Four sweet little boys sitting down at the table to have an after-school snack together.
Having races at the bus stop waiting for Peter to come home
Cousins having a pre-meet-and-greet. This was June 19, so all three had a little over a month left to cook before we could meet them!
Nate having fun running through the sprinkler on a hot day... the adults are having fun laughing at his too-big-shorts that keep falling down
Working with trucks, shovels, buckets, and pine needles/leaves kept these boys busy for a long time on our driveway. Little Stephen is looking on from the living room window, dreaming of the day when he can join them!
Me too! Me too! He was just pulling himself up to standing at this point and very pleased to be able to look out the window
We celebrated Stephen's first birthday at Mom and Dad M's place. It was Father's Day weekend again, so we were treated to the airshow, which has always been something special about where they live. I especially appreciate it now that I'm not feeling the need to study for exams when fighter jets or the Snow Birds are screaming overhead. Happy birthday to our littlest guy!
Boxes, boxes and more boxes in the living room. Packing up a house is a really big job, never mind the prospect of leaving a community behind where you feel very much at home. Looking back on these packing and moving pictures is painful for me - don't get me wrong, I know we are in a good place now, but I really, really miss where we were and the people we were close to. However, I definitely don't miss the chaos of those months.
A snapshot of the kitchen, getting less and less convenient as the days went by as more and more things got packed up. I had purchased a few notebooks for the boys to draw or colour or write in so that we wouldn't have so many papers floating all over the place. This was such a fantastic idea - those notebooks are so fun to flip through and see what inspires their creativity at this stage in their lives.
And then we got possession of the new house! We decided to get the bedrooms painted and re-carpeted before moving day so that we wouldn't have to move that furniture around afterwards to get those jobs done. It was a lot of work late into the night, and we were very thankful to have Mom and Dad M's help with the task. The memories of this day are also bittersweet. We were woken up early in the morning with the news that my Grandma (Dad's mom) had passed away. She was 91 and had been struggling with her health in the weeks leading up to her graduation to glory. She was the last remaining grandparent on my side of the family, and she will be missed. Memories that quickly come to mind are Grandma's laugh, her competitive Scrabble skills, the Purple Party, playing pool and square dancing. I have a picture of her scraping wallpaper off the walls of our first house shortly after we moved in - she had a good amount of spunk and although we had many good-natured laughs about her doughy pancakes, she was a sweet lady with a good heart. Dad and Mom left for British Columbia early the next week to attend the funeral and spend some time with the family.
This room almost required sunglasses when we first got the house - it was getting around to World Cup time so perhaps the vibrant Dutch Orange in the older boys' room was somewhat appropriate, but to be truthful we're only soccer fans at World Cup time, so to keep the orange would have been a little silly. It was so much more calming once the room had been transformed to a cool grey with a blue accent wall.
Dad cut the grass while we were painting, and thought he ran over a rabbit in the lawn. Turns out he actually ran over his favorite Grundy Lake hat, and we had a good chuckle over it! Dad was a little sad about losing his hat though.
Ahhhh, that's better. Carpet is installed, painting is done in the bedrooms, and the eyes no longer hurt from the brightness!
A few weeks later we conquered the orange kitchen, but this is the pre-painted, pre-moved-in state. It wasn't quite as vibrant as the bedroom, but there were too many different shades of this-and-that going on in here.
We woke up early on Move-In day to make our way back to St. Catharines one last time to pack up the house. Looking at this picture makes me want a coffee really badly.
We rented the largest U-Haul that you can drive without a trucker's license. We thought initially that it was way too big, but as the truck-packing progressed, we started to get quite worried that there was no way things were going to fit in. At one point in the late afternoon Mike was on the phone trying to find a trailer to pull behind us, but all the rental locations were closing for the day. The men who helped us load up were absolutely amazing at packing everything with maximum efficiency, and with a few family vans loaded up and one friend's pick-up truck, the job got done. I was very thankful for an extremely pleasant day weather-wise - a blessing that can easily be overlooked, but loading up a truck in the rain would have been miserable.
A hive of activity at the house. I didn't do a tally of how many people were there to help us out, but we really, really appreciated all the willing helpers who came out to lend us a hand. They did such a wonderful job, and in a way it was one last send-off from our church community. I have to admit I am having a hard time looking through these photos and reflecting on them - this was an extremely emotional time and it brings it all back again so vividly.
One last photo of the backyard. There were many good times had here: children playing in the huge sandbox, watching Port Dalhousie fireworks from the deck, family get-togethers, construction projects, BBQs with friends.
We drove, probably not so safely in our sleep-deprived state (there's only so much that coffee can do) back to our new home that evening and parked the truck in the driveway with all our worldly possessions. In the morning, a crew of men from the church and school community arrived to help us unload the truck and move things into their approximate place in our new home. It was a hive of activity, and we greatly appreciated having so much help from familiar and not-so-familiar faces. It was a reassuring initial welcome from this new group of people who we are slowly getting to know better. And that brings us to the end of June!
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