Speed Bump

Welcome to Little Localvores - a weekly series on our family's first experience with a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Every Tuesday all summer long we will receive a supply of fresh produce and local foods through the Good Natured Family Farms CSA. I'll chronicle my attempts to get my toddlers (3 years and 15 months) to eat fresh and local, healthy foods. Localvore: someone who prefers to eat locally grown/produced food. Our CSA goodie bag last week contained Ranch cheese nuggets, Farm to Market bread, GNFF honey, peaches, potatoes, cucumbers, sweet corn, heirloom tomatoes, and acorn squash - one of my favorites! I haven't had a chance to use this lovely squash yet, but I will...so many options. Life is still crazy at home, and even though we are officially in our transitional apartment (while we remodel , it's happening !), we are still moving stray items and cleaning out our old house . Lots of back and forth between the two (som...

I captured the one tranquil moment of the weekend with the kids playing quietly together. It was over as soon as I had it on record. I accept defeat. The other side won. The other side is whatever side I was not on this weekend. I was a single parent this weekend, trying to organize our new place and also clean up and get out of our old place. I had a lot of help from grandparents, but even so with worry and stress about a big event at work this week, plus closing on our Brookside house (finally), meeting with architects, adjusting (or not) to the new apartment - it all just added up to a perfect storm. Toddlers (2), me (0). Back door of our building that ate my key (1), me (0). Hipster neighbors trying to watch a movie at 5:30 in the afternoon so they had to knock on my door and complain and not say hello (5), me (0). Roxie not making it all the way to the designated gravel lot to do her business (3), me (0). Hoping for victory, or at least a tie game, this week.

Welcome to our new (temporary) home! We're out of our Brookside home and into a loft in downtown KC for the next 6-9 months while we remodel  (we met with our architect yesterday and he knows we're counting the months!). I'm loving the location and will let you know all about the fun aspects and challenges of living downtown with two little ones (and a dog!). I took a few pictures quickly before the movers arrived with all of our things to show the empty space. This is the view from the front door as you walk in. There is a laundry room and coat closet to the left, full bathroom and storage closet to the right. The kids' bedrooms are in the lofted spaces you see as you come in the door - Charlie is up the 6 steps to the right, and Izzy is up 4 steps on the left side. As you can tell from the picture, these are only partial walls on the kids' rooms, making the whole space essentially one big open room. This is the main living space at the opposite end f...

Our first peek at the designs for our remodel...oh boy! 

You could say we had a busy weekend of moving. Lots of work, not much sleep. The happy respite to our weekend was Cousin Haley's 3rd birthday party! These three ended the evening fishing in the pool. Happy Birthday Haley! Thanks for the great party. Matching smiles! Iz borrowed Haley's bumblebee suit - so cute! She really needs a haircut but I'm afraid to cut her curls. Here's a picture of our new temporary digs. Check back to find out how we turned this urban loft into a fun family home! The weekend definitely brought its challenges - we couldn't find the corkscrew or the coffee grinder. Moving sans alcohol and caffeine is not a good idea, trust me. And thanks to our horrible cable provider, TimeWarner(!!), we are without cable for 2 weeks during the Olympics. Not cool. Ryan managed to rig up some rabbit ears to our tv and with a litle crafy maneuvering of some boxes, we received excellent reception. We are counting the days until Go...

Selling a house is brutal. This was my first experience selling and I don't want to have to do it again for a long, long time. It is so incredibly hard not to take things personally when your home has been a labor of love. As I said before, we thought this was going to be our forever home (until the reality of Missouri public schools really set in for us) and we treated it as such. So much of what we did to improve the house amounted to intangibles when it came time to sell - things that didn't translate to the bottom line when it was all said and done. Everyone commented on the 'lovely house' but never acknowledged the labor and cost that went into making it that way. I just wish we could have shown before and after pictures, then maybe buyers would have recognized the value. Before. After. So different! Plus this project made a huge difference. In the end, we are moving on and I won't waste one more ounce of energy on the issue. It's done, ...

We're leaving our cheery, lovely home in a few days. Crazy to think we won't be living there anymore. When we bought it, we thought it would be our forever house. Ryan and I weren't yet married at the time, no kids in the picture. It will be almost 5 years to the day since we moved in that we will load up all our boxes and leave it empty. The house is changed by our time there, and yet not changed at all. Our five years is only a blip in the history of this 100 year-old house. Yet it was so much more than that to us. This was the home where we had our first big fight as an engaged couple and I slept in the guest bedroom for one lonely, long night. This is the house where we celebrated with a brunch for family and friends the morning after our wedding. We brought home first one tiny bundle of joy to this safe place, and then another. We walked the creaky wood floors at night and played musical beds til early morning during that newborn haze. We splashed ...