Mom, can I.......?

I love these phone calls.  Mom, can I substitute chicken broth for vegetable broth?  Mom, I'm making pancakes and I don't have any buttermilk.  What can I use instead?  Mom, how do you make meatloaf?

These are the best phone calls in the world to me.  My kids are grown.  They are married and have their own kids.  I thought it was going to be hard when they finally fled the nest.  Some days it is.  I was worried I would feel like my kids didn't need me anymore.  What would I do? 

I married into a ready made family.  Insta-mom.  My world was flipped upside down and inside out almost overnight.  All of a sudden, I had these two little people who I was responsible for (along with their father).  Their lives were changed just as much as mine.   I would love to say it was easy.  It wasn't.  I had this picture of what life with children was supposed to be.  Ribbons, bows, baking and sewing.  Yeah, no.  It was more like duct tape and Elmer's glue.  Oh, I baked, and sewed, and tried to make the fairy tale in my mind a reality.  Looking back, I think I tried too hard. 

Now, when my kids say that they are just trying to be like me when they were young, I want to shake them by their shoulders and tell them to stop.  I had it all wrong.  Don't be like me.  Learn from my mistakes.  It doesn't have to be perfect.  Really, it doesn't.  Have fun.  Explore with your kids.  Look at the world through their eyes.  Play in the rain.  Make snow angels.  Have a snowball fight.  Spend the afternoon coloring.  Make memories.  Because eventually, you are going to be older, and your kids will be grown, and they'll be calling you to ask if you can substitute chicken broth for vegetable, and what to used in place of buttermilk.

Oh, and if you are wondering, the answers are yes and milk with either vinegar or lemon juice (oh and add a few tablespoons of sugar to the dry ingredients.  Trust me on this one).

Almost unpacked.......almost

We have just a handful of boxes left, and they are big boxes.  You know, the baking pans, food dehydrator, miscellaneous kitchen stuff.  I really should be working on those things right now.  But I'm not.  I'm doing fun stuff on my holiday.

I face timed my dearest friend this morning.  She didn't answer, but did call back.  I gave her a "tour" of our new place.  It was kinda neat doing that over face time :)

Now, I'm looking towards the bedroom and a mountain of laundry that needs to get done.  I'm trying to motivate myself to do it.  It's not working.

I'm starting to settle in to a routine in the new place.  I like the space.  I don't feel so bottled up.  I can almost relax now.  Almost.  I just have a few more things to get done......

So I'm behind on my postings.......I have a good reason.  Really I do.  We moved.  Around the corner.  Yup, we moved around the corner and it took over a week to get it all done.  And the worst part is that we aren't even unpacked yet.

I prepared for this move.  I really did.  I made a plan.  I rented a truck, I took a week off work.  I had a plan.  I was ready.  Yeah, right.  You know what "they" say about plans, right?  "The best laid plans of mice and men often go asunder" or something like that.  And my plan went asunder.

I tried packing stuff up ahead of time.  That didn't work.  So, the week of, I was trying to get stuff packed and moved.  Here's the problem.  The new place wasn't ready yet.  The good part is that the new place is owned by my daughter and her husband.  They are renting it to us.  They decided to move back to their other place once those tenants moved out.  It's a long story for a different day.  Trust me.

Anyway, she was trying to move out of one place into the other, and we were trying to do the same thing.  It was really a comedy of errors.  Today I can laugh about it.  The week of moving, not so much.

The first few days, my husband was working, so it was up to me to get as much done as possible.  I tried.  Then my husband was off work.  That's when the fun really started.  4 days of solid moving, one of which involved a truck.  We enlisted help for the day of the truck.  We got all the big stuff moved.   We took the truck back the next morning with a whopping 5 miles on it.  Like I said, we were moving around the corner.

The last day of moving, the hubs was back to work, which probably saved his life. Don't get me wrong, he was a tremendous help.  His ability to lift and move heavy objects is amazing.  He just doesn't think the same way I do, God love him.  So, when he went back to work on Sunday, I breathed a HUGE sigh of relief.  The upstairs still had to be finished, and then we had to do the obligatory wipe down/vacuum.  Thank goodness we didn't have to clean the carpets, as the apartment was being renovated once we were out. 

One of my dear friends came over as did one of my son in loves.  We got it done.  There was still garbage that needed to be taken out, and my oldest planned on doing that the next day.  The landlady was gracious and said we could come back the next night to do the vacuuming, etc.  We did it!!!!

Of course, the next day, the garbage didn't get hauled, because the youngest granddaughter got sick, so we loaded it up and took it to the new place, along with the rest of the trash, and then vacuumed and wiped stuff down.  8:00 pm on Tuesday night, and it was finished.  We went to our new home and promptly crashed. 

As I said, it was a typical adventure for our family.  We had a plan, and it didn't work.  That's okay.  We got it done, we worked together, and life is now good.  I don't have the bass from the neighbors echoing in my ear at 9:30 pm every night.  I'd say that's a good thing!