Growing Pains

As anyone who has children knows, it goes too fast. So fast, speed of light fast, just the blink of an eye fast. Certain events trigger this reality to mothers, birthdays, big milestones, and the one that brings it rushing back to me: going through old clothes and toys.


Going through the boys' former belongings is the one that is hardest for me, as I hold their little clothes in my hands I can imagine the baby that once wore them and I can't believe that part of our lives is gone. As with anything else in life it feels like both a lifetime ago and yesterday, funny how time can do that. Twice a year I put myself through this for a kids sale that I take part in and it never gets easier and I guess it never will.


I guess this is such a strange phenomenon for me because I have always lived my life looking toward the future, often with impatience. I am a person who has always been in a hurry to get to the next stage in my life, be it out of high school, out on my own, married, or a parent, always in a hurry, always looking forward...and now I find myself looking back and that is so new to me. Maybe this stage in my life is always where I wanted to be, I find it so amazing to look at my life now and realize that these are the best years. I am aware that every person is different and others have different favorite parts of their lives but I know without a doubt that these are the best years of mine. So I try to cherish every moment and event, I try to burn them all into my memory so that I always have them with me. There are days that I look up at the boys and see them playing together and I consciously stop and try to record the moment in my memory because I know that these moments will be gone faster than I would like to admit.

Wow, how sappy! But all true, amazing what a couple clothes baskets of memories can do to your emotional state.

Towel Pig Hunting

In my journey as a home remodeler I have come across the most helpful site http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums or as the frequenters call it, the GW. I cannot even begin to tell you how immensely helpful this site, in particular the kitchen forum, has been to us throughout the process of envisioning and realizing what our home is to become.

The kitchen has been the projects of all projects. The most anticipated, the most exciting, the most dramatic, the most important, along with the most expensive, the most maddening, and the most drawn out. The kitchen has always been the one room that I have wanted to be perfect, I am a person who just wants to stand in my kitchen and drink coffee, gather around the island with friends, I picture holiday buffets and cookie baking extravaganzas, I see myself making delicious meals while the boys do their homework all in my wonderfully amazing kitchen. This is the expectation, this is the plan.

And this is reality...it has been 5 years, the kitchen was supposed to be the first project, it was in the most dire need of attention. Well I should say the room that was to be the kitchen, because when I moved in it was not a kitchen it was a room with tile. That's it tile, no counters, no cabinets, no appliances, no sink...just tile, hideously ugly tile. My soon to be husband had been living, as bachelors often do, in a most primitive way. Who needs a full size refrigerator taking up space when you can have a mini fridge behind your recliner in the living room? No running water on the first floor, no problem there is a garden hose right outside the front door and if you don't want to go outside you can always fill the dog's water dish in the bath tub upstairs. I actually remember attempting to cook Eric dinner one night and sitting on the porch with a bucket of water and the hose scrubbing potatoes thinking if only my friends could see me now they would really get a laugh out of this one! Then having to grill this dinner on the smallest grill I had ever seen, you know the ones that you sit on the tailgate of your truck that have the propane tank that screws on the side, yeah that was the extent of my cooking facilities.

Needless to say, the kitchen was first on our list of rooms to be done. We went to a cabinet company and had a beautiful kitchen designed and we were so excited to get started on it, but then life gave us a wonderful surprise named Max and the kitchen plans were put on hold. It seems for about the same amount of money you can either finish the kitchen in a house or everything else, so we decided on the everything else so that we wouldn't all be living in one room...which was lucky because when Max was just 5 months old we found out we were expecting another wonderful surprise named Grady.

So we finished everything else and lived with the kitchen. We made some modest improvements like a utility sink (which was really fun doing dishes in pregnant!), we bought a nice range and refrigerator, and Eric found a table that his grandpa had fashioned from an old door and that was our counter space, oh and I almost forgot to mention the rubbermaid container and book shelf that we used to store our food and dishes. Add all that to an empty room with ugly tile and you have yourself a makeshift kitchen.

But now finally, at last, and for real this time we are finishing our kitchen. But now it must be perfect! I have designed and redesigned it, I have researched kitchen planning to an extent that I am probably more qualified to design a kitchen than some of the people that work at the big box stores as kitchen designers. I tend to get obsessive about things and I can't let them go until they are exactly as they should be and I am on the quest for the perfect kitchen for the Kinsey's. Which leads me to the towel pig...

What is a towel pig you say, I said the same thing. When I first saw the post on the GW I thought they must be speaking of a man, like my husband, who doesn't get all the dirt off his hands before he dries them on nice hand towels. (Which reminds me of that scene in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson scolds John Travolta for the same offense, but I digress)

But no, that is not the kind of Towel Pig to which was being referred, THE Towel Pig is the cutest little resin statue that some lucky soul discovered in TJMaxx and had the revelation to place on her kitchen counter as a place to lay her damp dish towel...what vision!

And now I must have it...my kitchen will not be perfect without it. I am not the only one, there are several of us in search of this elusive pig. The internet has been scoured, little shops have been searched, Tuesday Morning and TJ Maxx has been explored, no stone has been left unturned. Sure there are other pigs out there but none as perfectly porcine as the pig in question. I must find him, it's the only way for me to have my perfect kitchen, the search continues...

The Beginning: An Introduction

Well here it is, the first post. I suppose both the hardest and the easiest to write, hard in that it will set the tone for my blog and easy in that I can write about anything because I won't be repeating myself.
I guess the first thing to do is to tell you a little about myself, I am a stay at home mom to two wonderful (and endlessly energetic) boys ages 2 and 3...just 14 months apart (wouldn't do that one again, but that is a whole other post). My husband and I have been married going on 5 years and the entire time we have been remodeling our 1895 farmhouse, which is yet to be finished (to repeat my earlier sentiment, wouldn't do that one again, but I can assure you there will be plenty of future posts on this subject). And along with the (soon-to-be) beautiful farmhouse comes the life of living on a farm, a life that if someone had told me earlier in my life that I would be living I would have probably peed my pants laughing at the absurdity, I mean honestly ME a farmer's wife...come on! Oh but it is true, the places that love will take you are amazing, ok that last line is super-corny but I think you get what I mean :)