our house tour!

So I did a thing and I made a house tour video - which, let me be pretty clear, is NOT my expertise. I would really love to get better at it (it's actually on my to-do list this year) but my skills currently are shaky and incredibly basic. But I love that we have a real video of our house before we began working on it, because it already looks SO different!

Our house is a special house. Gummy bears litter the stairs, the previous owners left a giant jar of pickle juice in the pantry and left their used loofahs in the shower. I feel like you should be able to actually press charges for that kind of behavior. In any case, our house is so ready for some folks to come in and love on it. Scrub the walls, repaint, light some candles, burn the carpets.

This house tour video was taken two weeks ago, so already our house is mid-transformation. We've finished painting the entire living room and kitchen areas, and are picking out new floors and appliances as we speak. This place has such potential and we've been constantly dreaming of all of the ways we can work together to realize that potential. It's such an exciting adventure, and we're really putting all of our effort and funds into making this house a home.

Welcome! Come dream with us.

the dichotomy of tears

April 29, 2015. The week we found out!

My wee little babe is the size of a peach this week. Since we just announced our pregnancy publicly yesterday, I have a lot of backlogged thoughts, emotions, experiences, vomiting... and I suppose this is the time to share some of those things. (I'll skip the vomiting).

For a while, I had to fight against my initial urge to feel guilty about being pregnant. It felt like I was painfully breaking out of the cocoon of heartbreak, a place that I felt was safe and familiar. I had friends there. Other mothers who had been permanently bruised by the loss of a beloved child. It was a congregation I didn't take lightly. I felt comforted by them, held by them. Sharing about my miscarriage with others who had experienced that same loss opened up my heart in a very raw and very real way. When I found out I was pregnant again, I had a rush of fears. Would I be banished because of this new life? Should I have waited? Would my friendships change? Would they feel a twinge when I told them the news, or be able to share this happiness in all of its complexities? I felt torn between rejoicing and grieving anew for the baby I had lost. I wanted to stay the same, but push forward. I wanted to hold onto the memorial I was holding in my heart, but I also wanted to celebrate new life. I was two different people, two different desires residing on a crossroad of complex emotion.

On June 3rd, at my 10 week mark, my husband and I were able to go to my very first prenatal appointment. We saw the same doctor that I had visited right after my miscarriage, and she was ecstatic to see me again and to congratulate us. It was incredibly nerve-racking. I still felt full of fear. I had this weird, irrational fear that they would tell me I wasn't actually pregnant after all - my body had tricked me. I had tricked myself. But in that bright room, feeling naked and vulnerable in my thin fabric patient's gown, my doctor navigated her handheld monitor across my skin until we all heard the whoosh whoosh whoosh of our miraculously tiny baby's heartbeat. We just cried and cried. We cried tears for Poppy, and we cried tears for our new baby whose heart was beating for us, with us, within me. The tears all looked the same, and they all came from us, but they meant very different things.

I have learned that complex emotion, that layered and turbulent crossroad, is beautiful. And I don't mean that in the fluffy, hippy way that people sometimes use the word "beautiful" (I mean, people love to say that birth is beautiful, but I'm certainly not paying anyone to see that business, not even my own). I wish there was another word, a better word. Complex emotion is...worthwhile. The fight, the questions I ask myself, the answers I discover, it's all worthwhile. I can't quite bring myself to say that birth itself is actually beautiful because it totally freaks me out, but it is worthwhile. It's not pretty, it's worthy. Because it hurts and it's earned and it hurts hurts hurts and it produces stunning, glorious, fresh life. The complexities of life are hard and they're worth feeling. They're the dichotomy of tears.

I own the grief and I own the joy, crying tears for both and feeling for both.
I don't have to choose, because I am all of it all at once.

THE announcement

I feel like whenever female bloggers have a big announcement to make they always have to begin the message by saying and no I'm not pregnant just to clear the air, because whenever you see "big announcement!!" you automatically think BABY! In this case, there's no disclaimer. This is it. It's THE announcement.

I'm no longer beating around the bush or changing the subject or resisting the urge to be cheesy. I'm cheesy and happy and a little bit sick because I'm having a baby!

I had this all-consuming fear of a super lame pregnancy announcement, because most of them are so cheesy and terrible, but when it all came down to it I realized that sometimes corny is okay. I'm looking for corny in my life. My wonderful sister-in-law (of Amy O'Neil's Photography) took the photos for us. We went to Starbucks and we used a Mini Frapp baby like total pros, and then we drank the baby.

I'm going to have a human. Correction, I have a human, growing inside of me. It's all very sci-fi, really, and we've never been more excited in our lives! We just bought a house, we're having a baby to put in that house, and it's all going to be a very merry Christmas.

a little embarrassed

Friends.

I'm a little embarrassed by my lack of blogging lately. I'd apologize, but I think sometimes it's necessary to take a step back and kind of recoup from the blogosphere. The month-long absence wasn't entirely intentional, but a friend of mine put this quite well: I've noticed that I tend to feel "burnt out" on blogging especially when life includes a lot of big decisions and/or hard, weighty things...

That's kind of spot on for me. When there are things that I may not want to post about or am distracted by, coming up with my quota of weekly blog posts feels draining instead of inspiring. There has been a lot going on in our lives lately, a lot of stresses and decisions and shifts. It felt unnatural to try and force constant, lighthearted posts when I simply wanted to focus on life, and take lots of naps to recover from the day to day. For the month of June, I am working 10 hour work days Monday-Thursday which has proven to be very tiring. I know it sounds stupid, but sitting on your butt in front of a computer all day is a total energy sap. I have to go lie down just to recover from sitting down.

AND, we finallllyyyyyy closed on our house yesterday!! The house hunting emotions are over, and it's finally finally finally time to turn this house into a home. You know, now that it's 111 degrees all day err day, let the summer projects begin! We are so thrilled. We kind of naively thought that the hard part was getting The Bank to accept our bid, but that was just the beginning of nearly two months of struggling to get to this point. The journey was an exhausting one but now we have a [not-so] brand new home that's all ours [as soon as we replace the carpets, paint every wall, and deep clean the bajeezus out of it].

I've been working on a video tour of the "before" of our house, and I will be posting that here probably this week! I can't wait to show you all how grimy the place is, and hopefully spread our incredible excitement for the potential it has. You just gotta look past all of the scattered gummy bears stuck to the stairs and the moldy refrigerator, and you'll be running up inspiration lane.

See you soon!