Yeah Hi remember me? I am Ashley and I used to post here once in a while…ya’ll remember that right? I used to write here ALL the time.
Then the 007’s got this great idea…we’ll call it let’s do a thousand home improvement projects and put our house on the market. So I haven’t had much time for the internet OR my Tivo. Which means I have a bunch of episodes of Kathy Griffin to watch, I haven’t written in forever, my inbox is overwhelming, and my Google reader is FULL of blogs to read. Blogs by actual bloggers who actually post content on their actual blog.
Wow what a concept.
It makes me feel a little out of sorts when I don’t write often. But with all of our projects and cleaning and packing it’s been hard to find the time.
Soon I hope to be able to write more often. Our house has a for sale sign in the front yard and tomorrow we will be officially on the market.
Now all I have to do is try to keep everything clean with an 8 yr old, a 21 month old, a 95 lb dog and 2 indoor/outdoor cats (one of which has kitty dreadlocks and likes to pull them out all over the house).
Ya’ll wish me luck on that.
We did pack up a TON of stuff and we rented a storage unit. Everything looks so nice and feels like everything has a place.
Why in the SAM HILL WORLD do I need all of that stuff? If I can pack it up and live without it for 6 months or so then why do we keep it around?
It’s made me realize that during this move I want to simplify. I have always been pretty good about cleaning out and getting rid of stuff but I still have needless crap in storage. So when we move I am going to be really careful about getting rid of things we are holding onto for no good reason.
So that’s what’s going on here…and I am doing a pretty good job of staying sane. Staying up too late and drinking a quart of coffee every morning. It’s all worth it.
This July it will be 4 years since we bought our house. We moved in as a family of 3 and now we are a foursome. Although I will always feel attached to this house because of the history I have here and the memories we have created here we are ready to move on.
Mainly because we want more than one bathroom and we would LURVE to have a garage. Usually we aren’t fighting for the bathroom but there are times when one of us is taking a shower and somebody needs to go poo. And no matter how much we love each other here in the 007 house we just don’t poo in front of each other. No offense to the open door poo-ers out there.
It’s just too personal. Plus we don’t have a fart fan. See now there is another reason to move. No fart fan to suck the unpleasant odors out.
Was that too much? Sorry if that was too much.
Anyway we are getting ready to put the crooked blue house up for sale. I will miss a lot of things about it. It has a great amount of charm and warmth and I feel very cozy living here. It has good light and it has all of these little built-in shelves and cabinets that I will miss. But 2 1/2 bathrooms are calling my name!!
My dad (a fabulous real estate agent if you live in Middle TN) came over and gave us a list of things we might want to do before we list the house. We have pressure washed and stained the deck, washed the windows inside and out, painted the front porch, planted landscaping in several different areas, pressure washed a bunch of other stuff and touched up some paint inside the house. The deck looks so nice without our patio furniture that I don’t want to put it back up there!
And we still have A LOT to do. There will be lots more painting and a few more things to do outside. We are also thinking about renting a storage unit to make the house look less like a toy store threw up in here. I was thinking about storing the treadmill and packing up various odds and ends to declutter and simplify moving. Plus I was thinking that it will make it easier to keep the house clean for showings. There are these two small people I live with who like to take out every toy they own at the same time.
Does anyone have any tips for selling your house with small children? Because I am pretty sure potential home buyers won’t find our Fisher Price toy selection a selling point.
So apparently it has been 2 weeks since I have posted anything. I got an email from BlogHer (my ad company) that it had been a while since I posted. OOPS! I have never gone that long without writing and actually not writing came a little too easy for me.
What’s up with that?
Well for one of those weeks the Double Oh Seven family went on vacation. We traveled down in our trusty Odyssey “Magic” to THE Redneck Riviera. Yes we vacationed in trusty ol’ Panama City, FL. We somehow managed to NOT get a picture of the 4 of us together.
Mr.007’s parents and sister met us down there and his parents generously paid for the condo we all stayed in.
In all fairness it is not as redneck as people make it out to be. I mean there ARE rednecks everywhere but there are also just regular people spending some quality time with each other at the beach. And plus I live in TN so frankly I am used to rednecks and I have become slightly desensitized.
And speaking of the beaches they are really beautiful and the water was absolutely crystal clear blueish green while we were there. We had GREAT weather and where we stayed we were pretty separated from the Senior tripping, booby flashing, girls gone wild, beer funneling Whoooers.
What is a Whoooer you might ask?
People who are riding around just for the heck of it yelling as loud as they can out of their car or truck window. They tend to make a WHOOOO! sound and this prompts other people from other cars and trucks to WHOOO! back at them in response to the aforementioned WHOOOING sound. I even saw a minvan FULL of teenage girls driving down the road with both sliding doors open. Of course someone honked loudly at the girls in the van and the only response to honking in Panama City is to WHOOOOO! as loud as you can.
If you hear a honking sound you don’t even look to see where it’s coming from. You just immediately WHOOOO! and move on to the next shot of Jose’ Quervo.
In fact once upon a time I may or may not have been a Senior tripping Whoooer. I may or may not have peirced my bellybutton in a store that sold airbrushed t-shirts and pool noodles. I have always maintained a high level of class and decorum. Yeah right.
I can freely admit that at one time I might have been somewhat of a hoodlum. I drank Zima and smoked Marlboro Lights and gasp! WHOOOED out of car windows. But now here I am at the old age of 28 and I have two small children and hoodlum’s get on my nerves. They cuss too much, they are loud and they can lay on the beach without worrying that their 8 yr old and 19 month old daughters need more sunscreen.
Oh to be 18 again…I wouldn’t go back if you paid me. Nope. I like being 28 and I like that I don’t WHOO on a regular basis. But I do smile and laugh because life is pretty darn good right now. Crazy and messy and loud and inconvenient but still really good.
I want to enter Alivia in our local newspaper’s baby photo contest. I happen to think she is the cutest baby EVER. I know, I know I am biased but whatever…so the only problem is that I can’t choose a picture. I have narrowed it down to a few and I need your help!
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I have a few favorites in this bunch but I would love to hear what you guys think. I am not indecisive at all…nope. I just value your opinions that much.
In other news we are leaving for the beach tomorrow and I have about eleventy hundred things to accomplish before tonight. I maybe probably should be productive today instead of playing on the computer.
In other other news our fabulous real estate agent (also known as my dad) is coming over tonight to discuss putting our house on the market. Last night he sent us some listings to look at online and although the idea of moving into a new house is exciting I am getting really anxious for many reasons. I am just a fretter and I fret about things and make 35 lists and call my mom and consult her about every little detail.
I am however really looking forward to going to look at bunches of houses. I mean HELLO it will be like House Hunters in my own real life! Now how fun is THAT?
OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS ME! I am crazy. I must be.
I have taken on a task that is absolutely crazy. I would much rather be in front of my Tivo watching last night’s Medium episodes. But no…I am in the process of cleaning out our attic. I started at the top ya’ll. And I knew it was going to get much much worse before it could get better.
I am way too far in to turn back now.
I am sweating, swearing and wondering why the crap I kept some of this junk. I always brag about how I like to get rid of things. How I don’t like to keep things around for ever and ever.
Yeah I guess I just forgot about some of the stuff I stashed in the attic. When I was pregnant with Alivia I went through everything in the attic and I converted it all into plastic bins. Now I ask you….WHY DID I NOT BUY CLEAR BINS!?
I labeled the bins with masking tape and a Sharpie. Well since my last nesting urge I have randomly switched things out and changed bins around and the labels are just about as INACCURATE as they can get.
Let’s just say that I am currently in attic/bin/stuffed animal/VHS hell.
Ok I have been sitting down for long enough.
Please pray for me….and my sanity during this time of intense upheaval.
Man is like a breath ; his days are like a fleeting shadow.
Psalm 144:4
That sort of puts things in perspective for me. It’s sort of like how fast 10:00 comes on Sunday night. Wasn’t it just Friday?
Wasn’t I just 17 years old checking my pager while I shifted the gears of my little gray Accord?
Didn’t I just meet Adam?
Nope…it wasn’t yesterday. It was 9 years ago this month that we started dating. By August we were pregnant with Addison. How did get she so grown up?
We got married 2 years later, pushed through life, changing jobs and houses. Addie wasn’t a baby anymore and then we added Alivia. A family of four!
Now I look around and I know we are young but I feel so old sometimes. Tired and impatient. Happiness and restlessness dance around each other. Time keeps racing by while we talk and plan and dream.
It’s all been done before but to us it’s just life.
Saturday mornings are loud. The kids are in our bed and everyone wants pancakes, the cats want to go outside and the dog is annoying. Sleep is a luxury.
I love the chaos…I hate the chaos. We are blessed and we are happy and we are irritated.
The seasons change like days and I don’t want to waste a minute. But I wish it away. Daydreaming about our next house…always wanting more. Something newer with an uncomfortable mortgage.
Then I stop. I like it here…it’s nice here…I am happy here. In this season, in this house, with this family.
If I wasn’t married to Mr.007 already…I would totally MARRY my refrigerator. The one we had to use in our rental house was OLD OLD OLD…it only had one big drawer at the bottom. It had wire shelves…I loathed that fridge! So when we bought our current house we purchased the lovely fridge in the pictures.
We bought it almost 4yrs ago and it has been very good to us. Of course now they have a bigger better model with better features. Now you can get water and ice in the door. The indispensable features for me are the freezer being on the bottom, the large deli drawer and the sheer size of the thing. We can fit a ridiculous amount of food and beverages inside. You can put TWO pizza boxes in the deli drawer! TWO PIZZA BOXES!
Now that I think about it our fridge may just be the reason I am so chubby.
Maybe if we had a smaller refrigerator we wouldn’t have so much food to eat.
OH woe to me! I can’t get rid of it I LURVE IT too much. I guess I could just develop some actual self control.
Good Friday wasn’t very good in the city of Murfreesboro, TN.
The first picture was taken literally less than a block from our house. I had the girls in the basement 15 minutes before this tornado touched the ground. That is all thanks to the early warning from our news channels and the weather radio. And let me just tell you how fun it is to be stuck in a dirt basement with an 18 month old baby. Addison just curled up and covered her ears. Alivia just didn’t understand why she had to stay on my lap.
It was traumatic to say the least but we are truly blessed to have no damage to our house. I just kept repeating in my head “God please protect us”.
I was watching the weather all morning and I knew it was going to be bad. I just didn’t expect our city to experience this much devastation.
I got all of these pictures from our county newspaper’s website.
This is a very interesting video from that day. I have never heard our news anchors sound so frantic and scared.
We were very blessed because our house has no damage and we walked away from the ordeal with nothing more than anxious minds and exhausted bodies.
My mom’s sister Karen’s house was hit badly (with her teenage son inside!)
He got into a closet downstairs and when he came out the house was torn apart.
My mom’s good friend Judy is having a 6-8 hour surgery on her spine today because of injuries from the tornado.
Here is a picture of Judy’s house…or where Judy’s house used to be. From what I hear she and her family are in good spirits. Losing the house is devastating but the fact that everyone inside survived is a miracle. Judy was inside her house with her teenage daughter and 2 other teenage girls. She threw herself on top of them! What a brave woman!
Not very far from Judy’s house a 30 yr old mom and her 9 week old baby didn’t make it. I am not sure of the details but the woman’s husband is still in critical condition. Their house is gone. I just can’t wrap my mind around it.
We are under a tornado watch in our area as I type this so please say a prayer that we don’t get any more severe weather. Our community has had enough I think!
Feeling a bit better today. The weather is awesome and the house isn’t a total disaster. I opened the windows and it just finally feels like Spring! Since it’s Wordless Wednesday here are some pics I have taken the past couple weeks.
I am all caught up in my own head lately. I have been trying to talk myself out of being in this perpetual bad mood.
I cleaned the entire house and washed every stitch of laundry. And that helped for about as long as it lasted with the dog and kids plotting against me.
The weather has been nice and that helped too. But then it rained yesterday….all day long. I want to blame someone else. I want to dodge responsibility. But it’s me. And no one can help me but me.
The bottom line is I am unhappy with myself right now. I have a plan on how to fix it but digging out of the hole I am in is harder than I thought. Especially since I have been the one throwing the dirt in on top of myself.
Don’t get me wrong I haven’t been staying in bed all day or moping around. I have good moments and I am taking care of my family. I even showered on Monday.
Kidding kidding…I have bathed every single day.
I think the weight and responsibility of life just become overwhelming sometimes. Does anyone else feel like you could use a vacation? It’s been too long since my toes were in the sand. What I wouldn’t give to have a week alone with Adam, plentiful sunshine, beach chairs and frozen margaritas. I would miss my kids but we would comeback refreshed and sporting a reddish brown freckly glow.
Ahhh bask in the fantasy….bask in it. Ok stop basking…this is my fantasy! Hey stop looking at Adam’s butt! You too Grandma!
By the way if you left me a comment or emailed me and I haven’t responded I am really sorry….I am WAY behind in my inbox!
I will get out of this funk eventually. In the meantime I am getting back to my beach fantasy. Can’t you just hear Jimmy Buffett in the background?
