Thor Comes Home - And We Hit The Road

Hey y'all -

Late one night, almost a year to the day since he first said goodbye, your dad came walking back up the driveway. I've never been so excited and overwhelmed to see someone in my life. We hugged him and clapped and Hagen asked to see his "army suit," and Laney started telling him about the shark book she'd just finished reading.

Photos by Laney:

There's video of his emotional homecoming, but I'm not going to post it because it contains lots of kissing and Laney says kissing is gross and I'm not going to argue with her. 

_____

And then this happened! See if you can keep up with this itinerary, because I'm not sure how we did it:

Your dad and I got to enjoy just a few days together at home, and then *I* had to leave for a video shoot in San Antonio for World Gym. Your dad likes to make fun of me because I go off and shoot 200+ hours of instructional fitness videos, then I come back to my own gym and walk around complaining "But I don't know what I should do." Maybe I should watch my own videos. But if I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: there's nothing more exhausting than a day spent watching other people exercise, while you stand behind a cameraman, enjoying your coffee. 

From San Antonio, I flew into Spokane where your dad picked me up in the truck and we went to see Garth Brooks in concert. He was only scheduled to perform one show, but tickets sold so quickly, he kept adding performances and your dad and I ended up seeing him on a Sunday afternoon at 3:00pm. Your dad kept making jokes about how we're certified old people to be so excited to see a show in the middle of the day. "Do you think we'll be able to make it to Cracker Barrel before bedtime?" he asked. 

The concert was pretty incredible; everything you may have heard about his ability to put on a show is true. Your dad is a big Garth fan, so it was a great "welcome home" for him to get to see the show.

Then who should we run into in our hotel but your uncle Joey, who was on his way through town doing the lights for the Mannheim Steamroller tour. We always love a good Joey sighting.

But wait - there's more!

Because from Spokane, your dad and I kept driving to Seattle. To make our kitchen budget work, we decided we needed to purchase our cabinets and countertops during the annual 30% off sale at our closest Ikea, so we took the truck - and our enormous shopping list - to Seattle, while Grandma Sue stayed home with you for a few days.

This is the restroom signage found throughout Pike Place Market, and I can't really understand what's happening, except it looks like the baby had a massive blowout and the dad is holding it like a contaminated specimen and the mom is sorta following behind, doing that passive-aggressive "If you want me to help, I can help, but it IS your turn, but if you need me..." 

Some people say if you want to test how strong your relationship is, you should take a long road trip together. I say road trips are for pansies, and here's what you should do instead:

1) Design a 2D kitchen plan that involves a lot of precise measurements and math with one spouse who is a professional scientist and mathematician and one spouse who says "But if it's flat, I can't see it, and it doesn't mean anything to me." You get a lot of this look:

2) Then, after you make your shopping list of the 400+ individual items required to build the kitchen you've just designed, go find them in a warehouse that looks like this:

3) Make sure you have enough Utrustas and Dinglefloopers and Kooorstas or whatever the hell these tiny Swedish parts are that will eventually hold your kitchen together, because you live seven hours away and there's no room for error.

4) Get home, and realize you're going to have to assemble this mess.

Welcome home, Thor. Thanks for still speaking to me. 

Love,

Brooke

Please Excuse Brooke From Blogging; She Had A Bit Of A Year

Hey, y'all -

You know how "Game of Thrones" makes its audience wait a year between seasons because it's so difficult to produce and they want to heighten anticipation as much as possible? That's exactly what I did with this blog! (Except not really on purpose and more because I kept running out of time, and I don't really have much of an audience, and maybe I should add some CGI dragons).

So here's what happened next, after Halloween 2017, which is when I think I left off. What a cliffhanger! Ahem.

Even though we lived in a perfectly lovely house that we had more or less just remodeled, I'd been keeping my eye out for something bigger. The house we were living in was 1200 sq ft with one bathroom, and while that was fine for the time being, I knew the kids would someday become teenagers (ugh) and need to spread out a little. Besides, I'll be damned if I'm going to wait in line to tinkle in my own house. I happened to see a listing for this strange little number in the middle of town and went to check it out. Y'all, it was turquoise. It had a basement apartment designed to resemble a log cabin. It was built in 1938, but then somebody had the idea to triple the size of it out the back end in 1968. From the front, it looks like a small cottage, and from the side, it looks like a never-ending sister-wife compound. Ugly carpet? Check! Wood paneling on the walls with no insulation, so if someone dropped a match, the whole place would go up like a firecracker? Check! BUT - It was exactly TWICE the size of the house we were living in, and cost the same... Probably because there was no kitchen. I mean, there was a room with a linoleum floor and holes where a sink could go, but nothing fancy like counters or appliances.

I walked through it a few times, and shot some video that I sent to Thor in Afghanistan. "What do you think?" I asked. "If you like it, let's get it," he said. Your dad's not one to get hung up on pesky details like missing kitchens or wonky floor plans.  I guess when you're living in a war zone in the Middle East, you don't get as bogged down by things like questionable electric panels.

We put in an offer and blah blah real estate mumbo jumbo, it was accepted and we were under contract.

Then, I set about selling our existing house by owner. I feel like a huge chunk of a successful real estate listing is marketing, and that's something I know a little about. So I took some pictures, made a flyer, put up a sign, launched a website and got the house its own Facebook account. It sold in 48 hours.

So with your dad still out of the country, we bought and sold a house. I know it sounds insane, but honestly, it was one of the best things we could have done, and here's why:

When your dad was deployed, he couldn't tell me much - if anything - about his day to day, but I knew it was awful. It was hard for me to talk to him in a way that would make him feel better about his mission because I didn't really understand it, and outside of shipping him almost-daily care packages, there wasn't much I could do to improve his situation.  That makes for some frustrating phone calls. But all of a sudden, with the new house, we had something positive to talk about; we could make plans for the near future and talk about how we were going to improve our new home. I know it sounds crazy, but I think it was a great mental health break for your dad to be able to go from drone warfare to "Which flooring do you like better?" and "Where should we move that breaker box?"

I guess I'm suggesting that purchasing a big old house that you'll be working on for years can make an excellent - though expensive - conversation starter! Try it!

Love,
Mom