One really long and scattered blog post coming right up!
My parents finally sold the house we grew up in. I use that designation loosely since we moved around quite a bit growing up, but this was the house we lived in from the time I was in the 6th grade. Before then, we hadn’t lived in a house (or state, for that matter) for more than a few years at a time, so this was the house that felt the most like home. Selling it was bittersweet, except minus the sweet part unless you were my parents and you were tired of paying to upkeep a big house that you were no longer living in. :)
At the risk of getting more sappy than the occasion really warrants, the house held a lot meaning for our family. My mom always referred to it as “party central.” It hosted more than a few family gatherings, youth group fellowships, casual hangouts, holiday meals and special cookouts. It also hosted the everyday happenings of our family for 12+ years. For instance…
At one point in early high school, I taught Brad how to could climb out of his (upstairs) bedroom window and scale down the front of the house. I learned that this was possible from my own bedroom window one day when I was tired of studying and wanted to see if I could do it (I did, and then I just came in the front door and went back to studying… I was a rebel, what can I say). Brad abused this tactic that I had taught him and would sneak out of the house at night and get picked up by his friends to go hang out when he was grounded. I was always the only one who knew he was gone and this was way before our parents let us get cell phones, so I would just sit on the floor in his room crying and waiting for him to come home safely. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was so worried would happen to him, but I do like to hold that story over his head. That was really traumatizing for me, Brad. So can you please bring your truck and help us pick up and move in our new refrigerator?
At some point when he was in middle school, Russell bought a pet snake but neglected to tell anyone about it. He also neglected to tell anyone that the snake had crawled into the TV upstairs and couldn’t be retrieved, but instead he just gave up and left for a church trip the next day. I had just gotten out of the shower a few days later and I see a big fake green snake lying perfectly S-shaped in the hallway. I say, “Very funny, Brad.” and go to pick it up only to see its tongue stick out and quickly go back in. My favorite part of that story? Brad acted like a little girl when I made him scoop it into a shoe box.
Then there’s more than a few mom stories from that house. Before my mom had her knee replacement surgery, she didn’t really go upstairs much. Like the respectful and well-behaved kids we were, my brothers and I never did the chores she asked us to do because we knew we could just say that we did and she wouldn’t know the difference. I even distinctly remember plugging in the vacuum, turning it on, and then just sitting on my bed for a few minutes while it ran so she would think I was vacuuming. It was probably more trouble than just going ahead and vacuuming, but what can I say-- I was 14. Putting away laundry was the bane of our existence, so we just dumped our clean clothes in our closet and grabbed them as needed. One summer Brad and I were headed out on a youth mission trip and my mom explicitly asked us to put away our clothes before we left, even adding a speech about how she buys us all the clothes we need, then she washes all of them and folds all of them and all she ever asks is that we take them to our room and hang them up or put them in our drawers. I had a lot of better things to do before leaving, like saying goodbye to friends and making sure my white eyeliner was packed, so I dumped my clothes in my closet as usual, and so did Brad. We had a great trip, but upon getting home and going upstairs, we found that our drawers had been pulled out of our dressers and overturned on the floor and that every single article of clothing that we owned was gone. Brad and I came out of our rooms and gave each other a “this cannot be good” look and went downstairs. My mom was waiting patiently in the kitchen. She calmly informed us that because we were not good stewards of the clothes that were provided to us, she had taken them. All of them. They were in trash bags in her bedroom and we could pay 25 cents per item to get them back. Every shirt, every pair of pants/shorts, every sock, every pair of underwear, and every shoe--- 25 cents apiece. Whatever we had not purchased back from her by the end of the month would be dropped off at Goodwill. (I would say lesson learned, but you saw the pictures in the last post!)
Then there was the time my dad put my life at risk by asking me to crawl into the huge built-in TV cabinet/bookcase to mess with some cords to the cable box. It was my senior year of high school and I was in the office doing homework even though it was homecoming weekend, because my date lived 1,000 miles away at Wheaton. The logistics of the situation are hard to explain without a picture, but he had removed a tall skinny speaker that was wedged between the wall and the box-style big screen TV we had, and he was wanting me to crawl through the corridor it had left and then stand in the nook behind the TV and plug something in. The conversation went something like this, “Hey Ems, come in here for a minute. I need you to crawl behind the TV. I would do it myself, but my head won’t even fit through the hole. I think you can fit. If you get stuck, I can just pull the TV out.” I went in to assess things, only to see that he was expecting me to crawl through a space that was 3’ tall but only 7” wide. I can’t tell you how many times I told him that it wasn’t going to work, even as I was trying to wedge myself in there, but somehow he talked me into it. I made it through, although it came at a price to certain parts of my body, and I was able to plug in the cord. I started to fit back through the corridor but quickly realized there wasn’t enough space behind the TV for me to get my legs at the right angle to slide back through. I told my dad that due to the simple properties of geometry, there was no way I could get out, so he needed to move the TV. He said that he can't move the TV by himself and that he had lied about being able to just so I wouldn’t be afraid to crawl back there. We talked about what our options were and concluded that I would just have to come out in the reverse way I went in, meaning I needed to come out legs first. I was hot and sweaty and scared, not to mention depressed that all my friends were having fun at the homecoming dance, and I was about to have my dad pull me out of a TV cabinet by my feet. My mom walked in the door just in time to hear the snap of the underwire of my bra, which just couldn’t handle the 7” squeeze. All because my dad wanted to be able to DVR two shows at once.
In addition to the meaning it held for my family, that house also held a lot of meaning for Kolby and I. It was on that front porch that Kolby and I had our first kiss. We had just spent the evening at our school’s homecoming dance “as friends” and he was walking me up to the front door to say goodnight. Fast forward five and a half years, when he knelt down and proposed to me on that same porch. The day before the closing was finalized, we moved the last of the furniture out of the house and Kolby and I got a few last pictures on our porch.
In other, non-sentimental news, the Texas Rangers will soon secure their spot in the playoffs! Kolby is beside himself. On a whim we went to the last game in the series against the Yankees last weekend and had the privilege of watching the Rangers sweep, though it was 105 degrees in the ballpark that day and I had the privilege of experiencing my first case of upper lip sweat. It was hot.
Kolby spent the hours between 8:30am and 11am this past Saturday placing over 75 calls to the box office to secure playoff tickets for us. That, my friends, is dedication. Go Rangers!
Last weekend I had quite possibly the best Sunday of all time—I drove up to Oklahoma to visit Jess and Steven and their 7-day old baby, Emersyn. I had the privilege of having a teeny tiny 8 lb newborn sleep on my chest all day while we watched HGTV and talked about how precious she is. Pure bliss.
Now we're packing and getting ready to hit the road for Wimberley tomorrow to celebrate Kassidy's wedding!
*Also, I added a couple new posts to our Real Food page, in case anyone is interested.*
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