Wearing a hat inside

When the furnace breaks and you wake up in a house that is only fifty-four degrees on a morning when the frost is so thick it looks like it snowed overnight, that's a good time to wear a hat inside the house.

When someone in the house finally figures out how to wire the thermostat to jumpstart the furnace and the sweet sound of the blowers fills the air only moments before the heat iteslf arrives, that's when you'll find the dachshund staking out his place by the register under the sink. Don't step on him, he's just trying to get warm. He doesn't have a hat to wear inside.

The house does not make the home

A good friend warned us that moving is rated as one of the most stressful moments in life, ranking right up there with getting married or having a baby, but we have to disagree.  We think that's a deplorable understatement - moving seems way more stressful than marriage and childbirth combined.  It could be the monetary strain, or the physical one, or maybe it's the act of condensing one's whole life into boxes and hoping it makes the transition in tact, but we think it goes even beyond that.  We think it's less the act of moving and more the process of being between homes that elevates the stress level so greatly.  With our old house, once familiar and comfortable as an old shoe, now stripped bare and left for the taking, the new house has become our family base. But we are not yet familiar with the sights, sounds, or smells of the new house, and in some ways our first week here has felt a little displacing, like being on vacation and expecting go home any day now.  Glimpsing our possessions settled into their new arrangements has been unsettling as well - familiar but in the wrong context, like seeing a face at church that you had previously known only at work.  We truly love our new house - we love the layout, the colors, the deck, the neighborhood, the location - but it will take some time for it to fully become our home.  In the meanwhile we find ourselves marveling at and enjoying the new (the open kitchen, the larger bedrooms, the wood floors), but clinging to the old (the dogs and cats in the same old sunshine, our usual coffee in our usual mugs, Calvin's same toys on the same shelves, and hey - we painted his new bedroom to match the old) while we go through the seemingly unending process of unpacking our familiars.  We'll know we've come to an end point when Calvin no longer exclaims "new house" whenever we pull into the driveway.

More pictures in the New House Process alubm. 

The move is going well.

We're in the new house and absorbed in the process of unpacking, which means we'll have pictures to share very soon.

When is a chore not really a chore?

When it's a fun, of course.  We've started including Calvin in several chores around the house:  aside from picking up his toys he also helps us load the dryer, carry dirty clothing to the laundry room, and unload the dishwasher, among other things.  We're not fooling ourselves here - we know this will only last until he realizes that these things are "chores," but we figured it couldn't hurt to introduce the idea of helping early.  His favorite chore, though, is one that he just picked up on his own - feeding the dogs.  At the mere mention of feeding time he dutifully picks up Moose's mini-dog dish, trots over to the garage door for one of us to fill it, then marches right back and plops it down, after which he invariably seems to get disappointed that the dog is eating his hard work.  We enjoy it every time.

Did you know....

that if you look hard enough you can find cats just about anywhere?