Friday

I want to write this morning but the sky is clouding over and it is supposed to be cold and rainy this weekend. Every time I plan gardening, . . . . well, I guess I should not be trying to play but trying to take advantage of the best days.

Isn't that life?!

Some things --

Julia's slot for the state subsidized autistic waiver has come up. This means that she is illigible to get intensive therapy -- from 20-35 hours a week -- for the next year. She is also elligible for two more years of therapy which can mirror the intensive or be modified. I have chosen a provider and now have lots of questions. Therapists will come to the house. It is not be difficult in the summer without school but will be quite challenging when school begins. But if we see it helping, we will stay the course. Intensive therapy has been very effective for younger children, and I have a gut feeling that it can be effective for Julia as well. I will be in the house whenever a therapist is here, so I will monitor what is being done. I know that behavioral therapys can be counter productive for kids who suffer from trauma, but good therapists will find ways to move around this. This may also break up our summer days while still keeping Julia at home.

Recently, there is a house that has caught our eye(s). It belongs to a long time college friend who grew up in Madison. She lives in NYC but her folks remained in the great midwest. The house is part of her parents' estate and she is getting ready to sell it. We went to take a look and rather fell in love with this one story rather modern house. It was strange that both David and I liked it -- it is so different from everything else we've ever bought. There are many people interested in the house and the price is not set yet, so there is a very good chance we will not get it. BUT it seems that tastes are changing and our next search, if there is to be one, will include another style. I think that both David and I long for less clutter, clean lines and an more open layout. It is an interesting change.

Today in school, Christy, the teacher, was not there and a sub (also named Suzanne) took her place. It was a hard day for our kids on the spectrum. Julia got mad, as did Aaron. Another girl was very quiet, too quiet, and another ran around more. Also during the beginning of the day, another student threw up and needed to go home. So the beginning of the day was pretty hard.

I feel very at home in that room now and can relate to some of the kids. The writing workshop was very informal and I played games with the kids who asked me. I was surprised that a number wanted to play with me. Julia didn't. She was busy reading and writing, but she also did not seem to mind. We did do some cuddling in the hall during circle time to calm her down and difuse a bit of anger, but when it was time to work she released me, did her own thing, and allowed me to play with the kids who asked.

I'm going to try to get a few minutes in the garden before the heavens open.

Midday snow pictures.

The house in the snow. I first thought that the house was a bit wildly painted, then I grew used to is. Now, I positively love the way it looks in the snow.

Last week, I heard on the radio that we WILL have a white Christmas. I guess that means no melting. That got me to wondering about the amount of snow on every street and piled in ever parking lot and lawns, etc. David says they seem to be trucking snow away downtown. I wonder how high the piles get and what doe the city look like in February. We were up last February but it was bitter cold and I just didn't notice how much snow there was. I also think that last year was a light snow year. When David moved up in April, there were stlill snow piles around town. Sure if they are 10 or 12 feet high, those piles are going to last a long time. There was, however, no snow by June.

Here is Julia and Daddy get ready for Julia's first sled ride. David dug out his childhood sled that we've carried from place to place. David used it as a kid; Cheshire used it as a kid; and now it's Julia's turn. She loved, loved, loved the idea of the sled but was pretty excited just being pulled along our street. Our street does slope up and we dragged her all the way up the street and then turned around and went down. It was a very slow ride down, but it was plenty for our girl. She laughed and cheered and loved it.

I think we have to build up to a real hill, but I guess we will have plenty of time to do that. I am sure it looks a little silly to see two grownups pulling a 6 year old up the street. I think most kids this age are on the hills, but Julia n needs the tuning. When Cheshire was a little one, I thought of her as finely tuned. She didn't need lots of admonishment or yelling and never any hitting. She was very atuned to her teachers' and parents' disappointment. She was the first one to say that someone yelled at her when all that person did was raise their voice slightly. (This did change in her teen age years. LOL)

Julia on the other hand, is hardly tuned at all. I am now telling her to make sure she responds to my first calling or admonishment. She wants to please but doesn't really know that I don't want to yell at her forever! I keep reminding her to listen and respond immediately and she is getting better at it.

As for experiences, like the sled, she has no idea how to respond. She can be unwilling to try anything new because of her excitment and I am sure, fear as well. Today's ride up and down the street was a exciting as a big rollercoaster. I do wonder what it would be like for her if she had siblings and was expected to just join into the fun. Seeing other kids doing these exciting things might make her more comfortable, but then again, it might not be that simple. She might need the very one-on-one care that we give her.

And that is why two old grownups were pulling Julia up the street and down again this afternoon.

Riding lesson 2

Today, Julia rode Ranger around an inside and an outside ring led by Terry, her teacher. It was her first time on an English saddle and her first time with her feet in stirrups. Terry had Julia put her arms out like airplane wings, put her hands over her head, and straight out in front of her. Julia even touched her nose to the horse's neck.

Happy Friday

Julia and I were home all day today. I was gardening in the front beds and Julia played around in and out of the house, on the porch, in the backyard. She loves her horses (maybe we will be vacationing one day on the Virginia farm) and her wings, of course.

I separated a big lavendar plant into 9 smaller plants which one day will be a lanvendar hedge. I planted out the hostas that I brought from Indy. I weeded and later watered. We've had no rain in more than a week and so I watered. In between my tasks, Julia and I had lunch and snacks, talked to Babja, and made lots of blue clay dinosaurs.

After I finished most of my garden work, MJ, the old owner, stopped over to give me some gardening pointers, to offer some mulch, and to ask to divide some of the perenials. Had I been a "younger" gardener, I could have been intimidated by her manner, but she is having a bit of a time letting go of this garden. And she didn't do all that she wanted to before she left and she hasn't taken me up on my invitation to take what she wants. I am not sure how to make it easier for her.

The last Harry Potter book comes out tonight. This is the first one time that a book will not be in our house the first day that it is out. Ah, Cheshire. I miss her staying up all night to read the book.

More about the house

There is so much out there on the web about historic houses and I love researching this stuff. Especially because we are planning to do our bath and kitchen, I thought I'd find out about this new house. We know that it was built during the 20's and I found a book of old house plans. Although I did not find our present house or our Indy house in the plans, there were a number of plans that I am sure I’ve seen in Meridian Kessler, and there was information about housing types of the 20's.

Our Madison house is a Shingled Style house:

The Shingle style house plan falls under the family of Victorian home plans. The name itself describes the dominating finish veneer found in the style of home. The shingle style do not place emphasizes on elaborate detailing around the doors, windows, cornice, and other design elements as commonly seen in Victorian homes; rather, it focus on the design of complex shapes and unifying the uncommon with a smooth veneer finish (the shingles).

A typical shingle style design has an asymmetrical facade with multi-level eaves. Walls are finished in shingles with no interruption of corner boards. Roofs in general are steeply pitched and have intersecting cross gables. Large porches are common but, a porch may be omitted or small in scale.

We have a very small Shingle Style House but it does fit the description. Too bad we don't have a tower or turret. Cheshire and I always dreamed of a turret house.

House and garden report

Garden report:

Taking over a garden is a delicate thing, especially if the new owner is a gardener. If the new owner is not a gardener, then the old owner and their friends pass by and click their tongues and mourn the passing of a good garden. Really, anything the new owner does will be critized and if plants languish and die, eyebrows will be raised in an ‘i told you so gesture’ to their walking mates. If the new owner is a gardener, she must proceed with caution. To plunge in and change everything is probably not very neighborly. To ask for advice and many questions may be preferred – give the old owner a sense of importance and of pride in what they have handed over.

But then there is the reality of the garden. Take the compost. There is a three-bin set up here that was here when the old owners moved in 15 years ago. I have never worked with a three-bin set up and for my lazy gardener’s way of making compost, two tall bins were very sufficient. There is also a big black plastic compost maker. One of those containers that is supposed to do speedy compost. I found a mouse in there one night so I don't think there is much compost being made quickly or otherwise. An animal might visit and eat what is on top, but if compost is being made the bin or pile is too hot for little critters to move in. Mine was usually even hot in the middle of the winter.

I waited until yesterday to touch the compost. MJ (previous owner), came over last weekend and emptied one of the bins for herself and left me with a couple of bucket of compost. I dug out another wheelbarrel full this morning. And then I transferred the dried garden waste from the top of the two other bins. And then watered the newly full bin. I think there is quite a bit of finsihed compost in the other two bins. The system needs more management that MJ has done.

Then those big big beds in the front. Indy must have really rubbed off on me. The messiness of the front beds disturbs me. I am sure that MJ has not had time to do much to the beds at this house because she moved more than a month before we bought the house. There are lots of weeds. I’ve been weeding little by little around the flowers, but there are also rows of weeds that would be easy to spray with Round Up. And so I did. I don’t know how PC it is to do that in this town – very natural place. Ummmm.

There are also no evergreens that are part of the landscape. I who once balked at any and all evergreens, now see them as an important design element. Some will go in, but not too quickly and not too many at the same time. I need to see what is planted here for the spring before I do much. A full garden cycle would be a good idea, but I don’t know if I can wait that long.

House report:

We spent the morning shopping for the house. AND we bought a bed. First time in our married lives (plus living together for a few years previously) to have a new mattress and box spring. They deliver it tomorrow. David insisted on a king and I found a lovely simple platform bed with a modern/Arts &Crafts type headboard.

We've slept on David's Nana's bed for years, and during the past few, we're both realized independently that those old, old mattresses were not comfortable. When you get a better night's sleep on the couch than on the bed, it is time to do something! So it's only taken us 18 months from realization to getting into a store. I did some web research and mattresses and headboard, and Julia and I went shopping last week. I picked out what I liked and then showed it to David. (Is this the way I should do all the house shopping?) I thought he would probably like the frame and then he tried a bunch of the mattresses and settled on my second choice. He is much more particular that I am about how firm/soft the mattress is, so I wanted him to make sure he liked it.

We also are starting the process to re-do the bath. Considering the size of the room (5'x11') there are only a few options -- no deluxe tub or separate shower or wall of glass blocks. I got a quote from the "best in town" guy last week and it was very high. I will talk to a few more places that plan the whole job, but I am thinking about being the general contractor and doing my own scheduling of workmen. I have to investigate it a bit more, but I don't see why I can't do it. Am I crazy?

We are thinking of a tube that is deeper and has jets but it will be the size of a regular bathtub because that is all that can be fit in that room. I am also thinking of white tile -- long rectangles called subway tile (Ah, NYC) with some chunky finish on the top. I saw the old octagon tile for the floor -- the traditional has 8 white octagons surrounding a black octagon. I am thinking of having grey centers instead of the black. The tile would come half way up the walls and the rest of the wall and the ceiling would be painted a dove grey -- very calming. If we want color, we can have it with towel, rug, etc.

Okay, that is all I can stand to talk about this stuff right now!

Julia's room

Working on Julia’s room today. She is on the floor playing with her clay and I open the boxes that I have found with toys and winter clothes and games and dolls. She plays quietly and comments only on what she is making with the clay, but she is watching the rug go down and the furniture and shelves be moved around. Toys that she has not seen (and has not missed or asked for) that have been packed away for three months now emerge. Rose the bear! The old cabbage patch dolls! Puzzles! And the pound a peg! She finishes playing with the clay, washes her hands, after three reminders, and revels in the old, now new stuff.

I am making a list – again, with the lists! – of what there is to do in each room. From painting and replacing a window pane to getting light installed in the closets and a few spots out of Julia’s rug. I’ll do the same for each room and then have a whole list of projects to work on. I do have to find a handyman. Oh, and we have California closet units in each of our tiny closets. I was not too impressed at first, but working with Julia’s stuff, I am finding the units and moveable shelves to be quite useful and easy.

Better check on my spicy dragon who has been washing her hands too quietly for a LONG time.

Our crayon box

Here is the new house. When Cheshire saw the house, she said it looked like a crayon box, and the name is appropriate.

This is the front of the house and the deck. There is a built in bench and we put our outdoor table and chairs. It is shady in the morning which is great for sitting and drinking that hot morning drink.
This is a garden bed between the sidewalk and the street. There are a few of these in Indy but Madison seems to have a few on every block.
This garden bed looks better up close than it does in the picture. There are some weeds but there is also lots and lots of interesting plants to work with. There are also two terraces that can't be seen right now. This is going to be a fun garden to work on. I am going to give it time to grow to just see what it is like. I don't intend to do much this year and even next apart from weeding and mulching.

Of course, I can't be held to that.
The front door is where the crayon effect is the plainest. I admit that it is growing on me. I was thinking yesterday that the light above the door does not do the painting justice.

A contractor came over yesterday. He is looking at our bathroom and our kitchen to figure out what to do with these rooms. We are planning to redo both of these rooms within a year (with the assumption that I will be working before the end of the year).

He also took some molding off a door way so that we could fit our frig into its space.

We are in Madison!

The moving van pulled away from our Indy house on Thursday at about 4:30, leaving us with an empty house and waiting for a plumber – foibles of the movers which felt huge when it happened and now just a blip to the day. It was a very long day. The promised half day of getting our household stuff on the truck stretched into an entire day – 9 to 4:30 – now, tell me they get paid by the hour! We were their only pick up and transport for this trip to Madison, and I think they wanted to get a full day of work in.

The Indy house looked lovely stripped of all our things. I have spent five months de-cluttering and putting stuff in storage, and then packing to observe the house being washed of our presence. It has been. Not our spirits completely – there is paint on walls, finishing on cabinets, tile on walls and floors, all those plants, and our fish. We are still in the air. I could not take the fish – some were born in that pond and have no recollection of being cheap feeder fish awaiting death. They are wild and free – to the extend that a 6 x12 pond is the wild and free. I have no asked and the new owners have no said if they will keep the pond or fill it in, but I have to leave my wild gold fish to their fate.

Suffice it to say that we staggered (by car of course) to Marcia's house for a glass of wine, take out chinese and ice cream. Then we fell into our beds and slept heavy and deep, even the spicy dragon.

On Friday morning, David went to the Indiana State House to meet with his old cronies, and Julia and I stayed at Marcia’s house packing up the car and readying ourselves for the closing at 3. The plan was to leave from the closing around 4 and start driving to Madison if all went quickly and well. We were armed with a back up plan of spending another night if there were some other blips which by this time we have gotten very accustomed to on this move.

Ach! The closing. I am SO judgmental! I didn’t like our buyers. I wonder if we would have been able to sell the house to these people without an agent. There was a lot of hand holding that their agent was doing with them and lots of solicitous behavior from our agent. I thought they were foolish and arrogant -- they were young but youth has nothing to do with their stance, I expect they will be the same at 70. They had a first and second mortgage on their first house and took the same on our house. They used a balloon first mortgage that has gotten so many into trouble this year. I wonder if our house will be on the market again within a year or two. They may just be investing and fixing up for re-sale. I have to grudgingly admire their nerve in this market if that is their plan. If they are just stretching themselves very thin, I see them as only foolish.

Something that distressed me was that they asked nothing about the house – its history, who lived there before we did, what we did, what others did, questions about the garden. Is it my own longing for history and roots that extend further than I can know, or some form of ego? To be able to explain all of our work, or how the garden developed for me. I don’t really know. But it saddened that the young family moving into our beloved house would have no stories to pass on. Then again, most developers pass on nothing about the corn field that they turned into a neighborhood. Our neighbor, Katherine, said, after I explained some of our dealings and bargainings, that this new family does not sound like they will fit into an old house. Possibly. But it is done.

Something I discovered only after we were a day in Madison — I forgot to dig up St. Joseph. I intended to and intended to bring him to Madison, but maybe he has work to do in Indy. Still, I felt like there was a promise broken. Sorry, St. Joe.

We drove up to Madison after the closing. It was the easiest six hours I’ve spent in a car in a long time. Fueled by adrenalin, we practically flew up – not fast, but it was a pretty easy ride even through Chicago.

And here we are! Madison. We all slept hard and long. We had a very slow day on Saturday and I expect that we will have another one Sunday. I grieve a little bit about the dear friends left in Indy. I hope to be in touch. Email and cell phones are wonderful at that.

patiently waiting . . . .

Okay, I am waiting patiently. I am pantiently waiting. Patiently, I am waiting. Waiting, I am patient. Waiting patiently I am. Am waiting, I patient. AAaaaaah!

Yeah, no patience at all. And it is raining, hard, and the kind of rain that is all day. Julia is playing with her blue clay, only asking me to make what she is not sure of. "Mommy make a yak." When I finish it, she improves it. Sometimes she doesn't wait for me to finish her assignment, she takes it from my hands and does a better job. She is so much more three dimentional than I am. It is nice of her to include me in her work. Do yaks have tails?

Oh, we were all so grumpy this weekend. It was not easy halting our search for that exciting home that we thought we could spend our lives in, and look for what would do and what was a good investment, AND stay within the school district that we like. This is the first house hunt in which our offers have been rejected and we've lost houses, so the getting back on the horse stuff is challenging. I am proud of all of us for making it through, but whew! I am glad it is over.

Over. Well, I hope so.

Also, waiting for the inspection on the Indy house. I am so hoping that our Buyers don't demand us to fix anything major or pull our price down.

Yes, stress has gotten to me.

Home

I have been playing with this new blog now and then for a few months without really doing enough to activate it. And so I'm just going to do it. Welcome to anyone who has moved over from Waiting for Hari. Yes, we have our girl and we are embarking on so much more -- David as Clerk of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Cheshire's adventures in Spain and Bolivia and her final year of college, and this move to Wisconsin. I am still feeling so very much in transition but I guess more along the process of transition than I have been.

Free fall from Indy to Madison. The sideways move west and north.


After weeks and weeks of cleaning and fixing and weeding and mulching, we finally put the For Sale sign in the yard last Sunday. Of course, Julia had to make sure that the sign worked, and that anyone could take a flyer. No kid proof lock on the "infor-tube" but those are clearly meant to keep only the grownups out. In the last three days, people have taken about 25 flyers. We have gotten two calls for appointments on Saturday. We are doing an open house on Sunday and St. Joseph does his work, we will have an offer by the end of the weekend.

On other fronts, Julia is doing her part to find us a new home. She considered something like what her Aunt Barbara is building. Julia likes those plastic logs and the built-in table.

Another option is something much more traditional. The shutters really turn her on.

Julia is having a bit of a hard time without Daddy being home. She had trouble getting into her classroom and once again has trouble with transitions.


Julia's firsts for the week are -- she dressed herself the other day. I've known that she could do this but she hasn't volunteered. She likes the attention and the personal care. I don't mind giving her this. She will decide to be independent when she is ready. Julia also has been going through the word books that we have. It is amazing how many nouns she knows. She is still have lots of trouble with prepositions.