Good riddance, Summer 2021

It's past Labor Day and we can happily say good-bye to one of the harder summers I've experienced. We started with a full DITY move that began when we bought our house right before Mother's Day and ended when we returned from Pennsylvania and did a full clean-out of our Kansas rental the last weekend in June. 

There was nothing easy about it. I speak for myself, but Scott carried an even heavier burden. But for real: some of it has been ugly. 

We did some DIY in the new house and we never, I swear, even had a chance at getting actually unpacked. Scott started work in Missouri around June 28, after only having 9 days off after graduating his Kansas course. That 9 days was spent driving to and from Pennsylvania and cleaning out the house in Kansas so we could hand over the keys. 

Come July, we had furniture at least. 

We celebrated Wells' birthday and we did what we could around the place (we bought it with the intention of fixing it up, remember?) and Scott prepped to leave for 5 weeks away. 

Meanwhile, Scott's father was in hospice care and we were trying to navigate being responsible for that from multiple states away.  Scott now entirely owns his dad's house and property instead of just half of it as he did before, so there's been a lot more to it than *just* losing a parent to a long illness. I do feel like Scott has the weight of the world on his shoulders with this because he's just on his own. I never thought I'd want to live in PA again (i do not, btw), but I'd love to be in Pittsburgh *this* year because maybe we could get some of this sorted. It's really hard when *you* are responsible for something and have to live states away for your job and you work 15 hour days and vacation days aren't a thing and ...I could go on and on.

Come August, we were hit with heat wave after humidity wave after heat wave. Scott's father passed away and, really, here's the list of everything that went wrong just that week. 

Honestly, August wasn't much better. There's even more to the story that I'll get to eventually here. But my mom came out for 3 weeks and took over caring for Wells so I could take care of random tasks that I can't do with him by my side. Like going to work, 

Wells did start preschool and that was a success. 

i don't have a lot of hope for school pics

School is going well enough.

Scott is here now at this exact moment and not away on some sort of deployment (for now...this is not a given so I'm trying to just go with it.)

The weather is cooling off (eh, kinda). 

How about you? How was summer? I was, clearly, not a fan. 

Long live #fall.