Hanging out with Meeka. We took backstage to her new favorite person for the week.
It was great to have them here, for real. FaceTime can only do so much. We spent a day in Sedona. John even came along on his only day off - that's love. Especially with the crazy long days he's been working. My mom wanted to take a Pink Jeep Tour, and it was pretty incredible.
All of us with the pink Jeep
We got to see a part of Sedona you can't see from the main roads, and drive right on some rocky formations. It was a super bumpy ride during parts. I had a flashback to the vacation where we rented a boat and my dad throttled it full-speed - my mom had pretty much the same reaction to both of these events. In my mom's book: pro - getting gorgeous views of Sedona, con - getting bumped around.
It's interesting how conscious they are of their impact on the environment; the tour company limits the number of vehicles that can drive the road each day to prolong its use. You can't say that about most tourist destinations. Also, there were a few intelligent people we saw who tried to drive their own vehicle (read: not off-road capable) back this route.
The rest of their time in Phoenix was spent hanging out by the pool, trying some restaurants in Phoenix, and trying to fix some items around the house. :) What are dads for? We attempted to fix the pool light, which had a deteriorating seal and was filled with water. A new seal, some caulking adhesive, a new light bulb, and voila! It still didn't work. We have yet to pull it back out to figure out what to do next. We did finally receive a proper ladder, now that we had access to a car that could fit one. No more borrowing the neighbor lady's rusted ladder! (Seriously, who had to borrow a ladder from their 85-year-old neighbor? This girl.)
Also, we got to share dinner with my uncle who was in town for a business trip...that just happened to be while my parents were in town. Fun times.
The reason my parents drove out to see me instead of the of-so-much-quicker flying option? They were bringing me all the "stuff" belonging to me from their house. This included photos, keepsakes, things I deemed keepable as a kid, my trumpet, wedding dress, and my grandma's sewing machine. After they left, I spent an exhaustive three days going through box after box of items. There were a lot of smiles at notes I found, pictures, drawings, cards, etc. There was extensive debate about what to keep. I am a bit of a sentiment-holic, but I am also repulsed by a lot of junk/clutter. Hence the dilemma. I starting looking through it as objectively as possible, asking myself:
1) Would my children care about looking at this? If I wouldn't care to see my parents' version of this, it probably wasn't worth keeping.
2) Is it still meaningful to me now? Notes from someone in high school that I don't even talk to anymore are probably not worth keeping.
And so the purging began. It didn't begin huge (4 boxes of loose items), and it didn't end much smaller (3 bins), but I felt a tremendous relief to have it organized together. This included collating what I saved in high school with what my parents saved from high school and so on.
Top 5 Interesting Tosses:
1. Baby teeth
2. First tuition statement from BGSU (thanks, Dad...what statement were you trying to make?)
3. Origami box full of notes passed from Megan Molleran in eighth grade, complete with cryptograms we made up for each other
4. Preschool self portrait
5. Teacher thank-you notes
Top 5 Interesting Keeps:
1. Mom's log of labor, including contraction notes
2. Judge's scoring forms for short story entry in Overture Awards in high school
3. Preschool class pictures where mom meticulously wrote each person's name on the back...so I can see the mini versions of people I went to grade school with
4. A painted pottery piece by Jessica (at a very early age) that has a musical button that plays "Send in the Clowns"
5. Fourth grade poem book along with my own poem book creation that summer
I kept my journals and notebooks because I love seeing the stories I wrote as a child. In second or third grade, I became "pen pals" with a classmate, Danielle. I say "pen pals" loosely because we lived five minutes away from each other and saw each other every day in school. But for a good year, we wrote back and forth to each other and even wrote a story together. Each person would write a portion, usually leaving a cliff hanger for the other person to pick up on. I remember ripping open her letters to read her latest addition to our story and trying to top it in suspense. Later (I would guess sixth grade), I took the story line and loosely drew it out into a new story. I filled an entire notebook writing that story, although I never ended it.
So my days have been consumed making an absolute mess of the living room, then sorting it all out and boxing it away. I wanted to bring the ladder in and possibly store these boxes in the attic, but I was stopped by the presence of one of these lovely beetles in our garage.
Not my actual photo, but these suckers are frickin' huge! For those interested in not being able to sleep at night, you can research more about the palo verde beetle. I like to think Pepper would protect us from this beetle if one ever managed to get in. And then I would build a glass box in which to live out the remainder of the summer.
I do NOT want to encounter one of those falling on my head as I'm balancing on a ladder. So I immediately nixed the idea of exploring the tiny attic space. I still have yet to see our attic. I couldn't make it to the home inspection, so John has been able to see much more of our house than me. At this rate, I may never see the attic.
So, the items were tucked away in the spare bedroom closet, and I have again turned my head to creating new items to list on Etsy. I have a feeling this store is going to be near impossible to keep up during the school year. We shall cross that bridge sooner than later...first day of school starts August 12 with the kiddos!
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