Progress can be a wonderful thing. but time can also work against you. We are making progress with the wedding plans which now is about five weeks away. It’s not the details of the wedding, it’s the preparations around the yard and house.
To ease the empty nest pains, I began several projects around the house. Too many. There were things I wanted to do because people will be staying with us for a couple of days for the wedding. Since the wedding will be outside, the yard has to be groomed and junk cleaned up throughout. My wonderful hubby is doing an excellent job and it doesn’t look like the same yard after the weekend.
I had a list of no less than eight inside projects which would have made it impossible to manage before the wedding. I have whittled the list down to something more manageable and am working my way through them. I finally decided what gets done is fine and what doesn’t will hold for another day.
I did get the front door painted over the weekend which was something I have been wanting to do now for a couple of years. The stain had worn off in about half of the door and it needed revitalizing.
Getting the paint, now that I look back on it, was an adventure itself. I only wanted a quart because I intended to only paint the front door. The color I chose was impossible because the can would overflow, even though the guy in the paint department did try. Plus they didn’t have a quart of base paint for the color I wanted.
In effort to speed up the process, I told the guy to just give me a gallon and I could paint the other exterior doors as well. I also picked out a different brand in hopes there wouldn’t be any problems.
The paint guy was very sweet and he was appreciative that I kept my cool and rolled with the flow. My husband, who was at home and knew I had just ran up town to get paint, was starting to panic though because it took over an hour for me to get back home. I had left my phone in the car so didn’t know he was worried.
There was a time I would have become very agitated but I am trying to be more patient and understanding. The paint guy didn’t do anything wrong and truth be known, they probably don’t sell that much paint, but I like shopping in town and it was definitely more convenient than going into Warner Robins. There are some things you just can’t help and getting angry doesn’t change or help those situations in the least.
There are those days when we are not on top of our game, or are feeling under the weather, that we would react differently. I am thankful this day was not one of those days for me.
With each weekend that passes and the weather is good, we are marking things off our to do list. We have repainted Cally’s old room which we are making into an office/prayer room. We are going to refloor and have ordered the flooring. I stripped a bathroom of wallpaper which turned into a nightmare. I had removed wallpaper from a hall a year or so ago and it was not that big of a deal, but the wallpaper in the bathroom was a completely different story. Once removed we discovered that the sheetrock had been put up backward which creates a new problem. My husband loves textured walls and so because of this nightmare, I have agreed to let him texture it before I paint it. I am not crazy about the texture and it soaks up the paint but it is the easiest and fastest solution in this case, so I will live with it.
David and I both have discovered that we can’t stay focused and that in itself is a problem. We move on to the next project, jumping back and forth without finishing the first one. I am determined to finish one thing at a time from here on out. It takes some effort though. I don’t know if this has something to do with age or not, or that fact that we have so much to do, but staying focused has seemed to get worse lately.
All of the projects help keep your mind off the fact, that your last child has grown up. It hasn’t been that bad though as we see them almost every day and our furbaby has been babysitting the granddog regularly. There are still things for them to move from our house to theirs. That is going to be an ongoing project for a while since you can only move a box or two a day after work without draining all your energy.
Life, I have always said, is an adventure. There’s something new every day and we can always find things for which we can be thankful. There is a circle of life and that’s the way it was meant to be for us. We can accept or we can wallow in sorrow. It’s up to us which way we choose and I choose the adventure and to keep rolling with the flow. One day it will all come to an end and we will make our journey to our heavenly home. So enjoy the journey. Blessings to each of you.©2016

VICTORIA SIMMONS is an author, columnist, motivational speaker, minister and publisher of The Georgia Post/Byron Buzz. Contact her at vsimmons54@gmail.com