If You Give a Mouse a Cookie...

I’ve talked about this at length over the years about my “if you give a mouse a cookie” situation with Ryan. If you give Ryan a house project, he’s going to want to do more projects before you can accomplish the one initial project.

Back in 2013, we moved into a 1950s, Mid-Century Modern home. It needed a lot of love and attention… but as newly weds in our mid 20’s we knew we had all the time and energy to get it done. I adored this little 1800 sq ft bi-level. I saw all the potential, loved its unique exterior, and wanted desperately to have the outside personality match the inside. (Even if the previous owner, decided it should be “tuscan villa inspired”.)

We took the keys in June, in the thick of Wedding season. Right away we got to work making my home office what we wanted. Ikea Cabinets, tantalizing teal walls, new lighting. As a Wedding photographer, I needed a nice, happy space to spend the majority of my days as I edited thousands of photos. By August, I was begging him to let me paint the living room. I had enough of the butter yellow walls… Something needed to change. “I just want to paint the Living room,” I told him, holding back tears. “Please, it’s killing my soul after living in apartments with white walls for the past 3 years… I need color.”

He stared at me for a few minutes, watching him process through all the things that need to be done before he gave me the green light to start painting.

“If we’re going to paint the walls, we should paint the ceiling first. If we are going to paint the ceiling, we should add the recessed lighting we want first, so we will need to cut a long strip across the ceiling in order to run the wiring. While we have the ceiling open, we should also run the lighting into the kitchen too. If we are going to do the lighting in the kitchen, we should fix the drain in the upstairs bathroom, while the ceiling is open. And If we are going to have all this stuff ripped up, we might as well rip up the carpet and change the flooring to hardwood like we wanted.”

Trusting the man I married, I said okay… Let’s do it. His brain works very different than mine, so I trusted that he knew what would be best. (Spoiler alert: he did, and usually does)

So on our first wedding anniversary, that’s what we did. We started by cutting a massive hole in our ceiling. In between photographing weddings, Ryan doing 3 home inspections per day, and the many trips to Traverse City… we tried to do the work necessary to make our vision a reality. While also not making ourselves broke in the process. Materials cost money, flooring is expensive, and new furniture to match our “mid-mod vibe” wasn’t cheap.

Doubt started to creep in, and somewhere around that time, we sold our old couch and other furniture while we paid cash for our new pieces and waited for their delivery.

We cut the hole. We fixed the drain. We added the lighting in the kitchen. We covered everything in plastic, making our house look like a Dexter Kill room. We ordered take out, grilled our dinners outside, always wore shoes in the house, as it was ripped up like this for MONTHS.

Somewhere around November, we discovered I was pregnant. That lit a fire for sure, especially because I was so sick those first few months of pregnancy, I was ZERO HELP. We starting paying my youngest brother to come over and help with the work, in order to expedite the process. Almost 4 months to the date, the Aquatint, by Sherwin Williams wall paint I had picked out for the living room finally went on the walls. While we waited for our new couch to be delivered, a queen size air mattress was how we watched TV in our living room.

By Christmas, we were feeling a little more normal, and could see the light at the end of the tunnel, at least at the end of the living/kitchen lighting and painting renovation tunnel. The custom couch we had picked out from a local furniture store and the Crate & Barrel entertainment center & coffee table had all been delivered. The lights were all in, the hole in the ceiling was closed up, the ceiling was painted, the drain in our upstairs shower was finally draining better. We felt like we could rest for a second, before we had to start the next project… A baby Nursery!

This was our FIRST big house renovation as a married couple. It tried us in many ways, but in the end, I learned to trust my husband and his beautiful mind. Where I see all the bright colors and fun decor choices, he sees the logistics and all the work that goes into that. Even if the process makes us both crazy, we are both so appreciative of each other and how well we work as a team. (even as I type this, he’s texting me photos of faucets and fixtures he likes and needs my stamp of artistic approval on).

Lesson: If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk to go with it. If you give Ryan a house project, he’s going to give you a coordinating project that needs to get done prior to the completion of the initial project… but it will all be worth it.

Still Distracted. And a House Update

I’m coming to realize that no matter how hard I try, if I don’t direct my focus to the right things, I’m going to always be DISTRACTED. Whether I’m being distracted by the noise of social media, the noise of podcasts, audiobooks, games on my phone, or the constant stream of anxious thoughts that flow through my brain on a daily basis… if I’m not directing my focus to that which I need to be prioritizing… I will get lost. When a thought crosses my mind while cleaning the kitchen and I pick up my phone to finish that thought, and black out and realize I was just sitting at the kitchen island perusing amazon instead of adding the item to my grocery list like I had intended. Sure, maybe my social media screen time has gone to zero, but Pinterest, text messages, email, amazon and mindless games have more than made up for it.

A little Life update: We have been thrust, face first, into a bathroom renovation. Sometime around October, we realized that the floor around our shower, in the primary on-suite bathroom, was starting to bow. We have lived in this house for over 4 years now, we are clean and responsible humans, not allowing massive amounts of water to pour on the floor after showers. Heck, Ryan is one of the cleanest people I know. (which is why I knew right away that I would marry that man, and raise babies with him.) Pretty sure I’m the messy one in this relationship, and even then I’m actually very clean. (Not neurotically so, but you know… it’s organized chaos).

Sorry, I digress. Back to the bathroom. We noticed that the granite slab that separates the shower from the vinyl flooring had a hairline crack in it. And overtime, water was slowly trickling down onto the subfloor and keeping it water logged, thus making it BOW. Well Shoot. With Christmas quickly approaching, family coming to visit and Ryan’s travel schedule for work… We just kept putting it off, knowing it was a ticking time bomb.

Boom.

About a month ago, we decided to tape off our bathroom, move everything out of there and start figuring out what the next steps would be to deal with this problem. Talked to home insurance adjusters, etc. As Ryan peeled back vinyl floor tiles to assess the damage, it became painfully obvious that we weren’t going to be able to simply replace the floor and be on our way. Ripping out subfloor, revealed a leaking shower drain, meaning we would need to rip out the tile in the shower.

And you know what that means. All the perfect pieces for an “If you give a mouse a cookie” situation. <if you’ve been around for any length of time, you’ll understand this reference> [or read this blog post] Could we rip out the shower, and replace it with the same brown tiles, and granite step and be on our way? Sure. This bathroom was only redone in 2017, so it wasn’t that old, we could probably find similar tile to match… but do we LIKE that tile? Not really. Tile costs money. And so begins our story…

If you’re going to replace tile, you might as well choOse tile you actually really like.

Let me preface this by saying, when we bought this house, I really liked the idea of having a tile bathroom with glass shower doors. When I saw the bathroom in question on the listing I said “That’s a nice bathroom. Not my personal style, or what I would pick, but really really nice.” And that’s how the past 4 years have gone. I love my bathroom, it’s bright, it’s clean and I feel like a complete spoiled brat to have it attached to my bedroom. After living in a house with only one full bathroom as a family of 5, moving to a home with 3.5 bathrooms felt like we won the lottery.

Welp. Here we are. The further we dug, the more we realized things were not done right. And if you know my husband… You know it needs to be done right. So welcome to my current anxiety spiral...

…The bathroom renovation I wasn’t mentally prepared to start. But as my sister in law reminded me, a kitchen renovation was thrust on us at our old house, and it resulted in an AMAZING kitchen in the end. A fridge leaked, turned a new kitchen floor into a mold and asbestos discovery, quarantined from our house/kitchen for months, everything was gutted, and over the course of a year we got a beautiful kitchen out of it. Honestly, the kitchen wasn’t finished until a few days before we listed it to sell… but minor details.

It’s amazing what a few new cabinets, new doors, hardware and paint can do to liven up a kitchen. Gosh I miss that kitchen. I almost miss the simplicity of life in Midland. I definitely miss being close to family. I miss the ease at which I could clean this whole house in a day. I miss the littleness of my babies when we lived here. Life was so different. Granted, it was towards the tail end of the ‘pandemic’ when we moved, and life was just… different like I said. I can’t help but look back at these photos and have my heart yearn to go back in time just for a little bit. If anything, just to be this younger mama, with squishy littles to snuggle.

Okay, until next time.

Welcome to My New "Home"

HI! Welcome to my little corner of the internet, and where I plan to hang out for the next 40 days, and maybe <hopefully> longer into the future! I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… I’m not sure if blogging is dead, but I’m not going to start over on Substack when I already have and pay for this site. I try every few months to resurrect this venture, with every intent to make it a habit, but alas, after a few days I forget and move on.

I’m hoping this time will be different, seeing as I won’t be sharing on Social Media. Can you believe it? I’m actually doing it. Giving up social media for Lent. I know this seems laughable to some, because people do it all the time, or (gasp) don’t even use social media in the first place <ie. my husband>. But for this girl who has been addicted to Instagram since 2011… that’s kind of a big deal.

I thought about this as I sat on a balcony in Miami last week, that maybe THIS would be the year I actually attempt this. Over the past 37 days I’ve been “bricking” my phone. Are you confused? Allow me to explain. There is a device, called a brick that you set it up on your phone to lock out certain apps at certain times of the day, and the only way to “unbrick” it is to physically go to the device and tap your phone to it. I know, there are ways to do this with the screen time settings on your phone, and I’ve tried that before but I didn’t have the willpower to NOT “allow access” after my time limit had passed. “Just a few more minutes” I’d tell myself and then mindlessly scroll for another few hours. My screen time usage was embarrassing, and I knew once I started hiding the truth about it from my husband that it was becoming a problem. Tasks weren’t getting done. Dinner wasn’t getting made. My level of annoyance and agitation went sky high. All the warning signs were there. I’d rather check out of my life and allow the thoughts, opinions & lives of other people to fill my mind and my day.

This isn’t meant to be an ad for Brick, but I can’t even begin to tell you, those first couple days were interesting. I busied myself with stuff I needed to get done, laundry, cleaning, schoolwork with the kids. But then something amazing happened. I realized missing out on other peoples lives, their posts, reels and stories, meant I was being fully present in my own. We started doing fun projects again, I was playing with them, looking them in the eyes, snuggling on the couch (undistracted). I learned a new hobby. I sat in the silence, or as the gen z kids are calling it “Raw-dogging” or not filling moments of downtime with screen time. You know, like we did in the 90’s <gasp>. (Also, raw dogging means something else if you grew up in the 80s & 90s… just saying)

Let’s break this down and do the math. I’ve been bricking for the past 37 days, that’s 888 hours. Of those 888 hours, I’ve had social media turned off for the past 789 hours. Allowing for 99 hours of social media use. That just means it was available on my phone, not that I was actually on it. But let’s just say hypothetically, I did use it, that would be 2.7 hours a day of social media use. Which, full disclosure, is EXPONENTIALLY LESS than what I was ACTUALLY spending on my phone before.

I used to sit a let reels and videos play as I cooked dinner, got ready in the morning, sat on the couch with my kids, hell, I even would watch stuff while I was attempting to do school with my kids. And as I sit here and try to recall the content of what was in the videos or clips I watched, my mind is blank. I can’t remember. I wasted precious memories with my kids, in order to watch clips that I can’t even recall now. Was it worth it?

I know you might say I’m being too hard on myself, and to give myself grace. Yeah. I’ve told myself this as well. That’s just what people do these days, fill voids with their phones. But I challenge you, put the phone down, go for a walk, touch grass. The drama of the news, politics, other peoples lives will still be there whether you see it in real time or not. And if things are THAT important, someone else will let you know. (like finding out that James Van Der Beek died).

Okay, off my soapbox. But I’m going back. Back to updating my life, like I did back in 2006-2009. IF you made it this far, thank you. If you’re going to be reading and keeping updated with our lives, won’t you be so kind as to engage with likes and comments. Until next time! <3

Every Day is the "BEST DAY EVER"

I know it’s cliche to say that my children teach me every day how to be a better person, but the statement is true. Motherhood, for me, has been one never ending lesson in self improvement. To put it bluntly, I’m an anti-social, impatient, type-A, control freak, who hates change, thrives on schedules and routines, and likes to have fun, but only if it’s in the time frame I permit. I’m going to go hide now, because I also don’t like showing vulnerability. But kids, man… kids will change you quick.

My children, despite the Homeschool stereotype, are extremely social kids. Everyone is good and wonderful in their eyes. There’s always new possibilities to make friends around every corner. We joined a nature school co-op this year, after 4 years of avoiding them. Every Friday is the “BEST DAY EVER” because they have the freedom to play and learn with 30 other homeschool families. It’s been a blessing in disguise, even though I really questioned myself for signing up.

If I’m being honest, since we’ve moved… I struggle putting myself in situations I know might be uncomfortable. Meeting new people? Uncomfortable. Spending time in nature, no matter the weather or elements? Uncomfortable. Allowing my kids the freedom to run through the woods, play in streams, and climb big hills, with the chance of getting hurt or dirty? UNCOMFORTABLE. But for my kids? It’s the BEST DAY EVER. Each time we go, they make new friends, tackle new experiences, gain a little more independence and subsequently gain a little more confidence.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a Helicopter mom. I’m not trying to stunt my kids, but protecting their souls is my primary goal… and this world feels wild, more wild than I remember it being as a child. I know, as soon as you start talking about the evils of this world, or the things you’re trying to protect you kids from, you become some type of “Worldly Hateful diagnosis”. If you say it’s for Religious reasons, it’s even worse. But I’m a Catholic. A traditional one at that. Assume what you will, but I’m raising my children in the faith, teaching them to love their neighbors, love their enemies, and to use discernment when encountering new situations.

“By their fruits you shall know them”

— Matthew 7:16

All this to say, I want to see the world, the way my kids see it. Every day is some new adventure to have, a new book to read, something new to learn, new friends to make, a beautiful sunset to see. They don’t just see the world with rose colored glasses, they see it with Tetrachromatic vision, with hundreds of millions of extraordinary colors and shades. It’s beautiful and complex, but rare in this pessimistic world.

I could tell you how my kids teach me about patience, or going with the flow of the day, or even accepting the things I cannot change… but hearing them claim “best day ever” over multiple days each week, makes me question my ideal “Best day Ever”. Spending time with neighbors, hikes with friends, shopping at cool stores, seeing beautiful sunsets, vacation in Traverse City, time spent with cousins, playing tennis, family bike rides. All of those situations and more, warrant the title of BEST DAY EVER, and that makes my heart swell.