sun & cultivating

This is a picture I snapped while driving home from dropping off Liam at kindergarten. It’s half day kindergarten here and Liam is a late bird, so he goes to school around 9:45 am. This is pretty much what it looks like here all. the. time. It’s absolutely glorious. You’ll notice the sun, of course, that is casting shadows on the road and illuminating my life. But there’s also a small grove of citrus trees to the right, mountains in the distance and blue skies everywhere. Not a cloud to be seen. ahhhhhhhhh.

This morning when I woke up, it was overcast, blah. And it was really the first day like that, and I was bummed out. I was talking to my sister, Christina, about the overcast-ness and she immediately responded, with complete confidence, “oh THAT? It’ll burn off”. And she was right. By the time I was dropping off Liam, lo and behold, there were blue skies and sun. I love that. There are bad things – ants, dust, more ants, spiders, and it gets reeeeeeeally hot here, but you have to give it to these southern Californians – they have the sun and awesome weather all year round.

In other news, I am hard at work on my house. I learned something about myself. I like to decorate new spaces, but not unpack new spaces. Unpacking is lame. Decorating is fun. I spend most of my free time unpacking and organizing. I have unpacked all but 8-10 boxes, which are in the garage. So basically, everything is inside the house. But it needs to all find a place. That’s the rub. Finding a place for everything is slow going. I feel like all I do all day long is care for kids, wage the ongoing war against the ants,  unpack and organize. It’s tedious work sometimes. There are three piles downstairs on the desk that I cannot tackle. It makes my stomach hurt looking at them. They have stuff ranging from memories to pictures to important papers to mail to craft stuff ….. ugh. It is exhausting to think of all the different places I’d have to go to make those piles disappear. And then there’s the closets. Each room has a closet full of stuff that needs to be organized.

Anyway, beyond that, I am in the process of really cultivating a home. Creating it. Making it mine. In this process, I want to buy two things – a dining room table and a headboard for my bed. For some reason, I am at a standstill with this. I was sooooo excited at first, and spent every night looking online for the perfect table. It had to be rustic so the boys could destroy it and beta on it and I’d be okay with that, but it also had to have a sense of elegance too. I found the perfect thing on 1stdibs.com

How much do you love that, huh? A classic 1880’s farmhouse table. Rustic, gorgeous …. and only $11,400. yes. really. I didn’t know you could spend that much on any single piece of furniture before now.

With a little more searching, I landed on what I thought was the new perfect dining room table – long, big, rustic, beautiful and in the mid range for price – $700. Not IKEA prices, but not Pottery Barn or $11,400 either, ya know? It’s at Cost Plus World Market, here. Actually, it looks like it’s on sale right now. But Daniel doesn’t like it.

What’s not to love?? He thinks it’s impractical to own a table so large. It’s 7 feet long. almost 8.

But it feels like such a big deal, to pick out furniture of this magnitude. This will be the table that my boys sit around forever. Where we have Thanksgiving dinner, where we pray, talk, eat. And we may never actually buy anything, because Daniel and I can’t agree on a dining table.

As for the headboard, oh yes, I have found it. At west elm and world market and of course, Anthropologie.

Buuuuut, there’s something wrong with each of them. The west elm one is beautiful, but a bit pricey and it doesn’t have any shape to it. The world market one is cute with the buttons, but doesn’t come in a king size. And the Anthropologie one is, of course, perfect, but $2500. That’s the problem.

Well, time is far spent and I need to get going on dinner. I’ll have to “cultivate” later.

One thought on “sun & cultivating

  1. I love those headboards, I’ve been wanting something similar for over a year. As for the table, tell him that now that you are living by family it is very practical to own such a large table that way when you have family dinners more people can fit around.

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