Katie the Scrapbook Lady

By the way, I wear glasses (again)

 

I forgot to include a small detail in my May roundup – I now wear glasses. I’ve been putting off a visit to the eye doctor for quite some time now, but when I went to get my driver’s license renewed in April I barely passed the eye test. I didn’t realize just how bad my vision had gotten until I started wearing glasses and had to adjust to them. Actually, my vision is not bad, I just have a lot of astigmatism. This is a problem that has plagued me throughout my life.

I started wearing glasses when I was 9 years old and I remember being surprised at how different the world looked once I started wearing them. Leaves had definition! Everything was so much clearer! I never liked wearing them and of course some mean elementary school kids called me “four-eyes” and such. My glasses were always quite thick and I was sure that I would never be “pretty” as long as I wore them. Here I am with my Great-Grandmother and my paternal grandparents, wearing my glasses.

 

When I was 12 years old, I started wearing contacts and I wore them almost all the time until I became pregnant with my first child when I was 24 years old. The shape of my eyes changed so much (astigmatism) that contacts became uncomfortable. Out came the glasses again, and even though they were supposed to be thinner due to new technologies, they still were quite thick. I really hated them.

 

When the wonder of lasik eye surgery came about, we saved up our money so I could have it done. I was the perfect candidate for the surgery because of my extreme case of astigmatism. That was in the year 2000 and I was told that I might have to have the surgery redone a few years later and that I would still have to wear glasses once I got older. I felt lucky to get 12 full years out of the surgery without any complications or relapses. My eyes have been very healthy and I have loved every day that I did not have to get up and put glasses or contacts on. It’s a gift to be able to see clearly from the moment you open your eyes each day. I was sad when I knew that gift was ending. I figured that I might just be getting “old” or that I would need another lasik surgery. I was surprised when my eye doctor said that neither was the case. I’m still not at all farsighted and I’m not really nearsighted either – just that darn astigmatism thing. He also said that another surgery would be more complicated, more painful, and have a longer healing time. I’m not interested in any of that so I just decided to come to terms with wearing glasses. The good news is that now my prescription is very mild and I can wear nice thin lenses. In fact, my current pair of glasses is rimless, wich is something I never could get away with in my earlier years.

 

A lot of people in my family wear glasses; my dad, my mom, my brother (pictured above), and my son and I think they all look great in their eyewear. Why should I feel any different? I’m finally comfortable with how I look in glasses. It does mean that I have a few new challenges when I’m getting my picture taken, but that’s no big deal really, I’m just glad that I can see.

You know what’s really funny about the whole thing? Hardly anyone has noticed that I’ve been wearing glasses again – not even some of the members of our immediate families. Does anyone remember the episode of Friends when nobody realizes that Chandler got new glasses? I’ve been giggling about that in my mind.

 

It’s ok though. I figure that just means they look natural on me. lol!

 

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Reality bytes

Obviously, I’m still not quite together these days. As I looked around our new home this morning (which I love), I saw some funny little vignettes of our current reality and immediately thought of the title “reality bytes” because of the bits and bytes (I’m a digi gal) of our new “normal”. I snapped some quick pics with my iPhone and thought you might enjoy seeing some glimpses of what my world looks like today.

 

My side of the master bedroom. I haven’t unpacked my stuff for several reasons: 1) been too busy working on family spaces like the kitchen 2) too tired by the time I head into our room at night 3) We don’t have any bedroom furniture and no shelves in our closets (we are having closet organizers built)

 

Ok, the furniture thing is complicated. We actually bought a new bedroom set because we decided to upgrade to a king size bed now that we have a little bigger bedroom. We picked out this set online and I think it looks nice. My husband didn’t like it in person though. I kept telling him to get over it. For several reasons, the entire set is being picked up for return today.

 

The biggest reason we are returning the set is because we picked out a sleep number mattress set and the frame doesn’t work inside our bed frame because there are drawers in the wooden bed frame. The mattress delivery guys actually thought this was a good solution – can you imagine? When I asked them what I should do about the space between the mattress and the bedframe, they seriously suggested that a dust ruffle would be a good solution. Oh, and I guess we would need to pole vault into bed. lol!

 

We had to leave our bookshelf system in our old house as part of the sale, so right now I have tons of piles of books and nowhere to put them. I know these are total first world problems, but they are still inconvenient.

 

More books – most of these are cookbooks. Not sure where I’m going to put these.

 

I have all my spice jars sitting out on my kitchen counter while I try to find a home for them. Of course, they are all alphabetized but my husband thinks it's funny to mess with my mind by putting them out of order. He said that he thinks I’ve spent more time alphabetizing the spices than I have spent using them. He might be right. lol!

 

We’ve got several young friends that are graduating from high school right now. I’m going to send out some cards today.

 

I went to the dentist yesterday and I still have my little goodie bag sitting out on our counter.

 

Oh, and a huge pile of mail on the counter! I need to change our address with so many different people and companies. Notice all the Comcast envelopes – I can now report that after about 8 hours of pleading with their customer service department to finally get our phone working. Ugh.

 

What bits and bytes of reality are you looking at today? Pull out your camera, or your smartphone and document it. Even if it’s messy!

It’s all a little chaotic still

Were you starting to wonder if I was ever coming back? I honestly wondered that myself some days. It’s been a super crazy ride as we’ve transitioned to our new house. In fact, it still is pretty chaotic around here as the house isn’t quite finished yet, but we are living here and each day we get closer to done. I seem to be averaging about 3 contractor appointments each day + numerous phone calls to line up future visits. I can safely say that I never want to be a construction superintendent. No thank you!

I will have plenty to tell you about this adventure and I do promise to share some photos soon. Peppermint told me that it just wasn’t nice of me to post pictures of the construction and framing of the house and then just stop there. After all the blogging I’ve done about this process, I won’t leave you hanging like that! At least not too much longer. For now, I’m still trying to recover from the move, put things away without any closets built or very much furniture (we gave a lot of it away), and while working around painters, framers, and other contractors who are putting the finishing touches on our new home. Oh yes, it’s also the last week of school for my daughter and my son is sick.

So for now, I’m going to post the mini-memories of the past 10 days that I have been sharing on Instagram. It’s been a great way for me to document little bits of the journey without having to stop and sit down to type it all out for a blog post. It’s also been helpful to have my iPhone to use as a memory keeping tool, especially without any internet connection for an entire week!

Here’s what has been happening:

 

Alex got the perfect fortune with his lunch on the first day of our move.

 

We were able to close the deal on our old house and on our new house on the same day. There is a lot of paperwork and pen action when it comes to real estate deals!

 

I started to have serious doubts about moving when my neighbor brought me homemade lemon cupcakes with lavender icing. YUM!

 

We moved our first load on a rainy morning. I hired movers, but it was still a ton of work!

 

I wasn’t sure how I was going to fit in eating lunch that day, but a sweet friend miraculously showed up on my doorstep with a Jamba Juice for both me and Alex. How nice!

 

This is the most photogenic pile of boxes in my new house. lol! I love the way the light shines down on them and our K’nex Ferris Wheel (with Lego guys riding in the seats) ended up making me feel happy over this particular pile o’ junk. I don’t feel the same way about all the other stacks around me! We’ve already unpacked about 40 boxes and there are still many more to go. I really did get rid of a lot of stuff, but it turns out that I still have too much to unpack.

 

We handed over the keys to our old home that we have loved for 9 years. I’m very happy that the people who are moving in are so nice and that they are so excited to live there! It was a bittersweet moment though and I’m really going to miss all of those gorgeous trees while we wait for new ones to grow again. There are many benefits to building a new house, but starting over with landscaping is probably not on that list.

 

I had let the food supply dwindle over the last month so we wouldn’t have to move a lot of food. Once we moved into the new place, I had and empty refrigerator and cupboards to fill. My daughter and I went on the longest and most expensive grocery shopping trip evah! It was exhausting, but we were all happy to be able to eat in our own home again. I then spent 10 straight hours unpacking and organizing the kitchen. I decided that would make the most difference in our lives and I’m grateful that amid all of our chaos, we can at least manage to cook and eat meals right now.

 

And it turns out that my new neighbors are just as nice as my old ones. Some of them even brought me muffins and cupcakes. Score!

 

So life is chaotic around here, but it’s also very good. We are together and have started building new memories. It will take a while to find “normal” again (if we ever had it in the first place), but in the meantime, I’m just trying to enjoy the ride, even with all of it’s bumps. One of the big ones has been that the phone company hooked up our old phone number, but missed it by one number. Some poor family has been going crazy trying to get through to each other and reaching us instead. I have to say that all of our utility companies made the move very easy on us, except for Comcast. They might get a special award for the worst customer service possible when it comes to moving. Oh well, small problems when you look at the big picture.

It’s good to be back to blogging. I really missed all of you!

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It only took 448 days!

Did you know that a giraffe’s pregnancy can last anywhere between 400 to 460 days? That’s a long time to be pregnant! You know what else can take that long?

 

Ok, it’s not typical for it to take 448 days to build a new house (and yes, that is the final count!) – but that is what has happened in our case. We wrote a check on February 25, 2012 to make a deposit on a lot and a new house. We had some delays in figuring out what we wanted to do and we went through a few different floor plans, lot choices, and waiting for the builder to open up a new part of the subdivision. We got all of that worked out and we wrote an even bigger check in May of 2012 and started meeting with the architect and picking out everything for our new house. We were told that construction would begin around the end of June and we would be in our house by October. We had a great time picking out colors, cabinets, and flooring.

 

 

I started packing up some of our non-essential items and preparing our current house to go on the market once our new one was underway. June came and went. So did July, August, September, and October. Even though the subdivision had been approved, the particular parcel of land that our lot was part of became tied up with the city because a church was going to be built nearby. That led to complications and we could not start the building process until that was cleared up. Finally, in early October, we got the go-ahead that it was going to happen. We got word that construction would start around the end of the month. I got serious again about getting the house ready and packing up a few more items. I tried to work on de-cluttering and getting rid of things that we didn’t need anymore. October came and went. So did November. By the first of December, I was feeling convinced that there would never be a hole in the ground before the end of the year and that it would just keep getting put off by winter after that. It was very discouraging. We had looked for quite awhile before we ever settled on building a new house, so it felt like we had been in limbo for such a long time (and we had)!

Then, it finally happened! They started digging a hole on December 13, 2012. Of course, it happened while we were out of town for our Disneyland trip. We had been waiting around since May and then the day they started digging we were out of town! My agent snapped some pictures and emailed them to us and I really couldn’t believe it until we got back in town and I could see it for myself. Our builder has been able to complete houses in about 90 days (which is kind of miraculous) but they told us ours would take longer because there were sure to be weather delays and we were also finishing our basement. Our agent said he really thought we would be in by around the first of April. I knew that wouldn’t happen. I was just hoping we could somehow move in by the end of April so I could host a family dinner for my brother’s wedding the first weekend in May.

 

Well, we had the coldest January we’ve had in Utah since 1949 so it was the coldest winter I have ever lived through. There were a few weeks where they couldn’t pour cement. I felt terrible for the workers who were framing our house under those conditions. It was miserable to bundle up and walk through the house. More delays. We didn’t want to put our house up too early and have to move twice. We felt like it would sell quickly (it did!) and it would be too difficult on our family to move somewhere temporarily if we sold our current home. We decided to wait until about 6 weeks before the house would be finished. I knew that I needed to finish getting the house ready though and we even had a friend who said they knew of someone who was very interested in this area and wanted to move in April or May. In early February, he said that they wanted to come through and look at the home. I went into high gear of getting things done and packed up a storage pod full of stuff.

 

The friend never ended up coming to look at the house, but I’m still glad I took action because it has lessened my current workload. It became apparent that the new house would not be done before my brother’s wedding. We made arrangements to host the family dinner elsewhere. We figured that it would be completed around the end of May. We put our current house on the market in the middle of April and it went under contract 6 days later. It worked out so perfectly, that we still keep worrying it will fall through since nothing has been easy for us with this process. The buyers didn’t need to move in until the time that we were going to be ready to move out. Things started really happening on our house and we are set to finally close the deal tomorrow. Crossing all fingers and toes that everything works out!

 

So I’m knee deep in final packing and making a lot of different arrangements. We will be in transition between 2 houses over the next week as we wait for a few final projects to be completed and some new beds to be delivered before we can start sleeping in the new place. I also still don’t have an answer yet from our internet provider on when they will be able to get everything hooked up in our new house. And somehow, I need to keep life stable enough for our family (especially Alex who is struggling with all of this change) during these transitions. It’s not like we didn’t have any warning… but somehow, all the advance notice has just made us weary instead of ready. As we walked through the new place last night, we are not quite sure how everything is going to get done before we close on Friday. There is still a lot that needs to be done. It looks like it is going to be crazy til the end on this one.

So at this point, I’m not really sure of what my blogging schedule will look like over the next week or so. I will try to post when I can, but I’m going to let myself off the hook and not make any definitive promises. I’m sure I’ll post some instagram photos to document our journey to the new house. Of course, I’ll have plenty of new scenery and fun things to share in the coming months. Now I get to finally put all of those ideas I’ve been pinning on Pinterest for the last 448 days into action! Here’s to hoping for as smooth of a move as possible.

 

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a non-blogging day

It's just not happening today. I expect there will be a few more crazy days in the coming weeks as we get close to our big move. I'm just trying to roll with it all the best I can and trying to enjoy the process.

Be back soon!

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