(The wreath hanging on my parents' front door.)
On Sunday we are having a little birthday party for Miss Jubals, and even though everyone coming is family and has already seen our house, today I decided to get with the program when it comes to decorating our walls.
I tripped down to the basement to find boxes of framed photos and art that hadn't been opened since they were packed away 18-months ago. There's no good reason why I hadn't opened them before except that I just didn't feel like it. But now? Well, I decided now was as good a time as any to go through it.
Inside the boxes were nearly all the things we had used to decorate our room and Jules' room. Though I hadn't forgotten about any of them, it was a lovely reunion to see some treasured items and photos that had once sat on shelves and hung from the walls of our former house. Now they have a new spot, a new place to hang, a new light to catch. Our rooms feel a little more complete.
Tomorrow a trip to Target, IKEA, and Costco will hopefully help me put the finishing touches on our place.
This process of turning my grandparents' former house into our house has been an interesting one. I am very content with where we are living now, even though it is certainly much different from where I thought we'd be about this time of year. I remember quite distinctly saying at Jules' birthday party last year, "Next year, we'll be having her party in our new house."
I was partly right. We are having her party at our new house...it's just not the one we were going to build.
The disappointment of not building has faded away. I didn't think it would, but it has. Mostly I'm relieved that we didn't go ahead with building, optimistically assuming that Jason would get a job after leaving his other one. What a disaster that would have been! But going through our stuff today made me a little nostalgic for where we lived. That red vase, the wooden kaleidescope, my favorite candle--I remember where they used to sit. I can picture vividly in my mind how the pictures hung in our bedroom, how the curtains hung in Sydney's room. It was a good house.
Where we live now is good too, just different. It has a different feel (owing, no doubt, to the fact that part of the living space was once a mobile home), but what a blessing that my grandparents' home was available for us to move into, allowing us to live on the Family Farm. If we couldn't have lived here, then life would be much different...and we'd probably be back in Oregon.
Yet, here we are, putting pictures up on the walls, unpacking all the decorations that make a place feel less like a space and more like a home.
We're here, for awhile anyway. Who knows when we'll build. I've been okay with that for quite some time, but it was just today that I really stopped to think about it, moving things around in my mind to see how I feel.
Turns out, I'm feeling okay. And I'm happy that we've found our home for the next few years.
