Remembering Our Apartment - Part 1

The Good

 It's strange, but I'm starting to feel all dreamy and nostalgic about our apartment. Never thought that could ever happen, ever, in a million years. This apartment was a bit like my personal hell, a prison filled with dreams unreachable. But somehow with the promise of light at the end of the tunnel, the bad is starting to fall away, and the good is lingering still.

I'm realizing that more and more in these final days. This is the apartment I brought both my babies home to. It contains the nursery I lovingly constructed for my very first baby boy, the kitchen where Oliver and his Grandpa baked together, the living room where we all danced together as a family to Christmas tunes and watched countless movies, and the bedroom where Matthew and I spent a good part of the beginning of our marriage.

So in honour of Ol' Blue, here are a few of the things we will lovingly remember.

Our apartment had some pretty cool walls. I'd always wanted blue walls my entire life, and finally we lived somewhere where we could paint and I sprung for it. It was calming and a bit grey, with just a touch of green to create a calm, spa-like mood (almost robin's egg-ish, only very very light.) And we didn't get sick of it once the entire time we lived here.

In the new house, we're thinking more of a neutral walls, vibrant accessories vibe, so we probably won't ever paint any walls blue again. Maybe grey or white, but probably not blue.

That's me and Oliver in front of the garage door, there. And in the winter time, it was nice to hop into a warm car and head out without having to heat it up first. Especially here in Canada, when winters are brutal enough.

Our new house actually doesn't have a garage, and it doesn't really have space to build one either, so we're going to have to bundle up, and work that command-start real good, but we don't mind. We've lived without a garage before, and we were perfectly fine.

If my Oliver really needed a place to stretch his legs, this yard stepped up to the task without breaking a sweat. An enormous lot surrounded by field and forest, this yard was perfect for basking in the sun, riding in a wagon, playing on a play structure, throwing a football around, and hosting photo shoot

The new house has a much smaller town yard, and actually has no trees or proper grass planted, since it's brand new. But the neighbouring yard is nothing but canola field, so that will definitely be a welcome familiar face to smile back at me whenever I gaze out. The other great thing about the new yard is that it will be all our own, so we won't have to worry about running into anyone else while we're out playing together as a family.

Our bathroom had a killer deep soaker bath tub. It didn't always, that feature was actually only installed half way through my second pregnancy (thank God!) and I really would have appreciated it for the first one. I got a lot of use out of it, and so did my sweet boys. All three of us fit in with room to spare, and you could fill it up so high you could almost completely immerse yourself up to your neck. Spacious and luxurious, that was one of my very favourite spots.

The new house actually has TWO bath tubs, since it has two full bathrooms (and a half-bath off the foyer) but neither of them are as deep as this puppy was. They aren't shallow by any stretch of the imagination, but I doubt I'll be able to soak myself up to my eyeballs.

This is a weird one.

Since we lived in a basement, with exposed ceiling beams, we actually installed some little metal hooks into the ceiling when Oliver was a baby. Why, you ask? Well...

The only way Oliver would fall asleep was by swinging his car seat (all 20 lbs. of it!) and it was getting to be really difficult, and actually pretty painful (sorry honey!) so Matt devised a solution and put hooks on the ceiling. Then he installed some heavy-duty wiring and some more hooks, and thus the car-seat-swing was born. Where we literally swung Oliver from the ceiling across the room. This didn't actually last long, and we ended up using it for an actual baby swing for a while, too (the kind intended to be hung from the branch of a tree or a play structure.) And then after that we could actually hook the jolly jumper from it, where Oliver would run and jump all day.

So it was a neat, very strange, feature that we probably won't be able to incorporate into our new house.

Because of the location of Matt's mom's farm yard, the water came from a well, was almost unlimited, and was 100% free (a word the Mennonite in me likes to hear a lot!) That meant long showers or baths, irresponsible dish washing once in a while, and as many pool fill-ups as we wanted without having to worry about racking up the water bill.

The new house definitely doesn't have well water, so we will be paying a regular water bill like the rest of the world, for the very first time in our married lives so that's going to be a new adventure. Matt's already trying to figure out how he can conserve water.

"What if I take my showers at the gym at work?" Oy.

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So you can see, it really wasn't all bad. There are definitely things we're looking forward to in the new house though, things we've never really had our entire married lives. But you'll hear more about those in Part 2 - The Bad coming up soon.

For memories sake it's nice looking at all of the great things about our first family home, and remembering to be grateful even when things aren't exactly how you'd like them to be. Matt and I are pretty sure that we only really reached our goals because we learned to be grateful for what we have, and we're learning more and more every day about the importance of it.

So stay tuned for the next post, in which I'll go into great detail about all of the things we won't be missing about our current soon-to-be-former residence.