My hands are cracked and bleeding.

That’s what happens when you take a sick day and spend it with one snarfly kid and one perfectly healthy kid. In an attempt to keep the healthy one, well, healthy I washed my hands countless times today. So often in fact that the very touch of water now makes them burn and sting.

Other than his runny nose, however, Baby E is back to normal. He took a tumble down the three stairs into our kitchen this morning. Well, more like one and a half stairs. As soon as I saw him falling the lightning fast reflexes of mommy instinct caught him before he slammed his head into the wall or floor. It shook him up a bit, but he was fine.

We had a lazy day today, watching more movies than I care to relate. We also built towers out of plastic dinosaurs and played with toy cars. I’ve said it before, playing with boys is so different than playing with girls.   When C got home from school we had dinner and made a craft.

So all in all, a pretty nondescript day, which is totally fine by me.

 

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary in our townhouse. We are now a year removed from the farmhouse and I can now look back on our experiences there with some perspective.

1- The winters were brutally cold. With minimal baseboard heaters we relied on space heaters most of the winter, which was both inefficient and expensive. On particularly cold nights the kids would have a heater running in their room and Tim and I would camp in the living room with another heater. At least for those hours we were warm. When we ventured into other parts of the house, it was so cold. I remember cooking breakfast in the dead of winter and seeing my breath.

2- The lack of power outlets. Each room in the farm house had one power outlet. Except the living room. It had two. And the kitchen had three! The best part was that most of the power outlets were linked to the same breaker. Want to watch tv in the living room, run a heater in the kids’ bedroom and have the bathroom light on? No Way! We became experts at knowing exactly how many things we could run at once and what we had to turn off in one room to enter another.

3- We had an incredible yard! I really really miss the yard at the farm house. We had an amazing hill that the kids would sled down. During the summer they would get their Cozy Coup cars and line them side by side, jump in, and race down the hill to see who could go the farthest and fastest.

4- I had a garden. I desperately miss my garden. I can’t say I was good at gardening, but I certainly enjoyed it.

5- Privacy. Our house wasn’t close to anything. It was at the end of a long drive and it afforded us a lot of seclusion. I didn’t have to worry about letting my kids out back to play while I was cooking dinner.

6- Taking walks. Going for walks at the farmhouse was one of my favorite pastimes. I loved that the kids could run along the unpaved road. They loved feeding the lion statue at the end of Myrtle’s driveway (Yes, our 90+ year old neighbor was named Myrtle.) We walked a lot and I miss that!

7- The bugs. I have never lived in a house that had so many bugs! Seriously, we had quite the stinkbug infestation one year. It was disgusting. Every night before bed, Tim and I would hunt down the stinkbugs so that I could fall asleep. I won’t tell you the double digit number we got to one night!

8- The critters. I grew up in an old farmhouse so I wasn’t surprised that occasionally we would get mice. Especially after our kitty died. One day Tim put out some traps, only to catch a mole!! Ugh! And then there was that time I found a snake in our kitchen! Gah!

9- My children still miss it. When we lived at the farmhouse I saw all its bumps and bruises, but at the same time I appreciated what it represented- an opportunity for our family to save some money to one day buy our own house (which we did.) And when we left, I didn’t look back. But for my kids, it was truly their home and they never saw its disadvantages. They never noticed all the things about it that drove me crazy. To them it was just home. Even a year later, Big E will say with longing in his voice, “I miss the farmhouse.” C will go on and on about how beautiful her room was, even though it really wasn’t and it pales in comparison to her current room. As for me, there are pieces of it that I miss, (the garden, the walks, the yard) but as for the house itself, it makes me all the more grateful for the blessing that is our townhouse!

Happy one year anniversary my dear family!