The house post

Patience is a virtue. But it is not my virtue. I look at my friends who are taking their sweet time decorating their beautiful homes. They not only have impeccable taste and a vision to match, they have the patience to wait until they find exactly what they are looking for… well find and can afford exactly what they are looking for.

Not me. I like to get things done bam. bam. bam. And be done with it. Which is kind of limiting when it comes to what I can find and what I can afford. Go figure. 

I have moments where I wonder if I should have waited to buy a good quality pottery barn rug instead of a beautiful statement rug from Joss and Main that sheds like a MoFo. But most of the time I am just happy to be in a house that looks cute and is coming together… even if it's not full of heirloom pieces. 

My one splurge, a gorgeous leather sectional that feels like buttuh. I figure with one piece of furniture so obviously nice, people may just assume that my other stuff is quality as well. 

There's still painting to be done and I want to add some fun wall paper in a few rooms. Our light fixtures need to be changed. And we don't own any window treatments yet… not a one… hello neighbors! But I've made some serious progress and now I've got the house to a point that I'm satisfied to be patient with the rest.

Anyway, here's some pics of the main floor. 

This is a terrible pic of the entryway, but it is the only one I could manage to get. It's super vaulted, but not super spacious. The opening to the right of the front door leads to a hallway with a coat closet,  powder room and exit to the one car garage.

Immediately to the left of the entry is the stair landing--one of my favorite spots in the house (more of it later)

And to the right is a little, somewhat awkwardly shaped room that was designed to be a formal dining room, but we decided to use as sitting room (the home teacher room) because our kitchen is big enough for our dining table and we're not really formal dining kind of people anyway.

There's a little doorway on the left side of the room that leads through a butler's pantry to the kitchen.

If you continue down the hallway you land in our family room. 

That's the carpet that I was referring to. But doesn't it look more expensive with such a nice couch on it? It was hard to find a good angle to take a decent picture, so you'll have to settle for several pictures taken from not so great angles. Collectively, they give you the gist of it.  

The family room opens up to our kitchen (as you can see). 

To have a fireplace in my kitchen is totally dreamy. My other favorite feature of the kitchen is the instant hot water… hot chocolate has never been easier to make--a sweet consolation on a cold Colorado morning.

Off of the kitchen we have a little entryway/mudroom that leads to our laundry room, another coat closet and the double garage.

Circling back to the stair landing…. I wanted it to be the perfect spot to curl up with a good book. Mission accomplished. :)

I'm not ready to do a reveal of the upstairs yet and I haven't gotten around to taking pics of the basement yet, but I did want to post pics of one last room…. 

It's the guest room. And it needs to be painted. But it is otherwise ready for guests. And it has its own bathroom. So if you're thinking about coming and wondering if we're ready… Come! We're ready!

Kai's 4th Birthday

Our first full day in Colorado also happened to be Kai's 4th birthday. It was chaotic, but we tried to make the day special. One of our favorite Bay Area families moved to Colorado Springs a year or so ago. So I drove the boys down to meet up with them and go to a kids indoor play place with them.

Kai had one request during our house hunt, that we find a house with a giant trampoline. So it was a top priority to find a backyard big enough and level enough to accommodate his request. We decided to splurge and get him the trampoline for his birthday.

We ate dinner at a local bbq joint

And topped the night off with cake, what else?

Kai made sure that all the candles were accounted for

 
Pappa did the honors

 Kai was delighted by the colored flames

Kai's fantastic grandparents not only came up with the perfect presents for Kai, they gave me reasons to get the boys out of the hotel and off doing something fun. Yo's parents asked if we could pick out a present on their behalf, so we decided to let Kai choose his own present. I found a cute toy store in the greater Denver area online and headed there with the boys not realizing it was more than an hour away....Oh well! I had nothing if not time to kill. So we made a whole morning of it.

The store was completely charming and had a huge selection of toys. Kai, of course, beelined to the garbage trucks. He has a whole fleet of them at home and continues to "love" them even though he rarely, if ever, plays with them these days. It took some persuading, but I convinced him to consider some other options. After handling virtually every toy in the store, he finally settled on a Bruder Bulldozer. A wise choice.

The next day we headed down to the Parker post office to pick-up his present from my parents. He could hardly contain his excitement so I let him open his present and card on the post office lawn.

He got this sweet books about sharks that he hasn't let go of since and a gift card for Build-A-Bear

Another excuse to get out of the hotel...hurray!

Kai had a blast picking out and "building" his bear. He went with a Koala with long eye lashes and rainbow-colored paws. He named it, "Kai".

I tried to talk him into getting it with sounds or scents or a cute little outfit, but he wasn't interested in any of it...which left just enough money for Ari to get a puppy dog.

Kai's birthday couldn't have come at a more chaotic time. But I figure he's just 4. And 4 year olds are resilient. Heck, he may not even remember this birthday...or he might remember this birthday more than most because of all the reasons that made it so chaotic. But I hope through the chaos Kai was able to feel just how much his mommy and pappa love him.

I think the move has made me realize what a good little buddy Kai has become to me in his ripe old age. He is funny and sweet and fun to talk to and just a little psychotic (he is 4). I am so grateful that I have his constant chatter and companionship to fill my days.

Love you Kai Kai!

Goodbye California

I thought that I would be able to get the closure I needed before leaving California behind. After all, we knew the move to Colorado was probable for months before it happened. But somehow our last months in California flew by in chaotic fashion. It was an anticlimactic whirlwind to tell you the truth. On the one hand, I became consumed with finding the house and preparing for the move. And when I finally felt all had been settled and I just wanted to enjoy my time with friends, I discovered that with the arrival of fall, the start of a new school year, the announcement of many a pregnancy, etc., my friends were just as busy and overwhelmed as I was, which did not leave a lot of time for just hanging out. To complicate matters, Yo was spending his weekdays in Colorado so I was also on lockdown, stuck at home in the evenings as a part-time single mom.

Today I finally got around to transferring photos from our camera to the computer and realized looking at them, that we did manage to pack some good memories into our last weeks in California, even if they feel like a distant blur in my mind.

As things worked out, my birthday fell on the weekend (thank the good Lord) so Yo was able to be home to celebrate. We took advantage of the Bay Area's plethora of amazing restaurants and checked out a new place in Willow Glen that was amazing. (I'll have to get back to you with the name...seriously it's all a blur, but the food was great.)

The next day we celebrated with the boys over some cake. (Sorry for the blurry phone pic.)

My wise husband gave me cash. Honestly, guilt-free spending money is the best. I ended up using it to buy two warm coats.... something my California wardrobe was (not surprisingly) lacking.

We also stayed in Sunnyvale long enough to celebrate one last Halloween. The hunt for the prefect Halloween costume was more difficult this year. Turns out 3 year olds have opinions on such matters.

When I first asked Kai what he wanted to dress up as he told me, "a garbage truck," as in the actual truck. Lo and behold, there were no garbage truck costumes to be found. His second choice was an airplane…not the pilot…the plane. Again we came up dry. His third choice was a velociraptor and he was not about to settle for a triceratops or t-rex. It was velociraptor or bust. When we also struck out on "humpback whale" (his likes are very specific, are they not?) I thought we our costume search was hopeless, but out of no where Kai said, "I could go as Peter Pan."

Done.

Before he could change his mind I ordered a costume. And I'm so glad he did. He made the cutest little Peter Pan in all the land.

Here is the night of our ward Halloween party:

 And here is before heading out trick-or-treating with Pappa and some friends:

Ari was the perfect size to wear Kai's first Halloween costume.... a personal favorite that I have been looking forward to using again. I thought that no kid in the world could make a cuter lion than Kai did.... but Ari has a brand of cuteness that is all his own and it totally rivals Kai's.

And here is Ari Halloween night. Not a great shot of him, but doesn't Yo look handsome?

I knew that we would be moving close to Kai's birthday and kept debating whether I should try to throw him a party before we left or not, but October is such a busy month for everyone and I just didn't have the energy or time to pull something together. But when our sweet friends the Parkes volunteered to throw us a going away party, I thought, why not call it a birthday party instead. It was less depressing that way and still gave us the excuse to get together with our friends before leaving town. And for Kai, it really did feel like the perfect birthday party. His friends were there to play and he got to blow out candles on a cake.

Some friends were even nice enough to bring Kai presents... even though I think most people caught onto the fact that I was avoiding calling our going away party a going away party.

Kai loved all his presents, but was especially excited about this garbage truck. It belonged to his friends Graham and Liam (known as Gram and Lam in our house). They generously gave it to Kai as a remembrance of them, knowing that this was Kai's favorite toy to play with anytime he visited the Aufdermauer's home.

After some convincing, Yo agreed to take some time off of work the week of our move. I don't know how I would have managed without having him home. It also gave Yo a chance to have one last guys' night out with some of his good friends.

I also managed to get my closest girl friends together for a little dinner excursion. But once again didn't take any pictures. (Maybe it's a symptom of my denial of having to leave such good friends.)

Yo's company paid for a full service move. It was a new experience for us. Packing day arrived and before I knew what was happening, a crew of 8 burly men were in every corner of our house chucking stuff into boxes. I quickly decided that there was no point in me and the kids being there. We just felt in the way and our belongings were disappearing so quickly, there was no place for us to hide and nothing for the kids to do. So I spent the better part of the next 2 days in my car, carting the kids from place to place, and driving in circles while Ari napped.

It made for some long days. But it was probably better than being around the house where I would undoubtedly have been freaking out about how our stuff was being packed. (Like how my wedding dress was thrown in a box with Yo's car oil and other miscellaneous stuff from our garage.) But whatever... I'm over it.

After the first day of packing, I headed home with the kids (we decided to spend one last night at our house figuring it would be more convenient than being in a hotel and to get a jump start on the cleaning we had to do) only to discover that the movers had packed up every last one of our lamps. And since we didn't have overhead lighting in the majority of our rooms, that left us trying to navigate through the house amongst piles of boxes by the dim light of our iphones. There was nothing convenient about it.... and not a lick of cleaning got done--did I also mention that they also packed up all of our cleaning supplies?

The next day the packers took longer than expected to wrap up which left Yo and me with 10 minutes of daylight to clean the house. We had 5 more minutes of cleaning in the dark before our landlord knocked on the door to do our final walk through. Awesome.

Miraculously our landlord refunded our entire security deposit, nonetheless. I credit the lack of decent lighting and Yo's powers of distraction.

I helped Yo settle the boys in at a super sketchy Motel 6 before heading over to a friends house to spend one last evening with some of my favorite gals.

I managed to keep it together while saying good bye to friend after friend.... basically by not letting myself think about the reality of leaving. But despite my stoicism, this truly was the hardest move I've ever had to make. For everything that we've loved about the Bay Area, there is something that we've hated, but the quality of the people that we were blessed to know there made it the very best place on Earth.... at least to us.

So we join the ranks of people who have left a piece of their hearts in San Francisco, but we are excited to be starting a new chapter in our lives, too. And mostly I am excited to be living in the same state as my husband again.

I am also excited to put all those frequent miles Yo racked up over the summer to good use... going back to the Bay Area sometime soon to see my dearly missed friends. :)