We moved into our dream house in January 2009. Built by Baddy and meticulously designed by me, it had a designated view from every window. The house was our new baby, and our other three boy babies were making their claims on it very fast, hanging off every ledge and jumping off every precipice. How wrong I was in thinking I had them in mind when I designed the house. Apparently I was shortsighted. “Great designing, Mommy,” Baddy joked sadistically. “Too bad we didn’t put in your requested interior skateboard ramp instead of stairs.” And it was indeed too bad. Once again, Baddy shoulda listened to Mama Bear.
But I was happy and felt as though we had arrived. While it’s true that home is where your heart is, this house was the bomb, a place where our entire family could run around inside and out in our skivvies and do cannonballs into our very own pond, built by Baddy and his beloved skid steer. As a family of boys, we didn’t have to worry about our loudness bothering the neighbors; the only observers of our lives were the wildlife who occasionally peeped in our windows.
We were like real adults, with a bona fide East Coast staircase with the softest carpet winding up it and through the upstairs hallways. Beneath our feet lay wide-planked recycled hard pine floors. And the kitchen? The kitchen had windows where I could watch the boys playing while I cooked. We had a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer and sparkling Caesarstone “White Shimmer” quartz countertops with ultra-fine mirror chips. I took immense pleasure in cleaning that shimmer. We also had a breakfast nook with Queen Anne windows where the boys could eat in the sun and do their homework. The rooms were painted soothing, faded J.Crew colors that I painstakingly chose after heaps of hours combing through magazines and paint stores. And it was all ours. I felt like we were cheating.
Goodbye, Tiny Condo
I had to sheepishly apologize to the crew for moving in before they were ready for us, but I was ready for more space and needed release from the tiny condo we lived in while building the house. Two years was enough. I agree that living in small spaces keeps a family closer, but I’m not convinced it was healthy for our particular rogue family.
In the condo, all three boys slept in, and leapt off of, bunk beds next to our room. The bathroom was where I went for privacy while on the phone. The worst part of suburbia was the neighbors who hated the thumping. “What is going on in here?” they’d ask as I turned down my loud music to yell at the kids to stop doing 720s off the couch. Why did I never hear a thing from their two little girls?
Having space made us so much happier, and we actually all liked each other again. Perhaps I should exclude Baddy from that equation. He wasn’t ready for us yet, but I didn’t mind that the oven was disconnected and sitting unusable in the middle of the kitchen.
A yard with sod would have been nice. April in Colorado isn’t beautiful like back East. It was muddy and messy around the house. Even the children didn’t like it, unless they were deeply immersed in it, buck naked. As soon as all their crevices were filled with mud, they traipsed through the house yelling for me to hose them down with the warm-water spigot outside and throw their clothes into our enormous washing machine.
