We’re Moving!!

I’ve only been stalking houses since December… And now we finally get to move!  We’ll be moving July 1, which means I have 792 hours to get my decorating plans in order.

But before we continue: if you are married to me or will in any context imply that I have nor the time or money to accomplish this (That means you TGrass), please return another day.  If you are my mother, or in any context will contribute to and support my plans (that means you April Harvey), by all means continue reading.

So.  The place isn’t huge, but it’s more space than we have now, split between 3 levels.  There is a living room, kitchen, finished basement, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, and a patio to work with. (Lucky for you, the landlord JUST emailed us some pictures…take a look!)

The kitchen is substantially smaller than our current one, but how much do you LOVE those white cabinets?  I’m in love.  And check out our BACK DOOR.  That’s right, people.  A back door.

Living room looking into the dining area. Living room.  The office. (And other pictures I jacked from Craigslist…)

So. For the bedroom (bottom right), here’s what I’m thinking…

This beautiful upholstered bed with decorative nail heads.  Am I going to pay $1600 for this from Crate & Barrel?  Heck no.  But it will serve as my inspiration… Make the headboard myself perhaps?  Find a headboard of similar shape (or even rectangular) at Goodwill, wrap it in filler, batting, and fabric… Stick some upholstery nails in that baby and voila.  Or there’s always Target…

And do you just LOVE this Pottery Barn bedding?  Sure it’s sold out online (hello, ebay) and good luck to me getting my husband to agree to it… But don’t the subtle blues go great with the bedroom wall color, the tans and greens with the headboard, and a great pop of coral red.  Man.  I love it.

      

We will likely keep the black nightstands and dresser we currently have, which look similar to these…

But I have one conundrum…

This green bathroom.

It’s really kind of a fun color, but maybe not what I would handpick.  And our landlord seems pretty….protective… of her place, so we’re not going to broach the “can we paint” question.  So what other option do I have but to make limeade from my limes?  I love this shower curtain, which Pottery Barn is sold out of…

And I can’t find it on ebay… So I could buy fabric by the yard from PB…. Or maybe buy a twin duvet and make it?

        

For the most part, this is really as far as I’ve gotten.  But don’t worry, I have a GIANORMOUS folder of saved favorites I’ve found on the internet.  So there is more to come…

BUT.  For the next 33 days, I promise to try to savor our last days in our first home.  It was the perfect place to carry us through the first three years of our marriage and provide sanctuary through three hard years of grad school.  We giddily unpacked our wedding gifts here.  We decorated our first Christmas tree. Bought our first sofa… Bought our first EVERYTHING.  Painted our adirondack chairs in the living room, wrapped head to toe in garbage bags. Had a HUGE fight about hanging that dumb shelf in the bathroom (For the record, I was right.). Tyler installed dimmer switches throughout the place, which he still points out to visitors with great pride. We celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time alone here, just the two us and a giant bird.  We slept in and savored the beautiful tree outside of our bedroom window.  And we have loved and loved and loved within these walls. 

So before I hastily move on with grand ideas about materialist things… I will continue to love our first home for as long as it’s our first home.

Waiting Game

Hi friends!  We had a busy weekend around here because we were house hunting… Yes, Mr. We’re-not-moving-until-October agreed to follow up on some places I’ve been stalking on the internet.  So we toured some spots on over the weekend and… we think we fell in love.

There were places in prime locations (read: four block from the waterfront in Old Town and you paid for every block), places that were huge but expensive, and places that were cheap but far away. 

BUT we found a little Goldilocks spot: a townhouse that’s close to where we are now, is still a jump in square footage (not hard when you have 900), but isn’t overwhelming in maintenance.  It’s in an established community in Arlington, full of young families and young professionals.  It’s a very safe and social community, where everyone’s out with their dogs and strollers in the evening and we would still have access to pools and tennis courts.  We would have a great little back patio, 3 bedrooms (or two bedrooms and an office), and it’s all beautifully renovated and we wouldn’t have to do a thing to it. (We’re just renting, did I mention that?  I don’t think I did… Just renting.)

We have several friends that already live in this neighborhood and it was the cheapest least expensive of everywhere we looked.  And best of all, we’d have our own front door.  Our own house number.  And an attic (Imagine that—no more Christmas decorations in the kitchen cabinets!).  Sounds like God’s just ASKING us to move there, right??

There’s a catch.

Money.  Tyler’s due for a raise this year and is expected to find out any day what it is.  And as much as I am DYING to blindly take this place and say “We’ll just figure out a way,” I know better.  If God wants us to move, He’ll work it out.  If He doesn’t, He’ll make it clear.  We were supposed to find out today from work, but we were told today that we’ll know tomorrow. And so we wait.  Yuck.

So that’s where we are!  Hopefully I’ll have good news to share in the next few days (I hope so because I’ve already started stalking furniture on Craigslist). 

Sorry this post wasn’t worth writing home about, just filling you in our life… Thanks for reading anyway!

P.S. I haven’t started my summer reading yet… Eek.  Maybe by June 1?

Summer Reading List

It’s that time folks!  “What time,” you ask?  Well, I don’t know exactly.  Because I’ve never done this before.  But since I’m a free woman (Not. A. Student.) and don’t have tests to study for every night until 2 am, I have constructed for myself a ridiculously ambitious summer reading list.  Twenty bucks says there will be a post titled “Fall Reading List” in three months with strikingly similar identical readings…

So here goes.

The Re-Reads

• A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken
  • Note: Aaaaaah-mazing.  True story.  Read it in college.  Loved it.  Cried like a baby.  I’m overdue for a revisit.
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Note: I cite it as a favorite, but haven’t read it since high school.  Also overdue for a visit to East Egg and West Egg.

The Biographies/Memoirs

• Maria by Maria von Trapp
  • Note: Yes, the Sound of Music is true.  And I want to know aaaaall about it.
• Messenger by Jeni Stepanek
  • Note: This is the mom of Mattie Stepanek, who used to be on Oprah all the time and passed away in 2004.  Almost scared to read it because of the seriously unstable manner in which I cried while watching his funeral on TV.
• I’m also in search of bios on Charles Darwin and C.S. Lewis (preferably not written by C.S…I am just not smart enough to cannot keep up with that man!).  Any recommendations?

The Trendy’s

• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• Anything by Jodi Picoult
  • Note: Yes, her stuff is formulaic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not thought provoking and a great read.

The Classics

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  • Note: I know as little as one can possibly know about this book, but I feel like I should read it.  I expect it’s not an easy read.
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles
  • Note: Read it in middle and high school.  Thought I was cool back in the day if I read my big sis’ required reading—Lord knows why.  But I think this book is the reason why I love a man in a pink shirt. And ties as belts.

The Christians

• A Lineage of Grace by Francine Rivers
  • Note: Based on the 5 women in Jesus’ lineage.
• A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story by Diana Butler Bass
  • Note: I’m weary of the word “progressive” secondary to how its been politicized, so I’m unsure of this book as it’s been described as progressive.  But upon reading reviews and descriptions, I’m intrigued.  No idea what I’m getting myself into, but what’s the fun in only reading what you’re sure you agree with?  I’ll let you know how it goes…

The Medical-Related Non-Fiction

• Schuyler’s Monster by Robert Rummel-Hudson
  • Note: I’m drawn to the lives of parents who have children with disabilities for obvious reasons, but the story of diagnosing a wordless daughter is just as appealing as the story of the blind love of a father…
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks

The Fiction Books about Alzheimer's

• The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merill Block
• Still Alice by  Lisa Genova
  • My neuro professor has apparently passed on her intrigue in Alzheimer’s…

So, Amazon’s profits should be up for the quarter.  Speaking of Amazon, I’m having an internal debate on a Kindle/Nook/iPad.  Any advice?  As I look up all of these books, I also realize the cover of the book makes a serious difference to me—I will only buy the editions with the covers I like.

Are you impressed??  If you are, don’t be.  There is no way I will have made my way through these by Labor Day.  No way.  But I’m gonna try!  Have y’all read any of these?  Anything I’m seriously overlooking?  Or better yet, anything on here that’s a waste of my time? 

I’ll keep you updated as I work my way through…

After We Talk about Father Time…

Can we just talk about the amazing-ness of Lee Dewyze for a minute?

Halleluyer, baby.

In other news, received some sad news today.

Colin Hanks just married.  Bummer.  Guess I missed my shot.

Update!

Holy canoli.  It’s been a long week since graduation!  As soon as our family hit the road last week, I started my first week of my final rotation.

[Side note: a lot of people get confused about my school status—I complete 3 full time “rotations” or “clinical affiliations” as part of my education, where I work full time as a PT under the guidance of another PT.  So I’ve graduated in the sense that I’ve finished my academic work, but won’t officially be done until I complete this last rotation at the end of July.]

[Side note numero dos: Can we all just sit and talk for a minute about how ridiculous it is that it’s already May 17th?  I mean, really Father Time.  Can we just back off for a bit?]

So, anyway.  I jumped right into my rotation and went non-stop all week.  The clinic I’m working for has 2 locations and I split my time between them— one is in Arlington, near us, and the other is in Herndon. Not close to us.  Not close at all. It’s only 16 miles away, but in DC speak, that is far, far away.  And in case you’re not familiar, DC has some really un-cool traffic.  And by really un-cool, I mean it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to get home from work my first day.

But outside of the commute on those days in Herndon (I think I found a better way home today, in case you’re worried for my sanity…which you should be), I LOVE my clinic.  The kids we work with are adorable (Mental picture: put together every cute, disabled kid you’ve seen on Extreme Home Makeover, and that’s my patient list.) and the therapists I work with are very smart, cool, laid-back people who happen to be excellent teachers to boot. Two of them are fellow Marymount alum, so we were taught by the same professors and have similar philosophies and approaches to therapy.  I loved working in the public school system, but I think I’ve learned more in the last week than I did in my entire previous rotation.

Even though my first week was generally spent observing, it’s still exhausting!  Tyler’s been asking what happened to his wife because this girl is in bed every night by 11 o’clock at the LATEST.  And Saturday morning I was wide awake at 7:45.  This to me is about as un-cool as that DC traffic, but I can’t help it!  I’m exhausted!

We spent all weekend on the couch, eating waffles and Trader Joe’s pizza, and planning our trip to Italy.  Sunday we crawled out of our cave for church and tried a new restaurant (Coastal Flats) for lunch (They served deviled eggs with sugar coated bacon and candied pecans as an appetizer… Enough said.)  We ran errands, hit the gym, and settled in for some more TJ’s dinner.  All in all, it was an excellent weekend and we caught up on some much needed sleep…

And now it’s Monday again!  One week down, twelve more to go.  Thanks for checking in!  I’ll have something more interesting to talk about later this week.  Maybe. Hopefully.

It is finished.

The whirlwind weekend of graduation and visitors is done!  It was a crazy, hectic, fun, joyful, hectic, bittersweet, and hectic three days.

Tyler’s parents came in on Friday morning and spent the day at our place hanging out and helping us with all of the food prep…

That afternoon, T and I drove to Kent Island on the Eastern Shore for my friend Julia’s wedding.  It was outside on the bay and it was the perfect weather: 75 degrees, sunny, and breezy. (I kept telling people, “I think I get a little bitter when I go to weddings with perfect weather!” :)) Julia is in my small group through church and our whole group managed to make it.  We had a great time and we were all SO happy to see Julia and Andy tie the knot!

Our group minus Julia: Kim, me, Jess, Ashley, and Jen

(They served cupcakes rather than wedding cake. I, of course, was in full agreement with this decision.)

By Friday night, all of our family members had arrived to join in the graduation celebration.  Saturday afternoon was the hooding ceremony with just my graduating class, followed by a party at our condo’s clubhouse that  night.  I’m proud to say that I didn’t cry but then again, the finality of everything wasn’t really sinking in at the time.  Amidst the craziness, we didn’t get any pictures from the party, but rest assured the food was great and fellowship even better.

Sunday morning we celebrated Mother’s Day with a brunch at Cafe La Rouche in Georgetown.  We love Cafe La Rouche, but hadn’t been there for brunch before.  Frankly, it was a bit of a disappointment so we probably won’t visit there in the AM hours again.  But we did have a great time hanging out with our family.  And even though it was Mother’s Day, this little bug received most of the attention… I think she made at least 2 laps around the table.

Sunday afternoon the fam was forced to sit through graduation numero dos at Constitution Hall in downtown DC.  This was truly the last time our class would be together.  Again, it didn’t really sink in at the time, but there was plenty of nostalgia and picture taking to go around.

Everyone was gone by Monday afternoon, but not before hitting up some museums along the mall with our out of town guests.

Major let down occurred Monday afternoon once the family was gone and the finality of everything set in.  I was heart sick for the rest of the afternoon after realizing the a huge part of my life was over.  I wouldn’t do it over again, but I treasured my time in school and all of the dear friends I made a long the way.  Many have already moved back to their respective states, but happy hours and reunions are already in the works.  (Everyone HAS been calling me “doctor” for the last three days…I won’t complain about that!”)

For the time being, I’m finishing up my final rotation in outpatient pediatrics.  No rest for the weary—I started yesterday and will be working through the end of July.  So far, I LOVE LOVE LOVE it!  It’s exactly what I wanted it would be. (But it’s EXHAUSTING!  I’ll fill you in on everything in another post…)

So that’s that!  Life goes on… Onto the next adventure.