Things I Will Miss

Let me apologize up front if all I seem to be blogging about are home repairs and getting back into our house. Now that we can see "the end" of all of this, it is very difficult to escape the tunnel vision I seem to have right now. I can't seem to focus on anything other than the 800 things that I think need to get done in the next week that will help get our life back to normal.

Because for the last several months, "normal" has looked very different. We have been living with my aunt, uncle, and cousin since September. When we first moved in, I honestly thought we would be back in our house by Christmas. At that time, if I thought it would be almost 2 months longer than that, we would have explored other options for their sake. Asking someone (even family) to put you and your family of four up for an indefinite amount of time just seems inconsiderate. Yet in our desperate and homeless state immediately after the hurricane, we did it anyway. To put it mildly, they have been the most gracious hosts you could imagine.  These last several months have been infinitely easier than they had the potential to be because of our wonderful family.

In no particular order, here are some of the things we will miss most about these last 5 months:

1. The drawer of McDonald's toys. My aunt Carol has an entire drawer in the kitchen dedicated to little McDonald's Happy Meal toys and other little trinkets. I think it took Dane and Aidan about 3.7 seconds to discover the drawer, and it has served as a wonderful "find something to do while I finish making your dinner" diversion.

2. Chocolate milk and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And Little Debbie snacks. And other goodies that I love but don't buy when I go shopping. The boys are going to have a rude awakening when they do back to drinking straight white milk without the splash of chocolate they have become used to. Yummy!

3. My cousin Jonathan ("Jonpin" to Aidan) and the look on his face when he watched Dane and Aidan run around the living room jumping and falling on the ottoman one night. It was a great look.

4. NCIS. My uncle Tom is an enabler to my addiction to this show. It's on 3+ times a day in syndication here, and the first episode starts during the kids' nap time. I'm sure there are more productive things I could be doing during nap time, but Gibbs and the team manage to lure me in more often than not.

5. No one decorates a house for Christmas like my aunt Carol. No one. It was so pretty and festive, I missed "being home" a lot less than I thought I would this past Christmas. Because my house is never that pretty or festive for Christmas. I'm lucky to get the tree up and decorated. The boys are at this perfect age where they were enthralled by All Things Christmas, and managed to break only a couple of things. Also, I wrapped all of my gifts and most of the gifts for my aunt, which I love doing, and I got to set up a "gift wrapping room", complete with a table for wrapping and a Christmassy movie playing. I wish I had a permanent gift wrapping room.

6. The boys playing the "newspaper game" with my uncle Tom. This is an ingenious game where the boys run around the room and my uncle, from the safety of his chair, hits them with newspaper rolled into a ball. Dane and Aidan LOVE this game, and could play if for hours. There's lots of squealing and attempts at evasive maneuvers, and shouts of "betcha can't hit me again".

7. Carol the cleaning lady (not Carol the Aunt). She came every other week. I will miss her.

8. The walking trails. In my aunt and uncle's neighborhood, miles of walking trails circle around in the "woods" for joggers, dog walkers, and little adventure seekers. It's a safe place for them to walk, run, ride scooters, and collect sticks and rocks. Dane and Aidan will miss their walking adventures.

9. My wise aunt. My aunt Carol is very very smart and the best part of our displacement has been getting the opportunity to actually get to know my family a lot better. We have lived 20 minutes away for 8 years now, and before this we saw each other perhaps a couple of evenings a year. My uncle Tom is very smart, too, he's just usually working during the day when I am at the house and craving adult conversation.

10.  The image of Aidan in my Uncle Tom's Chair.  My uncle has a Chair.  Many mornings I would wake up and find Aidan rocking back and forth in the Chair with his blankie after Tom has gone to work early.  Because he wouldn't dare occupy the Chair in Tom's presence.  But out of a dozen options of where he could choose to sit, Aidan loves to sit here.

We are moving back into our house this weekend, and it will be a transition.  One of many transitions that have taken place for our family over the last several months, between pregnancy and hurricanes.  As over-the-moon excited we are about moving back into our home, in many ways we will miss living here.

(And if anyone wants to help us move, please holla.  Because though I will be a useful unpacker, a little thing called Braxton Hicks means I won't be hauling boxes and arranging furniture this weekend.)