Happy one-year, Home.

This weekend we celebrated being moved into our home for an entire year. One year! When I mentioned the date to Mr. Keller, we both simultaneously noted how hard those few months were before and after moving. We were still reeling from the remodel well into spring. It stretched us so much emotionally, which is strange because going into it, we had no idea that it would be so hard (and we didn't even do the actual work!). Go figure!

I'm so thankful for this home. It's so comforting to me, which is just what a home should be. It fits us so well right now. We wish we were in the country and if we were, we'd stay here a lot longer than we probably will, but for now, we're so content.

The weekend we moved in, Stacy had the boys. It was so, so cold (our first snowfall) and I was sick from the stress anyway, I just stood around and watched, feeling so helpless and overwhelmed. We weren't organized; we hadn't packed the majority of the things we needed to, yet here we were dumping things into the moving van to hurry and get it all done (even though the bathrooms at the new house weren't even finished and working yet!). Things kept getting broken. It was the worst! After a long, cold day, we returned the moving van and were so grubby the only place we felt comfortable going to dinner at was Perkins. It's funny to me that a year later, I still remember sitting across from Mr. Keller thinking: here we are, making this memory. I'll never forget thinking to myself how much I loved my husband. We had at least three cups of hot chocolate (we were so frozen!), burgers and berry pie, then we took hot showers at the old place and went to the new place and crashed our aching bodies into bed. Good times! And I'm still glad that's all over and that we lived to tell the tale.

--------------------------------------------

And now, a little stroll down memory lane. For the children.

Remember the time I waited two and half hours for the Home Depot paint department to mix the right color, which they still couldn't after several tries and then I returned over one thousand dollars of exterior and interior paint because I refused to deal with them any longer? Or the time I bought thirty-three different samples of gray paint (from Lowe's, folks) and painted each one on the wall trying to figure out which the right shade was and still ended up with a shade I can't stand...all through the whole house. Remember the time when the wrong carpet was installed in the basement and I had them come back and rip it all out and put the right color in? Or, the time during demo when we found out had been a mouse infestation and I had an honest-to-goodness panic attack (gasping, tears and all) worrying that we were going to move in and die of the Hanta virus. Then there was the time I went the rounds with Franklin (again) for messing up the carpet (again) and the carpet salesman sent me flowers and then later brought it up saying, but "BUT, I sent you flowers!", as if that mattered and meant they shouldn't have to fix their mistakes (oh, the rage!). Or the time when we moved in and lived there for three weeks without a finished kitchen and how tired we were of eating fast food for days on end! This house turned us gray. We almost died.