume it had something to do with the 4 eye teeth he is getting simultaneously!)

porter

And, all I can say is that when he asks for your sunglasses, you had better damn well give him your sunglasses. (Also know as: the number one reason why I no longer own sunglasses whose replacement cost is over $20 per pair.)

porter

porter

porter

But that’s okay. Because around these parts, cute? Yeah, it goes a long way.

porter

porter and natalie

Speaking Correctly

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A couple of years back, Celene & Thad gave Stella this book. It has, apparently, been around since the olden days, and – much as the title suggests – goes to great pains to teach one how to not speak like they was raised in that there trailer.

This book’s target audience is for the 9-12 crowd, and so you can imagine it’s effectiveness on a three year old. Nevermind that the main goal with a three-year-old is to not have them yell things at you. So naturally we figured the next logical step is to teach her the proper use of WELL and GOOD.

The way the book works is that all the parts of speech and undesirable uses of tense and pronunciation are presented as characters. More specifically, they are little stick drawings with creepy faces and long, spider-like arms. They are shady characters who do things like always exclude G from their fun summertime activities (goin, playin, runnin, fishin). Poor little G. The kid with the inhaler left at the swim dock while everyone else gets to go canoin’.

But the reason for this story has not to do with the oft neglected G, or with LY (LY wears a pink dress and “loves action!” I’ll let you interpret the subversive text on that one.), or even that beer-swilling, monster-truck-driving bad-boy GOT (i.e., I ain’t GOT no teefs) – no, this story has to do with MAY. Good old MAY. Of all the forgotten letters, mangled suffixes and superlative prefixes in this book, the one character that Stella has decided to attempt to properly work into her daily conversation is MAY. But as one can quickly guess, Stella’s interpretation of where exactly MAY lives in those sentences has never been fully comprehended – even though we have read this book no less than 50 times.

I find this whole CAN vs. MAY character fairly pretentious and snotty anyway. Nothing is more annoying than asking someone if you can do something and they respond with a haughty, “I don’t know, CAN you?” As far as I am concerned CAN and MAY can go hang out with the improper conjugation of lay. I’ve never liked him either.

So now, when Stella really, really wants something. And wants to impress you with her astute ability in asking for it in a grammatically correct way, you will hear this pleading statement:

“Mommy, Mommy, CAN I please MAY? Please CAN I MAY?”

My baby’s done college bound.

Was there even life before technology?

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Most people? Yeah, when they decide to sell their current house and buy a new one, they might not choose to go on vacation the very next day. Apparently, we are not most people. Instead, the moment both of the counter-offers were accepted and signed – before the ink was even dry – we were headed south on 101. Not to return for another 11 days. That’s how we do it.

Thusly, we have not ever been too far from a computer, and I have actually managed to keep my cell phone not only charged, but within earshot. Thank the heavens for technology. And lots of it. At the rate we are going, we could feasibly close escrow on our new house before we even got home (even though we have chosen not to). Meanwhile, we have been droning on and on (and on) to anyone who will listen about remodeling and landscaping and miscellaneous repairs. Everyone has had to listen us endlessly discuss the finer details of flooring, windows and the differences between a cess pool and a septic system (we were originally told it was the first, but it turns out to actually be the latter). Yes, everyone, we are the kind of people that, if you see us coming, you should probably run. Run quickly.

Aside from the house ramblings, we are actually doing a bit of vacationing. And by vacationing, I mean leaving our children with whomever will take them so we can do luxurious things like shop, sleep in and ignore their whiny tantrums. Stella is wowing all of us with her aquatic skills (she is practically swimming!), and Porter is showing everyone how his adorable cuteness is only matched by his insanely short temper. And tenacity. And ability to bend metal objects with sheer will alone. But you know, all in a really cute way.

When he is not busy attending to whatever the heck he damn well pleases, he is dragging people around by their index finger. Get me this. Get me that. You can see the look of exasperation in his eyes when you just aren’t getting what Uhn, Ma Gaaaaaa! means. Come on people, get with the program, here!

You’ll notice I haven’t made even one whiny complaint about oppressive heat yet. Mostly, it is because there has been some crazy system following us at each stop that changes the aforementioned oppressive heat from hot to humid, which somehow makes it mildly more tolerable. Not to say we haven’t taken every available opportunity to float in the pool like hippos. Because we have. A lot.

Although we are rounding out our trip, and will be home in the next few days, we have continued to get inquisitive calls and emails in regards to our current housing situation. I thought I’d check in and let you all know how things were going. All inspections are completed (on both houses) and it is looking more and more like this is gonna happen. (Although, I still feel a little awkward saying as much.) If things continue on at their current pace it won’t be much longer until you’ll begin to see a lot of photos of a certain yellow house.