Thoughts at 4am

We bought our house 11 years ago next month. It’s a cute little split level in a great neighborhood with a lot of charm. It has a big back yard and four bedrooms. We painted every square inch of this house, including the baseboards and ceilings before we moved in with two very specific exceptions. The two spare rooms upstairs were left “as is.” I won’t say we were expecting that those two rooms would become our babies’ rooms, but there was hope that at least one would. So we held off on painting those rooms…until.

I never liked that the house had just a one-car garage, but there was a driveway and plenty of street parking, so I got used to the fact that the garage would be more of a storage and workshop area instead of housing a car. After all, we’d bought a beast of an SUV with the very same “hopes” of needing lots of car seat space and trunk room to accompany what families of four typically need and use.

We later painted one of those two rooms a beautiful robin’s egg blue complete with a sunshine yellow closet interior. That room would become Kate’s bedroom and the garage became much more than just a workshop for Daddy’s tools. It housed our gigantic stroller, push cars and sidewalk chalk. It was where we shed muddy boots, sandy toys and dinosaur umbrellas.

We always hoped we’d have a reason to freshen up that second room, but never did. And that garage now houses actual storage racks that we bought with storage bins built to fit. Those bins hold decorations organized by season for Kate’s cemetery plot. And that beast of an SUV doesn’t carry a car seat or anything in the trunk except a cemetery readiness bin with gardening tools, spare batteries for various decorations and a blanket where I can spread out when I visit.

11 years ago, we closed on this house overwhelmed by the space we’d need to fill. It’s not lost on me that now, 11 years later, we are again…