Topsail, the 2020 version

Back when this Covid thing started brewing, and one thing after another got canceled or closed down, I couldn't help but think to myself that if we managed to get to Topsail in June, I wouldn't care what kind of weather it was, I would be so grateful. Just to see all these faces again, it wouldn't matter if it rained all week. If it had been possible I might have bargained with somebody to make that deal, because it just felt like the world was ending.

But the thing is, human nature being what it is, when it's cold and gray and windy and rainy at the beach, and that happens day after day...it still sucks. Nobody comes to the beach to shiver in their sweats. We kept saying, "Dang 2020." I tried to maintain perspective, I really did, but I told Tim on Tuesday, "I'm struggling. I'm just craving the sun so much." It would come out of the clouds sometimes just long enough to make you thirsty for more.

I think the above picture was taken Saturday night, and that was the last time we saw blue sky until Wednesday. I think. Or maybe Tuesday night. Grace painted our nails (she always brings her collection of nail polish); the kids went to Shark Attack a few times times thanks to the adults willing to take them; a couple carloads of us took a field trip to New Bern to see our new digs; and we drank and joked and reminisced our way through the evenings.

The first time I could put on a bathing suit I flew down that wooden walkway so fast I risked a sprained ankle. It was partial sun, but I was like "I'll take it!"

I can't seem to stop myself from sharing a gazillion pictures; when I see them on the bigger screen instead of on my phone, I notice details I couldn't see before, and more to love about them. I think my eyes are starting to go. I turn 41 in a few days!

As much as I don't want to see angry clouds, they make for some good photos!

Nighttime was great for crab-hunting. The kids were all so excited to go. One night Scotty and his kids, along with Timmy, got to see a loggerhead sea turtle on her way back into the ocean after laying eggs under somebody's house. That's not something you see every day. It had a corn snake following it, which they couldn't resist catching and handling (yuck!). Scotty told us Timmy was not afraid of it whatsoever. They think the corn snake wanted an easy meal of turtle eggs, but it's like the scent of the turtle fooled him into following her away from all the eggs.

One morning the kids pulled out clumps of seaweed containing colonies of the tiniest hermit crabs we'd ever laid eyes on. They were so stinking cute! 

Mom and Dad and Grace and her family shared the unit right behind the blue umbrella; Tim and I were in the same duplex on the other side.

It's Grace's 30th birthday today. Happy birthday, Grace!

Joey was my little beach buddy. We had so much fun together.

We took our pictures on Thursday night instead of Friday, which is the last night. That was a good call. I think it's a lot easier to smile when you know you have one more day. For most of us, anyway.😜

Delaney's only three inches shorter than me now. Think she'll be as tall as me next year?

In case I get rusty and forget one day, I'll caption this with names and kids' ages left to right: Annie (11), Tim, Timmy (8), me, Delaney (12), Joe (4), Jaden (12), Scotty III (10), Faith, Scotty Jr, Roman (14), Aspen (14), Grace, Elise (4), Joey, Taj (2), Lotus (12), Mom, Damien (7), and Dad. We were missing Anna and Sophie and their families.

1000 sparklers in 5 minutes, to celebrate Roman and Little Scotty's birthdays

When we saw this on Friday afternoon, we figured our sun was done, but after some wind and a few sprinkles, it moved on. Phew.

My mom commented at one point during the week that kids might forget what they got for birthday or Christmas, but they never forget their family vacations. I know that's been true in my own life, and I think that it's true when it comes to experiences, period. That's where you get lasting memories. It's easier to foster these experiences when everybody clears their calendar and gathers in one place, and that's what makes them so memorable. But experiences can also just be the small things you barely notice at the time they're happening. Tim took a lot of trips with his family growing up, but he still talks about the time he and his dad drove all over to look at and test-drive used Mustangs. To be given the gift of someone's time, to know that just being with you is good enough for them -- that's what gives us our sense of self-worth and builds us up strong and sturdy so that some day we can turn to the task of building up another person. I heard the song "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd while sitting on the sand one day, and the lyrics encapsulate so much of what I want for my kids.

Oh take your time/ don't live too fast/ troubles will come and they will pass/ You'll find a woman and you'll find love / and don't forget, son, there is someone up above

And be a simple kind of man / Oh, be something you love and understand/ Baby be a simple kind of man/ Oh, won't you do this for me, son, if you can

On that note I want to wish a happy Father's Day to my wonderful husband, father, father-in-law, brother, brothers-in-law, all dads, and all good men serving in a fatherly role. Your hard work, love, and example are all so needed and appreciated, today and every day.

Kids' bathroom

We have had so much fun making this house our own. Well, I have to be honest and say that I've really been enjoying the end results, not so much the decisions that go into it, and very little of the work.🤣 Tim has been tackling one thing after another, and it's been consuming his evenings and weekends. Work--house--bed --repeat. At least we get to see him now that we're all living here! 

For the kids' bathroom, the wall paint (BM Pale Oak of course) was my pick, but everything else was Tim. He replaced the nondescript mirror with the framed one that we'd had hanging in the dining room of the last house. He picked the new faucet and new hardware, and only asked my input when it came to making sure the drawer and cabinet pulls matched the faucet exactly. They aren't an exact match, and I like them anyway. He painted the vanity BM Hale Navy.

In this room the Pale Oak has a lavender undertone that I think would have been impossible to achieve if we'd been trying. The picture below shows it best, I think. I wouldn't have wanted that shade anywhere else in the house, but it looks perfect here.

Annie picked the shower curtain. I think it's the cutest! Joey did not approve at first; he said he'd never take a bath in there. He seems OK with it now, and he's had a couple baths.

Delaney made this pastel cherry blossom in 5th grade (or was it 4th?), right before we got orders to Okinawa. With the bit of emotional turmoil those orders caused, I remember that this artwork was something that made me feel better about the whole thing.

The rest of the living spaces -- nothing but fresh paint and new lighting

With the current lighting situation outside, it's hard to really tell the difference in paint colors in these pictures. You'll have to take my word for it -- the new paint looks amazing. When it came to paint selection, the designer sent me an email with six options: Edgecomb Gray, Egret White, White Duck, French Canvas, Pale Oak, and Stonington Gray. The idea was to narrow it down to a few choices that I couldn't go wrong with. But sitting down to write this post, I had to verify in my email that it was only six choices; in my memory it was 10 to 15 choices, and it was completely overwhelming. I think I still had steam coming out my ears from the paint decision, by the time the lightbulb fiasco happened, and maybe my decision fatigue will make more sense in light of that. 

Pale Oak was always the frontrunner because our realtor had mentioned that that's what she had in her house, and from what I've seen of her Instagram, I like her taste. I should have just left it at that, but instead I tried to find everything I could read online about it and all the others. Almost all the pictures and reviews of Pale Oak made me feel like it was the perfect choice: it's a warm greige with a high LRV that looks good in spaces with limited natural light (our house is south-facing). But one source said that depending on the lighting or floor color, it could look "fleshy." I wondered how it would look against our red floors. One writer pointed out that there is no perfect neutral, and you must sample the color in any and every space you planned to use it. That wasn't going to happen. I was able to eliminate a couple of the options outright, because I didn't like the pictures I found on the Internet. In the end it came down to Pale Oak and Edgecomb Gray. I picked Pale Oak and just prayed that it wouldn't end up looking weird anywhere.

Well, I couldn't have been more pleased with the result. Pale Oak is kind of a magical color in my opinion, because it changes throughout the day, and from one room to another. I love all the iterations I've seen in my house so far. When it's a little darker I see more of the gray, and sometimes when it's brighter it's a soft off-white. I fell in love with it and wanted it in every room. Tim got sick of it rather quickly, but I couldn't understand why, because it's NOT the same thing everywhere you use it. In fact, he painted the kids' bathroom with it, and it was such a delightful surprise the way it ended up looking in there. I'll show you another day. I think he just got tired of going back to the counter at Lowe's and asking for the same thing multiple days in a row because he kept underestimating how much he'd need.

After choosing a color for the majority of the house, the dining room color was an easy decision. Again, I was given a handful of options, but I think those other options were a formality, because Hale Navy was the only one that stood out to us. We loved how it turned out, and you'll be seeing it in a couple other rooms of this house.

Besides new paint, we replaced all the old "bug catcher" light fixtures with new ones in the kitchen, dining room and entry. The process was the same, being given a handful of options and either choosing one or asking for more. I think I/we asked for more options for the kitchen. When the eat-in kitchen fixture arrived, I was taken aback by the size of the box. The image I'd seen had not prepared me for the size of the thing. I do not think I would have chosen something that big if I'd seen it in person, like in a store; but I love what a statement it makes in there. It casts such pretty shadows on the wall too.

The kitchen will get extensive updating in the future, but for now we just removed the big pendant lights and put in new recessed lighting. It was very dim and dark before, so we are happy with how the changes have brightened it up. 

More to come! 

The first week (and a living area before and after)

Ahh, it is so good to finally be moved in! We are all unpacked, nearly every box gone, and this house is now our home.

There's Willow, surveying her new kingdom. The porch is my favorite place to be, and I waste way too much time there.

The living room project was completed with maybe a day to spare. I think it turned out to be a little more of a challenge than the designer or her contractor had anticipated. But it got done, and now those shelves are full of our mementos. We are very pleased with how it turned out. Here are a few pictures of before:

We had a few issues with this space, which almost made us walk away from this house a couple times. At one point I said to Tim that we needed to just keep looking and quit trying to force a round peg into a square hole. We had looked a few times and kept finding the same problems. Tim was very drawn to it, and there were a lot of things about it we both liked, but I really just wanted to find THE house. The one that doesn't make us scratch our heads and go maybe if this was this way, or that was that way, and so on.

It's hard to tell from the pictures, but the layout of this living room presented a real conundrum for us. This was where we would be sitting down for Netflix and footrubs every night, but we could only set up the furniture so far back without running into that bar. We needed to leave adequate space to walk through between the couch and the bar. You can see the outline of the previous owners' 8 x 10 rug in the bottom photo (Brazilian cherry turns darker where the sun hits it). We set up a folding chair just inside that line and realized we'd be staring straight up at the TV over the mantel. That's been a pet peeve of ours for years, and something we were determined to avoid in a house of our own. 

Then there was that big hearth jutting out about a foot into an area already hurting for space. Above that we had those weird built-ins with the empty spaces at the top. Finally, the inadequate lighting and dark color both on the walls and ceiling, made for a very cavernous and gloomy living area.

One possibility we discussed was lowering the fireplace and making it flush with the wall. Even still, a mantel would be about "mantel-high," and we'd still be staring up at the TV, though not as far up. Another thing we considered was putting the TV in the built-ins somewhere, but it looks awkward and lopsided to me. We like fireplaces, and we really would have liked to make one work here. But let's be real, we're not staring at a fire at the end of the day (though it would have been nice to have the option!). So when the designer suggested just taking out the fireplace entirely, we had to agree with that. I love how it turned out. It's not quite finished -- the cabinets need hardware and the counter is getting stained, but I'm already so happy with it.

We had planned to mount the TV in the middle of that space, but Tim decided he didn't want to do that. Instead, he's ordered a stand that will make it a little higher.

We put our heads together with the designer and came up with a plan that included new paint, new lighting, and custom built-ins. We had talked about doing something with the floors, but decided to hold off on that. I'm glad we did because with the new paint color, I really like the floors. The color is Benjamin Moore Pale Oak. The ceilings were all painted white.

We had a bit of a hiccup when it came to the lighting. After the electrician came the first time and put in new LED lights, we turned them on that first evening and it was kind of like womp-womp. Tim and I knew we didn't like the new lights, but we weren't sure what it was about them that bothered us. At first we thought it was just the temperature -- 4000 kelvins. (I now know way more about lightbulbs than I ever thought possible. We found this article to be very helpful.) Was it too cold for a living room? we wondered. I texted my mom and siblings frantically, asking all of them what kind of kelvins they had in their houses. Would it look better when all of our stuff was in there? We were seriously confused. That first night we became convinced the kelvins were the whole problem. My mom told me her kitchen had 3000k lightbulbs, and I had admired the light in her kitchen.

2700 kelvins on the left, 4000 on the right.

The next day, after much research, Tim concluded that while the kelvins might be a problem, the lumens were a bigger problem. The room was still too dark and shadowy, and if the room isn't bright enough, it doesn't matter what temperature the light is. We spent hours swapping out and comparing light bulbs in the kitchen, and analyzing. At some point I got very stressed out and kind of flew off the handle at Tim. About light bulbs. 🤦 It's embarrassing to admit how the decision fatigue affected me. Those vaulted ceilings in the living room are high, and those LED bulbs are expensive and meant to last a lifetime, so there was a lot of pressure to get this right. I composed myself, apologized, and then he told me, "Don't worry, I've got this. I will make a decision about the lighting that we will both like." I said, "OK," and never worried about it again.

He ended up meeting with the electrician at the house and requesting four new bulbs, each with 3000 kelvins and 1200 lumens. It was a guess on his part since neither the designer nor the electrician were able to tell him how many lumens the first set of light bulbs had. This article helped him with his calculations. Whatever the case, we are happy with the end result. The electrician put in the new lights yesterday, and when I flipped the switch I said, "THIS is more like it." We're not even sure the bulbs are 1200 lumens. Tim saw a box that said 800 (but 3000 kelvins!). They're definitely brighter than what was there before, the space is now beautifully lit even at night, and that is worth the pains taken.

I share all of this here, because there was precious little to be found on the subject in blogs and social media, even all of those home improvement and design ones. I know I'm little, but maybe I can help one person.

I'll leave you with a few more photos of our first week here. I know this is the honeymoon still, but I am so happy we moved here. There is this huge group of boys here ranging in age from about 7 to 13, and they are literally an answer to prayer. You can see them outside almost any time of day, living an '80s childhood, running in and out of our backyard and others, playing hide-and-seek, baseball, and shooting one another with airsoft guns. Timmy comes in sweaty for a drink of water, and goes right back out again to play with them. We could barely get him out the door in our last neighborhood because he never had anyone to play with. 

Willow is doing very well with her invisible fence training. We were all skeptical, but she immediately got the hang of it. Today we tempted her at the flag line with family members and bacon at different times. She passed with flying colors and was rewarded with bacon and belly scratches.

And, of course, Tim has been enlisting the help of kids with this thing called yard work. I have not contributed much myself -- yet -- but I did pull a few weeds and I planted a hydrangea in the front of the house. It's a start.

Tim retires from the Marine Corps in a week, and then he has the whole summer off to spend with Delaney. She can't wait.😜

The Beach Calls

The beaches, along with their parking lots and restrooms, opened up last week, but it was a little too chilly. Yesterday had the perfect forecast, and I told Tim, "I'm sorry, I know there's so much to do at the new house, but I NEED a beach day." I thought maybe at the last minute he'd change his mind and go, but he ended up having a very productive day by himself, and I was excited to see what he'd gotten done. It's all coming along, and I'm looking forward to writing that post. His (and to a lesser extent our) evenings and weekends have been consumed these last few weeks with house projects, and the prospect of all that sand was just not enticing enough to pull him away. (He's really not a beach person, if you didn't know. I'd have felt much guiltier about going without him if he were.)

The temperature was just right, the breeze was just right, and so were the waves. I told the kids that since we had neither their father nor a lifeguard there, they were not to go in past their waists. But it was the kind of surf that's very long and shallow, so it wasn't a difficult rule to abide by. They were bodyboarding, and farther out, there were people walking around in water up to their shins. The water was too chilly for my taste, so I just sat at the edge. It was very refreshing.

I stayed until it seemed we'd reached the limit of their endurance and our food, and they were starting to get tired and cranky. I think it ended up being maybe just under three hours, and I soaked up every minute.You beach people know what I mean.

We got back home, recharged a little bit, did some laundry, cleaned up and prepared to clear out again so there could be another showing of the house we're renting for a little while longer. After over a month on the market and no activity, there have been four showings in a week. I'm confident the owners should be entertaining some offers soon. Then we had the boys put on collared shirts, and the girls and I wore sundresses because... for the first time in two months we attended Mass. It was an outdoor Mass, and we set up our lawn chairs like we were there for a concert in the park. Happy day! To be standing alongside the community of faithful again, and receiving Jesus again, was wonderful. I was so, so grateful.  

These last couple months have been...challenging, to say the least. "Challenging" is the word we use when we're trying to be positive. I like to put a positive spin on things in this space, focus on my blessings which are many, and give myself something to look back on and smile. Those things are always there, and in abundance if I'm paying attention to them. But I have to be honest to my future rose-colored glass-wearing self: being a stay-at-home mom has not been going well for me. I know that it has been wearing on all of us to be at home together day in and day out, for such a long time, with very few diversions and the pressure of "distance learning." But exacerbating that is a child of mine is non-compliant and seems to relish friction. I don't have the tools to cope because I am a person who likes to get along with others, has always wanted to get along (but mostly to be left alone, honestly), so I can't relate to the constant desire for conflict. I feel completely inept and ineffective as a parent in the face of this. I have been hurting, and have my children who've had to deal with my bad moods and frustration. We have been working hard to nurture our relationship with this child, and I've been praying for peace in our home.

All that to say, words could not possibly convey how much I needed yesterday.

P.S. Just wanted to share this because I'm so proud of Scotty and Faith, whose recent home renovation was featured in a magazine. You two can come do our kitchen next.:)