Memes and Missouri

 

I know so many crunchy Christian moms who refuse to do Santa but at the same time, also refuse to use conventional medicine because "oils work". 

I had 2+ glasses of wine the other night and Scott told me I'd be hungover and I was like no, that's not why. I wake up every day feeling hungover lol. 

It comes up quick. ^ Thought I had a few more years. 

 Mine was a wedding gift and I still use it multiple times a week. 

A few weeks ago, Scott took the kids to Missouri with him for the weekend and left me with the dogs. I RANSACKED bedrooms. Nothing was safe. I literally left them with VERY LITTLE. They are absolutely trashed again and I don't know how it's possible. 

^^ The ratio is what's important. 

We went to Missouri for the long weekend. 

Maybe you can help me: I'm trying to decide what's best for us as we move into next year. 

We're committed to Kansas until June 2026 and Scott will be working there until at least the next June.

I'm trying to decide what's best. Homeschool, public school, moving back to our house in Missouri? Private school? Trying to go back to work? 

I have a flow chart and I'm so incredibly conflicted on what to do next. It all depends on what the army tells us is next, obviously.

When it comes to maybe, possibly sending kids to school, I keep thinking that I'm doing my part to advance their education and provide them with experiences this year, so what they may learn or not learn in the next few years won't make a huge difference overall. 

My only non-negotiable is that, for the neighborhood we currently live in, we're not going to use that public school. My friend worked there and I know too much about it. I don't really want to stay in a rental in Kansas, especially if Scott will be traveling a lot for his job next year. While it's been exactly what Wells has needed, developmentally, it's not ideal for many reasons other than that. (Do I like being 5 minutes from Walmart? Ugh yes. Do I like having outlets and Target and the zoo and every other fun activity and friends within 30 minutes? *sob* Yes.)

I do really envy the people who just put their kid in a school and keep them there, always. 

I packed enough food and clothes and whatever for 4+ days because the grocery store is 20 minutes in the opposite direction. 

This is so incredibly similar to our 18 months split between Colorado and Wyoming. I remember MAKING Thanksgiving dinner in WY and driving it back to CO one year.

Flashback to May 2018: 

^^^Back in 2018, unloading baby stuff and very much trying to finish Wells' nursery in Wyoming while I was very much still living and working in Colorado Springs, 4 hours away. I was about 30 weeks pregnant. 

Unplanned microwave

Once in awhile, I'll offhandedly mention (in IRL conversation) about how we had to fix something or replace something in our house. Since we're the notorious out-of-towners in a very small town, someone will inevitably ask what house we bought and I'll explain the location and they'll usually know exactly what house I'm talking about. 

However. 

It's only a matter of time before someone says Oh, that was my brother's house! or Oh, I've been dear dear friends when those people for decades! or I know them! They're great!

Last year, I had a blood draw at the doctor's office. The nurse saw my address on the paperwork and said she used to live in our house :) She rented it in 2019 while she and her husband were building a house. 

Anywho. I would probably have no issue telling whoever it is that Maybe so, but they had no idea what they were doing and their home inspector should be fired and stranded on a deserted island where he can never inspect a home again. 

When it comes to the people who owned the house, I'm guessing you can probably be a decent human being but still make the choice to take out a load-bearing wall causing the ceiling to sag and the roof to leak. 

Maybe?

The latest: Scott had to replace the microwave over the weekend.

he also had to raise up the middle cabinets there to fit the new microwave.

above the new stove that we had to get when the old stove/oven randomly 

stopped working in February 2022

The turntable inside of the microwave never worked. It was maybe 12 years old when we bought the house. We could not figure out why this turnable never worked but we came to accept it over the last few years. It still did everything else the way a microwave should.

Last week, I pressed start on the microwave and heard a loud pop, there was a weird smell, and then the heating element of the microwave just stopped working. It would run but it didn't heat anything. 

After ripping it out of the wall, Scott realized that the two wires that connect to the turnable were never hooked up or wired into the switch. They were just floating there, not grounded to anything. By chance, they touched, causing the pop and the microwave to short circuit and that was it for the microwave. 

I admit: this was a new one for us to have the microwave not be installed correctly. 

The day when someone tells me they "know" the people who "fixed up" and sold us this house, I'm going to tell them about the microwave, just because in 15 years of renting and buying, this is a new one. 

Obviously, I'd also like to charge them some kind of inconvenience fee.

The tree that used to be in our front yard.

*I absolutely meant to post this in July since the story you're about to read took place on July 31, 2021. However, I also meant to post it in July last year. So let's just clap because I got it written down at all.*

I was weed-eating (weed-whacking?) around a tree stump in our front yard the other day and I thought about our history with this tree. 

When we moved into the house in May 2021, it was there. At the end of July 2021, it got struck by lightening in such a fashion that it split the bark, shot it everywhere, and knocked out the neighbors' power. Then it was positioned so precariously that we had to have it cut down a week or two later ($800!) so it didn't fall on the house. 

Scott would've cut down the tree himself but he was in Kansas for work for six weeks. 

My point: 

During this lightening storm, I took a pregnancy test and that's how I found out I was pregnant with Sutton. Thunder and lightening and an anxious dog bouncing all around. I called Scott almost immediately (I don't even recollect what Wells was up to) because not only was he in Kansas for six weeks, he was leaving Kansas the next day en route to Pennsylvania for his dad's funeral. 

Good timing, right? 

In addition, in the middle of this phone call with Scott (which I could barely get through because our internet was nonexistent and Facetime or regular calls don't work out in the country without wi-fi), the neighbor came over to tell me the tree got struck by lightening. You know how a doorbell can rile up some already-anxious dogs. 

Again, good timing. 

It was such a unique strike, blowing the bark off like that, that the people who came to cut it down took pictures of it to show their coworkers. 

Anyway. I feel like I should carve her name into this stump or something. 

Did I have to double-check the info on Google Photos to verify the date of this event? I did. 

Sutton's License Plate

Sutton turns 4 months old today. She has her check-up/shots on Wednesday though, so I'll do a monthly update post for her later. 

Military kids are really unique and parents find all kinds of ways to celebrate them. Usually, all the kids from a military family are born in completely different states, which is so normal in my mind but really odd if you think about it. 

We are those military people who actually just kind of blend into the gen pop of wherever place we live. We tend to buy houses or rent off-post instead of living on base, I work in the local schools, and we don't spend a lot of time with other military families simply because we don't live on post. I don't know why this is the path we've taken, but we have. It does lead to a fuller experience than just being a tourist in your current town/city, I guess. 

In the past, we have bought vehicles in different states. When you do that, you just get a plate for the state you live in and pay those taxes. Until 2019, when we transferred everything to reflect our Alaska residency, we had accumulated plates from PA, AK, MO, CO, and WY. Once everything was replaced with Alaska plates, we had those others just sitting around. 

Which means, Wells gets a Wyoming plate framed and on his wall to commemorate where he was born. 

When Sutton, who was a complete surprise to us all, was born in Missouri this past spring, I immediately thought I could do the same for her. 

See, we have Missouri plates hanging around from our time stationed here in 2013-2014. Our Tacoma (that we sold in 2017) was bought in Missouri in 2013 and our Rav4 (that we still have) was bought in Missouri in 2013 too. 

The long and short of this story is that shortly after we bought that Rav4 in Springfield, Missouri, we were told we'd likely never have biological children. I was, quite ironically, told this in the very same hospital where Sutton would be born 8 years later. Like, literally almost to the day. 

This means that, also quite ironically, she gets that Missouri license plate to show where she was born. We'd renounced our Missouri claim years ago, changing the car registration to Colorado and then to Alaska. But I still had the plates. 

I know that's a little bit of a turkey trail to follow, but the point is that it's totally not lost on me that Sutton arrived exactly when and where she was supposed to, and this license plate on her wall is my enormous daily reminder of this. 

If you want to see how I put the license plate in the frame, click on the Wells post up there for a quick tutorial!

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. 

Labor Day Weekend (almost all labor)

This is exactly how I felt heading into the weekend, knowing my goal was to paint the upper cabinets:

First, Scott took them apart for me. Then he showed me how to sand them. Then it rained all day Saturday and he went to the grocery store so I didn't have to. 

Laura Ingalls Wilder said that butchering hogs was "hateful" work, but necessary. So is cabinet painting. I hate it. But I hate ugly cabinets more. A lot of people have ugly cabinets. Unless you buy a house that you designed or was built in the last 5 years, you will be doing something to cabinets, be it painting them or replacing them. 

One coat:

Two coats: 

Shudder: 

Sunday, I sanded these ^ and started painting doors. Everything needed two coats because people always like to choose ugly wood stains for their cabinets. 

Meanwhile, Scott really wanted to take Wells to the aquarium at Bass Pro, so that's what they did. 

"Hateful":

I did take a break to walk the dogs for a good 90 minutes. 

And then we went to a friend's house so Wells could play and swim. 

Honestly, the most relaxing part of the weekend was when I just sat in bed on Sunday night and watched the first two episodes of Clickbait because...our DSL internet has been installed (this was a 5.5 hour process on Friday afternoon) and now we can stream without fear of reprisal (our satellite data being cut off for overuse). 

Now I have to call and cancel the satellite internet and pay the $300 termination fee. 

Also, did you know that this part of Missouri just has REALLY bad internet in general? Like, good internet just doesn't exist here? I don't remember a ton of issues the last time we lived here (we had DSL through CenturyLink) but we also didn't require internet just to survive back in 2013. It was a different world. 

So I have tried every. single. avenue. toward internet service over the last few months and there is nothing. NOTHING. There is one DSL service where we live. And there is satellite. 

In town, there's more options, but they're not more reliable. 

*Apparently*, they make you teach from home on snow days here and it's nothing but problems because no one's internet works that well (according to my coworker) and you have to wonder why they bother? 

Anyway, the cabinets aren't done yet...this'll be a two-weekend project because Scott has to hang them all back up for me and we still have to putty the extra hole where there was a handle and do the touch up over that. 

Now all we need to do is replace the roof, replace the floor, replace the countertops, and add a back deck.

Maybe next weekend. 

Building a Kitchen Island

This isn't the first island we've built. The previous one in Colorado had more to it-- electrical, for one thing. This one is more basic, but also much more functional because it's bigger. 

In Colorado, our island had storage but it also had our stove on it, so the space was not as functional. It had a butcher block top and quartz counter around the induction stovetop. 

This time, we were looking for STORAGE underneath (we have no pantry) and SEATING. We eat, really, only at whatever bar top we have in our kitchens. Going on 4 houses now of eating exclusively at the bar top. We're those people, I guess. In Colorado, we ate almost exclusively on the couch, so...progress. 

Two things: This island is not attached to the floor yet or trimmed along the bottom because we are replacing this kitchen floor this winter. We also wanted to make sure it was exactly where we wanted it before we, literally, nail it down. 

While we bought the cupboards premade, Scott reinforced them with extra wood because premade cupboards bought at Home Depot aren't designed to be high-end or sturdy. This is the DIY of it all. 

These pictures go backwards because this isn't a tutorial (LOL) and that's how Google Photos does things. 

 Concerning this project, all I did was paint. I was so sick this day. I think this was my only contribution to anything that entire weekend. The color is Sherwin Williams Farm to Table. 

Supports for the bar top. Scott likes them as is, I kind of want to do them in off-white. Idk...This is the good part of DIY. You can change your mind and add to it later on. 

This is why Scott reinforces with real wood and supports: the "supports" in the middle were literally broken when we unboxed it. They were particle board. 

We were going to put this panel on it. We still may? Idk. We kind of just like it how it is. 

The first step was really to condition the bar top, stain it (it's a walnut stain), and then apoxy it (which took years off of Scott's life, I'm pretty sure...we've only done this once before and I'm quite sure we'll never do it again). 

In Case You Missed it:

Pleasant Surprises in the New House