Around the Dinner Table

I am a perfectionist, a neat freak, and control freak.

I know, I know. You're thinking, "Maaaaann, I wish I'd married her. Sounds like a charming, pleasant, laid back kind of gal."

Too bad. You missed your chance.

The upside is I get all our bills paid on time, my editor doesn't have to correct much when I turn in my stories, and you could eat dinner off our kitchen floor.

The downsides, oh, they are like numbering the stars. Or like numbering the June bugs Happy has eaten in the last two day: a lot.

What?

Just one of the downsides is I haven't wanted to have people over to our house until it's finished, just so, perfect. Like, after I scrape all the popcorn off the ceiling, repaint, tear up the 1980's carpet and lay down wood floors, replace the rotting trim, install crown molding, pull up all the weeds outside, hang stuff on the walls and replace all the generic pictures that came in the frames with pictures of our own, fabulous selves.

A week or so ago, our friends Andrew and Jenna invited us over to their house for dinner. It was so sweet, so thoughtful and so old-fashioned hospitable of them! We had such a great time. Jenna made tacos and smores bars, we sat around and chatted and looked at the adorable wardrobe accumulating for soon-to-be-born Baby Borne, and the boys went outside and made fires.

I left thinking, "We have to do this again!" You know, at their cute house. The one with decorations and pictures of people who actually live there in the frames. How many times could we eat there before they would start to wonder if we lived in a van or had 18 cats or really were the couple they thought they recognized on Hoarders.

Then I got to thinking. What we loved about that night with the Bornes was the fellowship, the sharing stories, the laughter, working together, whether in the kitchen or out in the shop. Jenna's home is precious, and she should be proud of it. The comfy surroundings added to the joy of the night, but it wasn't what made it. What truly made it was just being able to be loved on by our friends and enjoy time together. It was the act of Jenna and Andrew welcoming us into their home that warmed our hearts, the fact that the home was adorned so nicely and kept so well by Jenna was just a bonus. Besides, there are probably imperfections Jenna sees in her home that her guests would never notice. (Or, it just makes me feel better to think that.)

So I decided funky carpet, popcorn, junk room and all, I wanted to welcome the Bornes to our home and hopefully give them the same joy they gave us. So, last night, they joined us at the Haynes house for dinner.


Don't get me wrong, I went into manic mode and cleaned the house from top to bottom the day before they came. Tanner caught a dose of my crazy too. But it was nice to know I was cleaning it not so I could get a gold star on my OCD chart, but to make it welcoming for our friends. Life is to be shared after all! Faults and all, we're proud of our home. I'm proud of how hard Tanner has worked and how fiscally wise he's been so that we could afford this home. Mostly, I'm grateful for God blessing us with this house and such wonderful friends to welcome to it.


We made cheesy tortellini casserole (Tanner's favorite), Jenna brought a delicious spinach salad, and the boys grilled up some monster steaks. Butterscotch cookies warm out of the oven were enjoyed with fresh roasted coffee - Jenna roasted the raw beans that day! Us girls chatted around the dining room table and the boys played outside with Andrew's potato gun. From what I could tell, everyone was comfortable and happy, and no one noticed the creaky floorboard where we hide our collection of embalmed medical specimens.

JUST KIDDING!

We Bought a House Today

It's true. After work, Tanner and I went downtown to sign the papers and close on our first home!

Our first night in our first home

About four months ago, we started looking for a house in the Weatherford area. We wanted something with acreage for the horses, a yard for the dogs, and a decent house. Oh, and in a specific side of town and at an affordable price! It turns out that getting all of those stars to align is not aeasy. I was getting to the point where I was ready to sell the horses and all our possessions and move to a shanty in Maui.

Then, the perfect deal presented itself with all the criteria we were looking for. A brick home on 2 acres at the end of a quiet dead end road in the right rural area – and a bargain price. It took about a month for all the wheeling and dealing to go through. Offers, counter offers, inspections, repairs, approvals – it's all enough to make me want to puke. Tanner handled most of everything, for which I am sincerely and abundantly grateful. He is much more calm, confident and willing to relinquish control than I am.

Now that the process is finished, I'm a little shocked and so thankful that we have our first home! I am very humbled by how God has worked things for our good. Early in 2010, I lost a great job when the company relocated to Colorado. It was my first job, and my firs time to lose a job, which can be a little scary. I received a severance package though and was paid extra to stay on as a contractor until my replacement was hired. We were able to put all that money away and use it as the down payment on this home. I was blessed to find a new job with only a week layover in between and Tanner has been securely holding a really wonderful job in the natural gas industry here in Weatherford. With the down payment ready and the insanely low interest rate Tanner was able to secure, we were able to close and secure a monthly mortgage payment on a 15 year loan at only $18 more than we were paying each month in our rental.

And that's not even the best part. Most wonderful of all, we don't have to move. We bought the house that Tanner first rented in November of 2008 when he moved to Weatherford. We've been living in it as a married couple for the last year. We knew exactly what we were getting, good and bad, as buyers. We don't have to pack. We don't have to move. We don't have to unpack.

Our home (take during the fall)

The only thing left to do was celebrate. We hit up Montana's for fried pickles, chicken fried chicken, fried porkchop, mashed and baked taters, Texas toast and salad.

I'm not kidding.

At the restaurant, I asked Tanner if he would carry me over the threshold of our new home. He conveniently forgot and is passed out on the couch with Gladiator and spilled guts running soothingly on the TV.

It may be our first night in our "new" home, but some things will never change.

Things Girls Do: Pillow Talk

Girls like pillows. And lots of 'em. I'm no exception. I love a bed full of plush pillows. I'll stack those suckers half-way down the length of the bed. Why? HELLO! They look pretty. Even though I only get to enjoy their beauty for the 5-10 minutes I spend standing in my room while I change clothes before bed, that's reason enough. And, the few times I have the luxury of extra time to read for pleasure (GASP!), or on the rare occasion when Tanner refuses to forfeit the living room TV (cuz they only play Waterworld every 5 hours), those pillows are the perfect cushion and back-prop while reading or vegging-- how I love cuddling in a cocoon of pillows.

I finally got the European-sized pillows to go inside the remaining shams, fulfilling our darling decorative pillow family that came with our comforter set.The morning after Pillowpalooza 2009, something shocking happened. I discovered it when I came home from work. Tanner, who gets up after I've already left the house, had made the bed, excessive pillows and all. He didn't even make a comment about the new additions to the family. And then......

it never happened again.

Those pillows, as light and fluffy as they are, quickly broke his will to bed-make. I'm obsessive about a made bed -- if makes me feel at peace and complete. I don't like getting into an unmade bed. So, I politely informed Tanner, "It would mean a lot to me if you would make the bed before you left. I'll start feeding the horses in the morning (a chore he doesn't like) if it would help." [Tanner:] "Ummm, how about I just get up and out of bed before you leave so you can make the bed. I'll keep feeding the horses." [Me:] "But you'd have to get up, like, a hour earlier than you do now!" [Tanner:] "Yeahhh, that's fine."

Pillows? Yea, well, now Tanner thinks they're kinda dumb, "We just take them off every night." Sigh.

The Bed That Ate the World

Our first big purchase, and I mean BIG purchase as a married couple was our new KING-size bed. It was clearly evident from the start that Tanner's bed from college was not going to be good for our marriage. As I described earlier, Tanner can cause quite a commotion at night, striking all kinds of poses at my expense. Not only was the double bed too small to provide me a buffer, it sagged in the middle, forcing me to roll towards center, funneling me directly into the line of fire.

In reality, Tanner's crazy episodes are more infrequent occurrences than regular happenings, but space was still a priority for me when it came time to consider a new bed. Despite being abnormally affectionate and wanting constant physical contact for the 17 hours I'm awake (if Tanner would carry me in a BabyBjorn, I'd be totally happy), at night, I really don't like to be touched while I'm actually sleeping... at all. Cuddling while slumbering, no thanks. A cold toe brushing my leg, please no. A good bed-time snuggle while watching TV or chatting pre-sleep is cozy and lovely, but when it's time for REM, it's time for personal space. It sounds harsh, bitter, cold-hearted, I know -- but please believe me, I make up for it with uber-cuddling and mega-hugs and kisses at all other times.

SO, after much discussion and debate and back-and-forth about whether to buy a queen or a king, we settled on a king. One of our main priorities was finding one that would alleviate some of the back pain Tanner has each morning. After looking first at memory-foam mattresses, and then realizing a king would cost the same as a small yacht, we picked a Simmons, with individually-wrapped coils and a 4-inch layer of memory foam on top.
When the delivery men brought that sucker home and plopped it in our bedroom, Tanner and I pulled out the drafting paper and pencils and began designing an elaborate layout of catwalks and bridges to navigate through the room since it had been SWALLOWED by the blob bed.

Spanning the great divide.

I jest. We have a large master bed room, so the thing fit in there, but it is gigantic. I've appreciated the extra sleeping space and have been getting some nights of heavy, uninterrupted slumber. But, strangely enough, the bed has actually made me a bit more of an affectionate sleeper. With all this acreage to sleep in, I'm so spatially distant from my hubby -- I look to my side, over the fence, and a mile down the road, and there he is sleeping on the other side. At times, it's made me feel a little lonely and isolated, and I've actually found myself creeping through the neutral country, into the hostile territory, just to check in and see what's up. But... just like a traveler, I find myself thinking, "This place is nice to visit, but there's no place (and no sleep) like home." It's back to my side, and my antisocial, wonderful sleep.

My Worst Nightmare

My worst nightmare: nothing is organized, nothing has a "place," I can't find any of my belongings, too much stuff! OK, so I am being a little dramatic, but this picture does not even do justice to the black hole of clutter our house has become since we've unloaded all of my things and all of our new housewares. Every time I walk in the door, I hear that "duh-nuh, duh-nuh" Jaws music!

With me getting used to my lengthy commuting schedule, I haven't quite had the energy to tackle this beast (who's girth has spilled over into every room and hallway in the house) on the weeknights, so it looks we'll be walking through a maze of boxes and banging our shins into coffee table corners at least until this weekend, when Tanner and I will both be home. Since I'm one of the freaks who actually enjoys organizing, I'm really looking forward to this weekend of un-cluttering. It will be interesting to see who gets the bigger closet. Any votes? :)

The only family member who seems not to mind the clutter -- plenty of neat hiding places.