Small Moves

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time." –Abraham Lincoln

Since we began taking over handling everything for the Queen Mother, my husband keeps saying that we are making "small moves," because if we look at all that must be done, it is just too overwhelming. So, we just keep making small moves that will eventually work down the overwhelming, but as I see it, it will never really be done. Some things will be in the short term, like the estate sale and the selling of the house, but that only changes other aspects that are long term. It is always the long term that wears me down.

We all three finally sat down and thought out room-by-room of our own house what we are keeping and what we are taking to Florida to add to the estate sale. To make most of the those decisions, we first had to decide on one in particular: What to do with one room in the house that really is not used, the guest room!

It has been my idea to move the Princess' daybed and trundle into the guest room, after it have been redone in a compromise of her taste and my rules, which include not painting the walls black, but I approve of black accents. That way she would still have the nightstand that she herself bought and her lamp. This would give her the most floor space so that she could use the trundle when one of her girl friends stay over and still be able to walk around the room, because they have to walk on the trundle to get to the door in her present bedroom. However, that would mean that we sell or store the guest room furniture.

My husband's idea was that she just use the guest room furniture and leave it as it is decorated already (although I still need to paint the window and match the faux paint pattern round the window—actually I need to paint all the trim as it is way too white for the decor and so there is that coming up). Right now, my guest room has a light peachy pink faux paint pattern with a wall paper border up by the ceiling. I also have two framed cross stitch artworks that I did some years ago of angels. So, it has a roses and angels kind of theme with a country flavored honey oak four poster bed and matching nightstand and mirrored dresser. (We have a matching wardrobe that will not fit in the room that we used in the nursery because it matched the crib and still have in the Princess' room today, but it may be going downstairs.) When I decorated the room, I wanted it to have a bed and breakfast feel even though the room was too small to really pull that off.

So, our conundrum is that that we now have the Queen Mother's furniture to consider and that means we have an additional queen and full size sleep number mattresses that we would like to keep as they are so expensive and so comfortable—we have a queen one for some years ourselves and we bought the full size to be in the Queen Mother's guest room because the extra firm mattress would have us in terrible pain by the third night. We have thought and talked about several scenarios, because we really do not want to sell our guest room furniture but we don't want to try to store it either.

The guest room is definitely not to the Princess' taste but she did say that it all looks nicely put together, so maybe she can stand it for "just two years," as she puts it, because she has some grand idea that she will not be here soon after she turns 18, but Mama is thinking a bit differently since I am hoping we move. (I am thinking that she is coming back to "being a girl," like when she used to dress for dinner, even though she would not admit it to us yet.) So, we decided that she will get the full size mattress to the replace the double sized pillow top queen mattress presently in there—I mention that it is a double sided pillow top because it is rather high. The full mattress will only give her a few more inches of walk-around-the-bed space, but she is only going to be using it for her bedroom because...

The bedroom she now has is going to be her...um, well I have come to call it her "hide out," because "study" sounds too stuffy for her. I did toy with "phrontistery"—actually I am still toying with that one. We will repaint it. I am thinking it might be messy although I have to say she is rather neat, but when she is doing a project at her desk....she becomes something else. It will have the digital piano that is currently taking up space in my dining room and her desk that is downstairs. She will rearrange her bookshelves so she has a place for all the homeschool books we will are actively using, which are also taking up space in my dining room and downstairs. This room she can use to hang out with her friends also.

It is not ideal, but given the floor plan we have, it is better than it has been. Her bedroom can still be used for guests, but since we have not had any for about ten years...well, what is the point of leaving an empty room for nobody coming?

Since we all compromised on those two rooms, the rest is a matter of moving many things from one place to the other between here and Florida and from one space to another within our home.

My husband decided the open trailer he bought a few years ago mostly to haul his ATV is not what we really need now. He had been toying with the idea to build a large shed, but his time and energy have been a commodities in shorter supply between work and the extra things with the Queen Mother, trips to Florida, and her stuff. He then came up with another small move towards the next big one: to get an enclosed trailer that we could use like a shed for storage of many items in our garage, after we move furniture items between Florida and here, of course. It is not ideal for me because I just see it as a space hog in our driveway, but we are seriously planning to move within the next one to three years, so having something we can use to move our furniture is a plus and, if we will not be needing it later, trailers resell well here—we sold ours for a good price in just two days. In fact, the one we just sold went for more than 2x what we paid for it in two days, although we did fix it up with wood sides. Because we have to move furniture in about two weeks, he ordered one instead of looking for a used one. We just do not have the time and it will cost about the same as a shed...not if he built the shed himself but....time.

It always comes down to time and money. If one is short in time, he usually has to spend more money. One who has time and is short on money, usually spends more time. Time is a what we are shortest on these days. It just is what it is right now.

If you found yourself wondering what we are going to do with the extra queen-size sleep number bed, may I introduce my husband's bigger of the small moves and another one of his justifications for buying the big pickup truck, which was not a very small move, in my opinion. He wants to get a camper and it makes some sense with how our lifestyle will be. The Queen Mother will have to remain in Florida for at least five years due to financial reasons, so we will need to continually go down to Florida to check in on her at least once or twice every two months, we are thinking. Yes, my husband has some sky miles and hotel points, but few hotels take big dogs and those things do get used up and there are plenty of camping areas in Florida. Plus, the man seriously wants to hunt and having a camper gives him a better opportunity and more choices. Then there is me...I used to love to travel and camp in tents, but I am the one in this family who has traveled the least in the last twenty years and I am not so fond of tents in rainy weather nor sleeping uncomfortably when I camp, so sleeping on a sleep number bed in our own camper that we can pull along, maybe even have electricity when we like, is far more appealing to me than when I was younger and called such people "city campers." Anyway, we will store the mattress until we get the camper, which will be another exercise in compromise, I would think.

Lots of things are changing and at times, like today, it all just overwhelms me. At times I feel like I am trying to walk on shifting sands, but just when I feel like maybe I cannot do all this, I remember hearing God say He is going to bless me and I realize that it will work for the good.

My Lord, help us to make good decisions with our time and money, particularly now that we are all so stressed out.

Cutting Strings to Sell, Donate, or Trash

Clutter is the physical manifestation of unmade decisions fueled by procrastination. -Christina Scalise, Organize Your Life and More

Now that we have decided on having an estate sale through a broker at the Queen Mother's house, I am gathering things together from my own home to take down to Florida to be sold. Most of those things were gifts I did not really want from the Queen Mother that accumulated over the years, and I kept most of them because...well, the Queen Mother takes it personally when a gift she has given is not on permanent display and, yes, she would look.

Her gifts were gifts with strings attached with expectations. Once she gave a seven-year-old girl in the family a special edition Barbie doll and the girl, of course, immediately began taking it out. The Queen Mother was not happy because she gave it as a collectible. I though was cruel to give a doll to a young girl and expect her to enjoy just looking at it in the box, like she did hers. She did not think to try to explain that it was meant to stay in the box, after she unwrapped it.

So, I learned soon after my marriage that if I did not love any gift she gave me, she seemed to take as I was rejecting her. It really was a stretch for her to get to know what I liked and there were a precious few times that she would surprise me, but for the most part I just saw those attached strings of expectations. I always had it in the back of my mind, even when she stopped coming here to visit, that she may live with us or near us and come here again.

I knew that those strings had me all tied up. I felt like I had to keep that stuff to keep the Queen Mother happy, because her love language to everyone else is gifts. I could have packed them away and only brought them out when she was coming, which was rare, but I just did not. And, I think the thing that bothered me the most—actually, weighed me down the most and paralyzed my thoughts to rid myself of them—was that I did not keep them out of respect for her, but more like fear of her being upset with me. Every time my eyes would rest on something the Queen Mother gave me, a thought of how it came from her and how she was insensitive to what I really like would surface, but in her defense, I do have eclectic tastes that only those who really know me or are attentive would get.

In honesty, I used to appreciate some of her collectibles, like the Boyd's Bears, because before the Princess, we had a children's guest room with a teddy bear theme and my husband likes teddy bears, but over the years even those have lost their appeal to both of us. I have switched from accumulative mode to downsizing back into simplicity and practicality for our lifestyle. I am now rather selective about what I want to look at and dust off every two weeks for the rest of my life and the majority of things the Queen Mother has given me are just dust collectors for the most part, not even my taste.

I am not really like most people from previous generations: for instance, I have always thought (even as a child) that having a formal dining room and another informal dining area is a waste of living space. I like one dining area, so I love the now popular open plans where the kitchen is practically part of the living room. However, I do like a quiet library room.

The Queen Mother has a china cabinet filled with her better dishes, which are quite plain, and hordes of her figurines and glass collections, while my china cabinet is not for fancy dishes we use a few times a year—although I have to say that is perhaps not entirely true, which I will explain in the next paragraph. Instead I have my everyday dishes, which are the Pfaltzgraff Tea Rose pattern. I had loved that country fresh pattern for many years and some of their heart shaped bowls and servers, so when a friend was putting together a good-bye party at our church in Florida before we moved to Georgia, she asked me what I wanted if people were to ask her and they were it. She bought us a set and I was thrilled. Later I found some bowls marked down for clearance at a K-Mart. I thought K-mart was discontinuing them but actually Pfaltzgraff had retired them. Once while shopping at an antique store, I found a large set with about 10 settings and a few other pieces that looked brand new and bought it all for $65. So, every day I see the dishes we actually use and we have to get all our dishes from there. Now Pfaltzgraff has again gone into production with them, but not with all the pieces they used to have.

In the bottom half of my china cabinet, I have another set of dishes that was given to my husband before we met. They are ironstone Colonial White by Homer Laughlin, which is the same company that made Fiestaware that has come back into popularity, so they are producing it again. I am not that fond of the Colonial White, but we have used it for holidays. It looks nice with a red table cloth and colorful Christmas trimmings. However, it is not fine china but was probably meant for everyday use, because it is heavy, which I actually prefer, and feels more like it should be in a restaurant. I have wanted to get rid of them several times, but I decided to again keep them because their high gloss and the angular Dover mold style makes it more up scale looking and appealing—and because ridding myself of the other stuff in the bottom of the china cabinet allowed more space.

Back to my point, I am trying to go through my house gathering items for the sale and carrying items to the two bins marked to sell or donate with the trash can handy. I will be going down to Florida on my own with DragonHeart packed full to meet with the estate sales broker, so she can see everything we have to sell. It is just amazing what I have accumulated through the years. However, I cannot tell you how freeing it is to have space and to think what I really would like to place here and there. I knew that I was feeling overwhelmed by the clutter in my home for years, but since yard sales do so poorly here and some things were worth a little something, I just held on them. Now I finally have an opportunity to really let go of quite a lot, which will be sold and what is left over will be donated and done with.

I probably would have worked through this stuff faster if I was not fasting, but I did not go into a full water-only fast. I have been drinking milk and kefir in very small amounts throughout the day to stimulate losing the fat and because I knew I would need more stamina to do this, although I have to say, it still takes it out of me. I think I was about 10 pounds over the what I like to call my comfortable heavy weight when I officially started on Tuesday—frankly I did not step on a scale until I had been fasting two days because I just knew. I have to start coming off of it today or tomorrow so I am strong for the trip. I am and should hold down to around that comfortable heavy weight and will have to try to fast again later to rid myself of the rest of it.

My Lord, thank you for helping cut these strings that have had me tied to fear and keeping things I did not treasure. I am happy to let them go to people who do find pleasure in them and to have my home reflect only what I finding pleasing.