Rest In Peace.

We found out this week that our elderly neighbor passed away.

He hadn't lived in his house for over a year -- he'd been moved to a home after a couple of incidents at his house where his "nurse"(the redneck neighbor's mother) was unable to help him or just flat out wasn't there -- but he'd been our neighbor for the first three years of living here, honestly the hardest three years of us being a family.

He was kind and understanding, funny, and loved to sit and talk. He thought Kiedis was a hoot as a baby with his funny little scoot (before we fully understood his spinal issues), and laughed and laughed at newborn Tova's red hair. He told great stories, about his family and his life, about the neighborhood, and about the neighbors both past and present. 

He always told me that he kept his door unlocked if I was ever in any trouble when I was alone at the house, and to never hesitate to ask for help. Sure enough, when I locked myself out of the house with an one-year old Kiedis still inside, he was there with a landline and a drink of water to calm my nerves, and when Kyle and I were going through the almost-divorce, he kept an eye out and gave me detailed notes of the comings and goings of everyone while I was not living in my home without me saying as much as a word.

We took him meals occasionally and spent many summer evenings on his front stoop, Kiedis playing with the neighborhood cats in the grass, just talking about nothing in particular at all. I sat with him after his wife passed and listened to him talk about the intricacies of aging in a partnership and the end of life kind of things I don't think many people my age, who are just beginning their lives and families, really consider. 

He had an awesome fat cat.

He was one of the best things about moving here, and he thought we were the best thing to happen to this house in a very long time.

We have already missed him for some time, but the finality of it breaks my heart whenever I glance out the dining room window into his empty kitchen, remembering the sound of his laugh and his kooky advice.

We don't really know what's going to happen to his house, now -- hell, I'm still worried about the cat he had with him in the assisted living, hoping his family or the staff didn't dump him or drop him off at a shelter -- but it's hard to shake the feeling that a black cloud has moved in just over the property line. The last time we got excited about someone buying an adjacent house and fixing it up, we were stuck with the renter neighbors, who have gotten progressively worse over their two-years-and-running engagement. I can't bear to think what that means for the house on the other side of us, in this still-shitty housing market with owners who I imagine will be motivated to sell and wannabe slumlords chomping at the bit for their next cash cow and all manner of person looking for dirt cheap rent no matter the condition of the house and holy shit, this is not what we signed up for five years ago.

But then again, five years ago we expected to be moving by now.

All of that aside, our elderly neighbor was a good, kind man to us, and we are incredibly and deeply saddened to hear of his passing -- even if it was a week after the funeral services, and only because our neighbor behind us managed to catch us outside and realized that the redneck neighbors probably hadn't said a word to us. Which is really a shame, because we would have shown up to those services and paid our respects because we did respect him.

I guess next time I'll set up a Google Alert for obits and keep myself informed. 

So, it's been a sad couple of days for us here at L'Casa. Our early homeowning days as we knew them have officially ended.

Now we just weather this next storm and hope for calmer seas ahead.

The Conundrum of L'Nursery Un, Part Three.

Okay, if you take into consideration Kiedis' unique complications when thinking about the need to repair and remodel his room, you can start to see how truly tenuous the situation could play out to be for us beyond the usual hiccups and surprises that come with what I would rank as a medium-scale project.

Aside from the obvious tactical issues that comes from moving a four-year-old out of his room for roughly a week (if we're lucky and everything goes smoothly) -- things like where he would sleep or where we would keep his furniture and things become potentially insurmountable roadblocks. We don't know if he understands enough to say, sleep on the floor in Tova's room and not pick fights with her all night or stay with us in our room and not keep us up all night -- though we do know he knows how to work the TV and the BluRay so the fold-our couch is certainly a no-go. But we also don't know if not being able to be in his room, the only room (other than ours) he's ever known will cause him to freak out for days on end. It's hard telling if that kind of albeit temporary yet fairly major transition will be too much for him to handle and cause regressions in anything from our hard-fought potty training to his language skills or social cue acquisition. 

And that's only taking one step of the process -- the load out -- and considering the possibilities. Once you move past that, then we have to think about what it'll be like for him that the room will be different when he is able to go back to it -- the floors will look and feel different, the walls might be different, the closet surely would be different -- and that has a heavy potential to short circuit his sensory processing. Even little details like wanting to get him new bedding because what he has is in shambles -- it's a huge gamble. He may hate the pattern or how the fabric feels or the way things are stitched together. The color combinations might be triggering, or just the fact that it's not what he currently has might be enough to break the floodgates with him.

And because he can't tell us, there's not really a way for us to know. Even taking him to the store to pick things out is unpredictable -- he'll pick something there only to scream at it when we get home, then scream days or weeks later for it after we've returned it because we chalked it up to a fail.

It's exhausting, in all honesty.

Then back in March, I caught the oven on fire. 

And replacing it took over half of what we'd set aside to budget for working on Kiedis' room this summer.

So we're stuck with a room that's literally falling apart a little boy who doesn't understand the damage he inflicts on practically everything, yet requires so much stability in his life that doing much of anything to remedy it has as much potential to obliterate his sense of rightness in the world as it does to better it.

Writing that out actually made me choke up. It's something I don't admit to myself, often. It's just how our lives are, that's all. But explaining it illustrates it's otherness, our otherness, and sometimes that's a hard load to bear.

So we were left with little option to make the space last (hopefully) just one more year other than bear down and rough it out.

Then West Elm put a rug I'd been eyeballing for the better part of a year on clearance. And we could afford it at the clearance price.

We talked about the plan for weeks, looking for little clues that one way or another would indicate what such a large change would do to Kiedis. We waited anxiously for the rug to arrive, and while Kiedis was gone at school one morning, I orchestrated one of the largest switcheroos our home has seen since we moved out of the upstairs bedroom in order to make it his nursery.

Meet Mira.

While Tova watched PBS, I moved the dining room table and chairs into the kitchen, vacuumed the zebra rug we'd in the dining room that we bought alongside the table and china hutch, rolled it up, shoved it aside, swept and mopped the wood floor, unrolled Mira, vacuumed it, and moved the dining room table and chairs back so everything looked as close to the same as possible for when he got home.

Then, I dragged that zebra rug upstairs to it's new home.

It felt like a big chance, but he'd had a much smaller zebra rug in his room as a baby, before we moved it to Tova's room, and it was really the only other space in the house that could hold such a large rug. After an incident with some oxygen bleach and some cat puke it has some faint discoloration on parts as well as approximately a zillion pulls from the cats using it as a scratching pad -- so while it's not in pristine condition and therefore I don't have to worry too much about him destroying it, it's still nice enough to not look like I threw some moldy old remnant down and called it a day. It kind of coordinates with the color scheme in there as it is now, and as an added bonus, it practically covers 75% of the floor that's popping up.

I just had to wait for him to come home from school to see if all that work was for naught.

Luckily for us, he loved it.

Both kids just ran in circles on it, rolled around, and generally enjoyed the new soft surface to play on.  On the third day, during one of his episodes, he started chanting "ahhh done zebuah, puddit away" and I told him no, that the zebra rug lived in his room now and that's how it has to be and he wailed pretty heavily for a while. The next day, I found him folding up the city playmat rug and putting it in his closet, so maybe the rug-on-rug pattern and color disparity was too much for him. He sets up his trains on the zebra rug just fine, and about half the time he'll pull his "cozee buhlaneket" off of his bed and take a nap on the floor all rolled up in it like a sleeping bag.

So we got away with it, for now. It doesn't solve many of our issues with needing to work on his room, but now we know that at least this once, he took a fairly major change in stride.

Such Great Heights.

You know what's really useful for being up on a ladder perched in your stairwell while applying a vinyl wall decal to the most precarious location in your house?

Fourth position.

At least for me.

So when we left off, I was climbing this ladder in my stairwell, boobs packed in with directions and the scraper tool and Kyle below the ladder, because I can sit 20 fit in the air on a one-inch thick metal hoop or climb up two pieces of fabric and do stunts on either, but put me on a ladder and I get all panicky and worried that I'm climbing to my untimely end. 

Spotters, children, always have a spotter.

Anyway, after following the directions to make a "hinge" to help place the decal and checking for it to be level, I got to work actually applying the decal:

Which was slightly more specific than I anticipated -- but nothing a little bit of re-positioning and some elbow grease couldn't immediately remedy.  Also of note, I WAS ON A LADDER ON THE STAIRS. Caution was my number one priority, not exertion of force.

Within five minutes, we were set:

So I dismounted from my perch and stepped back to admire the new(er) view:

For perspective, here's how the ladder was set up:

Hopefully now you can understand a bit of my trepidation. But now we know such things can be accomplished safely and at appropriate angles, so maybe we'll actually get around to touching up the paint splatters on that part of the ceiling. Maybe.

After a couple of days, though, I felt that the quote needed just a little extra oomph to really draw attention to it, so like any good DIYer/hoarder, I found an unoccupied frame laying around, spray painted it neon pink, and had Kyle help me get it up:

And now (with the addition of another spray painted frame waiting for the right contents -- I keep toying with getting a giant hashtag/number symbol and putting it in there because ha, hashtags) my family wall is feeling way more fleshed out and generally awesome.

I just need about 24 more canvases of Instagrams and to frame the word art Kyle keeps buying me and to find a couple other random bits to really take this up to full power, but for now I'm pretty stoked with how it's shaping up.

Thanks to Mindy for supplying me the decal, and don't forget to check out her Uppercase Living site so you too can decal the most precarious place in your home!

Or, you know, a less precarious place. That's really your call.