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Feeling Supported

Thanks for all your kind comments & calls after my last post.  I’ve been feeling a lot more settled so it surprised me at how upset I was at his teachers rather innocent comment.  It’s good to have a place to vent.

It’s also wonderful to have supportive people around you.  Which I have in spades.

I do think I am nearing the end of my Grief – Moving Edition.  Or at least, I’m finally working my way towards acceptance.  I’d love to move back to Rural City, but if I do, I know I’ll actually miss some of the things here, & I don’t mean Target.  We’ve found a wonderful church, and it has actually been a bonus to be closer to MN.  I was able to make it back for a funeral that was important to me & had we been in RC, it would have been a lot more difficult.  Last weekend all the grandparents & some of our sister’s met us in Minneapolis for a Twins game & a day in the Cities.  All that would have been a lot harder had we been in RC.

I won’t go too much into the things I don’t like about Metropolis as I’m trying to stay positive, but you RC people will never know how good you have it if I don’t tell you.

The major grocery chain is Hy-Vee.  I loved my RC Hy-Vee.  If you wanted something not in stock, they’d try to get it for you.  When I make Pho I need the beef cut very thin & most of the meat guys know exactly what I’m talking about because they made a point of remembering.

The Hy-Vee’s here are awful.  The race car shopping carts don’t fit in the check out lanes.  You have to walk the entire store because they put the dairy all along the back wall.  When you walk in the store, you have to battle the check out lines & then you actually enter the store by the liquor.  Now, I sometimes feel like a drink after fighting to get into the store while shopping with my 3 lovely errand runners, but I much prefer entering the store through the calm of the produce section.  So RC people, consider yourselves lucky – your Hy-Vee is ‘old style’ & the new design of Hy-Vee SUCKS!

Wow, that wasn’t supposed to be a huge rant, but seriously, I spend a lot of time at the grocery store & I have yet to find one I like.

In other supportive news, after 12 years, we have bid farewell to our bed & bought one that does not have a ridge in the middle, butt sink holes, & snapped springs.  The simple pleasures of a comfortable nights sleep…

Make sure you Harry Potter fans check back tomorrow for a truly magical post.

K~

Metropolis vs Rural City

This morning Gavin’s teacher stopped to talk to me about volunteer stuff & I mentioned it was hard to do things in the classroom because the school doesn’t allow younger siblings to come.  She suggested doing a sitter swap with another mom & I mentioned we’d moved here not long ago & friends were at a minimum.  We talked about the move & Mrs Teacher assumed I must be ecstatic to be out of Rural City because Metropolis has a Target & restaurants (her daughter went to the University in Rural City so she knows about the lack of shopping & eating opportunities in RC).

I’m so sick of that attitude.  Yes a Target is nice & there are many more restaurants than Rural City & if my life revolved around stuff  & eating out, I’d be very happy.  However, my life is not about stuff, it’s about people & all the shopping in Metropolis isn’t going to make me any happier than hanging out with my mom friends, or carpooling with our neighbors, or softball nights with church friends, or doing a sitter swap with any number of friends so I could volunteer at the boys school even though that’s not necessary because the RC school didn’t mind having siblings in the classroom.

I had been feeling okay about the move too.  Now I’m all sad again & wishing I could make a few calls & meet some friends at the Old Dairy for a grilled cinnamon roll & a chat while the kids play.

*sigh*

K~

The Big City Swim, Take 2

Metropolis must know they have about 8 million people competeing for a spot in one of their 7 pools so 3 mornings a week they have a family swim.  For 2 hours, starting at 9:30am, you can swim with hordes of children & their parents.  Since it was already 87° at 9am, I screened the kids, hustled them out the door, & we were in the water by 10.

It was actually quite nice.  This pool had a few more slides & a bigger area for the little kids.  And because it was a family swim, the deep end was less busy.  I really do have a strange daughter.  She wants nothing to do with the little water slide or the fountains, she wants to go to the deep end & practice her cannon ball aka belly flop.  The boys had a good time playing catch & were actually able to swim a little.  We’ll definitely be going again.

K~

Mind Over Matter

A few years ago I read a book review of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The book was about the irrational thoughts she had during the first year after her husband’s death.  At least that’s what I think it was about, I’ve never actually read the book.

Why would I bring this up?  Well, the one thing I remember from the review was the story where she cannot give away her husbands shoes, because he would need them when he returned.  “Magical Thinking” – if you hope for it long enough & avoid certain things, you can change what’s happening.

I feel the same way about some aspects of moving – if I hope long enough & avoid some of the ‘getting settled’ business, I won’t really live here.

The changes I struggle with the most are church, my cell phone number, & my drivers license.

We were unhappy in our Rural City church & yet, we are reluctant to join the one we’ve been attending.  The people are nice enough.  We enjoy the style of worship.  They have a lot to offer our family.  But taking our names off the rolls at our Rural City church is just too permanent.

I’d love a new phone & the area code of Rural City is only one number off from the area code of Metropolis making for much confusion.  But if I change the number, it makes me the same as everyone here & different from everyone there.

Even though I sleep each night in my bed in my new house on my new street in my new city in my new state, my drivers license says I live in Rural City.

Changing each of those things is just one more sign that I no longer live there, but that I now live here.

Magical Thinking – Moving Style.

I wish I could feel the purpose for the move.  I wish I could feel like this is where we’re meant to be.

I wish I could press the Undo button.

But I can’t.  So instead, I’ll just hold onto my drivers license & wish away.

I hope someday I’ll adjust to living here, & I’ll eventually change my license.

It won’t be any time soon though.  This humidity is not kind to my hair…

K~

The Big City Swim

Today, the thermometer hit 80 & the sun was shining (mostly) so we ventured out for our first big city pool experience.  I was not really anticipating this would be any different than our swimming experiences in Rural City.

I was wrong.

I now understand why there is a subdivision pool & why it might be worth the $600 yearly price tag.

What a mad house!

The first pool we tried was fairly close to the house.  All the pools in Metropolis (I’m going to revert back to this moniker because Gavin is in a Superman phase) have a couple of water slides & a zero-depth pool for the little kids.  Apparently the pool closest to our house is very popular.  I have never encountered a line to get into a pool before.  When we pulled up there were probably 75 people waiting to get into the pool because at 2pm, they were already at capacity.

On to the next pool.  This one was smaller but just as packed.  I don’t see how they weren’t at capacity, but we got in so, meh. The kids had a good time.  Ethan enjoyed the water slide.  Gavin enjoyed swimming between my legs.  Tova enjoyed jumping off the edge.  It was just a matter of finding a spot to jump & keeping an eye out for the boys swimming among the thousands of other kids.  Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it felt like a thousand as I was scanning for Ethan.  Gavin was always easy to spot in his bright orange swimsuit.  Ethan’s new suit is navy & green.  That was a mistake!  Next year he’s getting something neon.

I did meet a nice woman who has adopted 2 boys from West Africa.  We chatted for a while & I would have given her our contact info, but no one had a pen or paper or a dry pocket…

Swimming won’t be the relaxing activity it was in Rural City but we’ll survive & possibly even make friends!

K~

The Neighborhood

I like our neighborhood.

For the most part.

You didn’t really think you were going to get a move update without some whining did you?

I like the proximity to Target, the Movie Store, & the school.  I like how the neighborhood was designed to cut down shortcut traffic.  I like that even though it’s a cookie cutter neighborhood it doesn’t really feel like one because while there are maybe a dozen house styles, no two look exactly alike.

I don’t know if it’s because our house had high turnover in the last 2 years, but it has taken almost 2 months for the neighbors to introduce themselves.  We met the one on the left right away because their daughter is in Ethan’s class.  The neighbor’s on the right we met this weekend after we made a point of doing an introduction.  The people across the street seem nice & there’s a couple down the street that belong to the church we’ve been attending that are very friendly.

But then it gets weird.

The people 2 houses down are the trash police.  Last week I put our cans out a day early because we were leaving town & I was told we can’t do that.  She was trying to be nice about it, but couldn’t quite keep the sneer out of her voice.  I should have known though.  Trash Day was the day our moving truck arrived so our cans had to be on our neighbors yard & at 5pm we had a knock on our door asking if we could get our cans.  Trash is a big thing around here I guess.

What’s even odder is the moms walking to school.  I’ve met a few that are pleasant & a little chatty.  But then there’s the one that is a sidewalk warrior.  She will do anything, anything, to avoid saying ‘hello’.  She will walk up the sidewalk at a nice pace with her stroller & two dogs & then as soon as she’s on the same block as me, she will take off like she’s going on a run.  Only she’s usually wearing flip flops.  There’s no ‘excuse me’ or ‘on the left!’.  Nope, she just blows by like there’s a stroller convention she must attend NOW.  I find it bizarre behaviour.  Then there’s the mom that lives up the street that has started acting like ‘hi’ is painful. Maybe she’s jealous of the new van?

Jason & I have heard from many people that CSS is a friendly community.  Our question is where did they move from that CSS is considered friendly? Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where George buys the toilet book from Brentano’s & Kramer & Newman bought a rickshaw?  We’re feeling a little like the flagged book from Brentano’s  “We’re trying to help the homeless here – it’s bad enough we have some nut out there trying to strap ‘em to a rickshaw…  You get your toilet book out of here & I won’t jump over this counter & punch you in the brain!”

As a disclaimer, the previous paragraph is why Jason doesn’t blog.  All his idea & I thought I’d humor him

Our realtor had mentioned the subdivision had an upity reputation but I thought other areas we looked at seemed more like ‘Upity’ candidates.

No worries.  We’ll beat them down with our crabgrass, dandelions, bikes on the lawn, & sidewalk chalk drawings on the driveway.

A friend would be nice though…

K~

Finding Home

My goal is to get out of the house everyday & do something.  Some days it’s shopping,  some days it’s the Library, some days it’s the grocery store.  Today it was the Y.

I miss the Y.  Or more accurately, I miss working out & the Y was where I used to do that.  I hadn’t planned on joining the Y here until the Fall.  At home, I never made it during the summer.  We usually had too much going on & the morning was the only time we were home so I didn’t usually engage in the battle to get the kids out the door so I could go sweat.

I’m not anticipating the same problem this summer.

Anyway, I was looking for some info on the youth sports for the summer & membership info.  What I found was youth sports info, nice people who made me feel welcome, & something just as nice – familiarity.  I don’t know if all Y’s buy their equipment from the same place or what, but there was my elliptical!  There was my treadmill!  There were my circuit training machines!  The stuff was in a much nicer facility but it looked so familiar.  I was ready to sign up right then, but decided to wait until after payday.

I am aching for something that feels like home.

I just never thought I’d find it at a gym…

K~