The kids wrapped up their first week at the new center last Friday. I’m feeling good about it but the twins are having a very rough time adjusting, at least at drop off. Jude has been inconsolable before Kristin leaves for work in the morning if he’s anywhere but in her arms, and they’re both a mess when I leave them in their classroom. It tears my heart out to see them go through it, but I know that I have to make space for all of the transitions they’ve been going through and recognize that it’s probably a normal part of this process. The teachers swear that they have a good time once they settle in. For the most part Jonah seems to love it. He had a rough time at drop off on Friday, but I blame myself for lingering a bit too long. He’s told me that he loves his teacher and seems to really enjoy all that he does there.

Of course following the first week at a new school, two out of three of them are sick and had to stay home today. And of course that happened on a day when I had one of the most important meetings I’ve had in many months. Thank god my mom was willing to forego the work she’d intended to do today and stayed home with them while I hid out in other rooms to make phone calls. While I presented to our senior leadership team via Skype I was terrified that one of the kids would burst into the room screaming at any moment, but my mom is a miracle worker and I honestly didn’t hear a peep.

It was also Kristin’s birthday today, and my mom ended up making her cupcakes (sorry mom! I really was going to do that and I owe you big time) and picking up Chinese take out for dinner when cooking just didn’t come together in time. K took Jonah to his first swimming lesson a the Y tonight (which they bailed on halfway through, partly because he didn’t feel good and partly because he can’t stand to follow directions – apparently he told the teacher “But I already know how to swim!” Lies, but I can absolutely hear him saying it). We hope to take some sort of family weekend trip soon as a belated birthday celebration, but planning it is still firmly in the to-do column. We’re open to suggestions within a few hours drive.

On Saturday I went down to a local paint store (“a real paint store” as my dad says, as opposed to Lowe’s I guess) to sit down with a design consultant and get some help thinking through our color palette for the house. I’m SO glad that I did. We already had one color that I’m in love with, which we plan to use on a single wall in our great room, but we were really struggling to pull everything else together. I sat with a super cool woman named Sally who had the most amazing glasses (she tells me she’s had them since the ’70s) and she suggested a handful of colors that should work far better than the neutrals we’d picked out. Tomorrow I’m supposed to meet our potential flooring guy at the house so that he can measure and give us his two cents (and a quote, of course), so I’m curious to hear what he has to see about both these paint swatches and a couple of flooring ideas that we have.

On Saturday afternoon we took the kids up to Lansing to a science museum called Impression 5. I remember going there once or twice as a kid, and the kids seemed to enjoy it. We’re so accustomed to being at our museum fairly often that I keep thinking we really ought to buy a membership somewhere, but so far it’s been tough to decide. Every time we go to a new one we ask Jonah which was his favorite and it’s always the most recent one (of course). This one had a particularly fun room for ages 0-4 with a tiny water table play area that the twins loved, and some pretty cool catapults and pneumatic rocket type things.

On Sunday we checked out the Paw Paw Wine and Harvest Festival with high hopes for some family fun, but we only made it about as far as a craft fair full of gems like this one before we knew that this was not our scene, and we packed everyone up in the car. It was definitely a Michigan culture shock moment, of which we’ve had many.

We headed for the Kalamazoo Nature Center instead, which is where Jonah wanted to go all along (we really ought to listen to him on these matters). I hadn’t been in a million years and barely remembered anything besides the historic farmhouse that I always wanted to play in, but the kids LOVE it. They have this really wonderful “playground” that isn’t a playground in any typical sense, but it’s almost better because it just gives them space to explore the natural world and get dirty. Kristin commented later that she loves seeing them with dirt under their fingernails; that’s kind of why we moved, after all. The big attraction at the playground is a big water tower with lots of faucets that can be turned on, creating an instant puddle/river to splash and play in. Jude was totally enthralled. To our surprise, Vivi wasn’t into it and didn’t seem to want to get dirty, but the boys were all about it. Vivi was more into playing with gravel and sticks.

That look is exactly how she felt about the water.

This guy, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough. If you can’t tell, he is soaked. He’s basically sitting in a river, and it didn’t occur to us to bring a change of clothes. Check out that smile under his cap as he throws handfuls of sand into the water.

And that tongue sticking out as he tries to balance? I can hardly stand it.

We then headed across the street to the small farm that’s also a part of the Nature Center. It had just closed when we arrived, but they let us poke around for a bit anyway.

Notice Vivi in that picture?

Too bad I was too busy taking pictures to notice she’d fallen off and was hanging by her pants. There’s no good clean fun like playing on dangerous farm equipment. #goodparenting

It’s honestly a miracle that she hasn’t been bitten by a wild animal yet. She is fearless and almost lost a finger to a rooster twice on this visit.

I’m sure we’ll be spending a lot of time here, and I’m looking forward to all of the dirty adventures to come. There’s a festival at the farmstead in a couple of weeks and I’ll be curious to see if the kids are as into the old farm house as I was.

So young

Today is our tenth wedding anniversary (add six or so years to that to get the full total). K gave me the most beautiful cards this morning (we rarely give anniversary gifts, and this year we agreed that since we’re buying each other a house and lots of other things to go inside of it, we could skip the recommended tin items). Naturally we both wrote a bit about the journey in our cards, but K took the time to reflect on the fact that we are back in the city where we met, and the city in which we were married. I had to remind myself that we’ve never lived in Michigan during the time that we’ve been married – we lived in New York the whole time, even though we were married here. This is our first anniversary living in the place where our journey began.

K also reminded me that despite how awful things have been feeling these past few weeks, and all of the moments in which I’ve found myself saying “I don’t want to live here – I want to go back.” We have to believe that this is where we are supposed to be right now. It doesn’t feel that way, but I need to try to believe it.

My dad has been urging me to call Roberta and push her for a closing date on the house, since we foolishly signed a purchase agreement that said something along the lines of “early October.” He said that it’s because he wants to make sure that we’re able to book painters and flooring contractors immediately upon closing, but I’m fairly certain that the real reason is because he wants us out of his house as quickly as possible. I can’t say that I blame him – we want to be out of here too, but it still makes for an unpleasant living situation when you’re aware that your hosts wish that you weren’t there. So I called Roberta and she said that we can tentatively close on the 10th of October, and get painters in by the 13th. My dad then reminded us that since we’re putting in wood floors, the wood will have to sit in the space for two weeks before it can be installed. That pushes our move date back significantly later than we’d hoped, and we found ourselves feeling so despondent about the next ten+ weeks that we actually discussed breaking our contract and buying a different house. We came to our senses pretty quickly when we realized that most closings happen no sooner than 30 days out, and that we wouldn’t likely get in THAT much earlier, particularly since we didn’t have another house in mind.

Ever since we signed the contract I’ve had my sights set on Halloween in our new neighborhood: I pictured us trick-or-treating there and could imagine sitting on the front stoop handing out candy to neighborhood kids, meeting new neighbors as we go. But it’s starting to look like that’s an ambitious target date. I’m super bummed at the prospect of ten more weeks of living out of suitcases in someone else’s space. All of our coats and warm clothes are packed away in boxes in the garage of our future home, and I probably allowed that to happen because of my wishful thinking that we’d be in well before we needed them. Still, I recognize that ten more weeks in the context of ten years of marriage should be small potatoes, and that the next ten years in that house (god willing, because we never want to move again) will be worth it.

Nothing terribly story-worthy has happened this week. On Friday evening, Kristin and the kids were already downtown at the library when I was wrapping up work, so I met them and we strolled around for a bit and talked about how Kalamazoo really seems to have gotten more interesting over the years and seems to be moving in a good direction. Then today we spent a brief chunk of the day at the mall and the cognitive dissonance was almost more than I could handle. I was both hating that this might be our new reality, but also well aware that we chose this so…

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the last couple of days of the kids with trucks. Jonah was the lucky recipient of a hand-me-down John Deere Gator (those battery powered plastic trucks for toddlers) and he saw it for the first time last night and was awfully excited about it. Most of the time was spent with my parents trying to keep him from driving off of a cliff while looking anywhere but in the direction he was driving.

I’m pretty sure that he was either saying or thinking “but I’m a good driver!” We heard that a lot.

He actually wants to stop and dump the cargo bed even more than he wants to drive it.

It was a rainy morning, and about a million degrees out, so we were stuck indoors and spent some time upstairs playing with Papa Doc’s old trucks. Jonah has loved them for quite some time, but now the twins are old enough to be into it too. Jonah calls this “playing beans” because of the dry beans standing in for dirt/gravel.

Have I mentioned how much the twins love the pets? Pets are such a novelty for them. They often get down on their bellies to try to win the dogs and cat over, but it’s usually futile.