twins Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Kristen Anne Glover

Love at First House

This is the way our house looked when I first saw it.

It was five years ago, and I had just found out I was expecting twins. That meant we would soon have a family of seven living in a two bedroom apartment in the downstairs of Jeff’s parents’ house.

It was time to move. But rent was more expensive than a mortgage, so with fear and trembling, I set about trying to find the perfect house. We needed something big enough for a (quickly) growing family but affordable enough for our one-income household.

It was a tough challenge. The Seattle-area housing market was super inflated, even though the housing crisis had already begun. Finding a house under $300,000 was a trick. Finding one in decent shape and in a good part of town was practically impossible.

I should know. I looked at a lot of houses. Some of them were downright scary. The ones that weren’t were far too small or on the wrong side of town or so close together, you could stand in your kitchen and look into your neighbor’s house and tell them they were adding too much salt to their rigatoni.

For a girl who has almost always lived in the country, that made me feel claustrophobic and squirmy and a little nauseous. I need space. Five kids need space.

I just didn’t think I would find it for us.

When I walked into this house, I knew I had.

The view took my breath away. I could see those mountains from four windows in the living room. I could see them from the kitchen sink and from the living room couch and from the dining room table.

It was love at first house.

But, this house needed a lot of work. We bought it because it had a lot of potential, and at the time, the price was very reasonable compared to other houses like it on the market. But it needed work. Did I mention that already? Because it did. It needed a lot of work. So much work. This was not one of those homes that would just appreciate while we slept.

Nope, this house was going to take some serious elbow grease.

For one thing, the siding was rotting in places and everything in the house screamed of fast, cheap construction. I mean, I’m not expert, but I’m pretty sure stick-on floor tiles are not the definition of quality.

The most quality thing about this bathroom was the toilet paper. Kirkland brand. Nice.

We set about changing every single thing. We did it over the course of five years because according to all the charts, we were impoverished. I know. Who makes these charts?

Impoverished or not, we had to do it on the cheap because five kids eat a lot, so we scoured the area for inexpensive building supplies and materials and begged cheap labor off friends and family. Chances are, if you came over for dinner, you ended up painting something before you left.

Sorry about that.

For instance, you might have helped us paint the outside of our house, which now looks like this:

Hold on–don’t scroll up. Let me make it easy on you. I’ve got a side-by-side shot right here:

The trees sure have gotten bigger! But you’re supposed to be looking at the house. Doesn’t it look cozy?

But wait. It gets better.

I already mentioned how when we bought the house, the siding was bad. You can see how the previous owners tried to patch things up with a lovely piece of sponge-painted drywall nailed under the deck.

So sneaky.

We spent the entire summer of our first year in the house repairing siding. Well, I spent most of the first summer in our house on bed rest. I’m using the term “we” loosely, like when I say “We gave birth to twins that August,” which, as I recall, was pretty much a one-woman gig.

So. “We” cut out and replaced the bad siding and trimmed out all the windows and any exposed seems. Then, Jeff went around and caulked every. single. seam and every. single. nail hole around every. single. square inch of the house. Using his fingers. It took forever. He bled.

But, he saved the siding from any further damage. In fact, it was just inspected again for the first time since we bought it and came back with an excellent bill of health.

That’s my guy.

Part of the reason the siding has fared so well (besides Jeff’s sacrificial use of his body in applying caulk) is because we painted the house with a high-quality paint. At first, it made me choke when I heard how much it cost. Seriously? Paint can cost more per gallon than a Starbucks triple latte? Well, I never. It was good paint, though, and we needed good paint because the siding is exposed to lots of moisture for about nine months out of every single year (you mean it rains in Seattle?)

Not only that, but when the sun decides to come out sometime in mid-August, our siding gets a direct hit.

We live in a very conflicted part of the country.

So, we bought the paint, and it has held up beautifully. I will never again balk at buying good exterior paint because it still looks brand new.

I took this photo yesterday, nearly 3 years after we painted the house. It still looks perfect.

We chose a darker shade of grey and added an even darker accent color. Can you see it above the windows? I was nervous about adding the extra-dark color, but I love it. It makes the trim pop and the whole house look neat and tidy.

On the outside, at least. Ahem.

We also added a new front door. We were able to find solid wood doors at a liquidation store, so over time, we replaced every single door in the house. The original front door was moved to the back to replace an even worse door on what is now Jeff’s office.

This exterior door cost $40. I’m telling you, God loves us.

I think it’s a huge improvement, considering we started with this:

That was $40 well-spent.

I also made some funky house numbers out of some leftover slate tiles from our bathroom project (you’ll see how we banished the stick-on tiles another day).

I love my house numbers, even though they look a little bit like they were created by a fifth-grader in the Craft Cabin of some summer camp in Wisconsin.

People think Faith made those for me, and I say, “Didn’t she do a great job?” because people like my weird house numbers better when they think they were created by a ten-year-old instead of a twenty-nine year old.

Or someone a teensy bit older than that.

Also, I know I probably shouldn’t put my house numbers online, but we’re moving and our house is listed for all the world to see anyway. Besides, if you come to my house with evil intent, I have five children and we have booby trapped the house with sharp, pointy Legos. While you are dancing around the living room with sharp, pointy Legos imbedded in your feet, they will climb on your back and call you a horsey and bombard you with a million questions about what life is like in prison.

I kid you not.

Moving right along.

You can see by the pictures that we added a lot of landscaping. Many of the flowers were donated from friends’ gardens. Most of the others came from a local nursery. I have scoured their “Take Me Home” table and 50% off sales for the past five years and have come home with many treasures that looked half-dead but weren’t. That allowed me to turn our yard from this:

into this:

Notice, I didn’t save that wagon wheel and we don’t even talk about what happened to that stacked frog “sculpture.”

But I did save the clematis that was already here. It is almost done blooming now, but it’s one of my favorite plants in the yard. Most of the others, including the fruit trees and berry bushes, we added ourselves.

My house is always full of flowers I picked from my yard, and the kids eat their way through the landscape all summer long.

It took us a few years before everything looked that beautiful, however. For instance, the side yard was basically a gravel/mud pit for most of the time we lived here. Originally, it looked like this:

And occasionally, it looked like this:

Or even this:

Just keepin’ it real, people.

This spring, we finally transformed it into this:

It was my father-in-law’s idea to mulch back there. We were going to level out the ground and put plantings in, but the mulch worked so much better. They even came and helped weed, lug mulch, and dig holes in rock-hard dirt. I swear, someone used to park an RV right there.

But it was worth it because it turned out so well. Sometimes, I come outside just to look at my shade garden. The kids like to skip across the stepping-stones, which we got for some ridiculous price at Lowe’s because the teller couldn’t find the price tag.

Which brings me to a word of caution. God does stuff like that for us all the time. So, if you own some kind of home improvement place and we walk into your store, there’s a good chance you’ll just end up giving us stuff. You won’t know why, you’ll just find yourself saying things like, “I don’t know how much a 2×4 costs. Just take it.”

Consider yourselves warned.

The entrance to the shade garden is an arbor I designed and built one year with Jeff’s help. It was a Mother’s Day present because he really didn’t want an arbor there. He wanted to be able to park things–manly things–beside the house. But he loves me. And he didn’t have a Mother’s Day present.

I win!

I planted grapes by my Mother’s Day Arbor because I have no idea how to prune the renegade grapes that are growing all over the arbor you can (barely) see toward the back corner of the yard.

Besides, we love grapes, as you can see by some of the harvest we’ve gotten in past years.

Once the side yard was completed, Jeff went to work on the back yard. He rebuilt the retaining walls and added steps because having a muddy Slip ‘n Slide down the backyard probably voids our homeowner’s insurance.

Although, according to all the neighbor kids, it was way cool.

When we first purchased the house, the back yard looked like this (and yes, that really is a slide off the back porch):

This is the way the it looked half-way through the project when Jeff came in and collapsed onto the couch in exhaustion:

And this is the way it looked when he was all done and I kissed him over and over again because it turned out so well:

My guy did such a great job, I’ve got to show you the before and after one more time.

If I could whistle in print, I would.

You probably notice the window in the after picture that wasn’t in the before picture. Well, that’s a little surprise waiting for you when I take you on a tour of the inside of our house.

Because you DO want to see the inside, right?

Join me next time! There is so much more to see, and I can’t wait to take you along!

Red Hair Like Me

100 Days of Motherhood: 35

Mom, can I sit on your lap?” Paul asks, stroking my arm.

His face looks a little more big-boy than I remember because just yesterday, Daddy took a scissors and snipped until bright red curls covered the kitchen floor. It was necessary because the boy could barely see.

But I’m partial to bright red curls and baby-faced boys, and I can’t help feeling a little sorry about how grown-up he looks.

“You want to cuddle with me?” I say to the grey-blue eyes that look up at me.

Paul nods, making his face long in an attempt to look as pathetic as possible.

It works every time.

I nab him up into my lap and squeeze him tight. Paul’s dimple shows because I fell for his trick.

He drapes a lazy arm around my neck and says, “You smell adorbubble,” and gives me an impish smile that lifts up the freckles on his cheeks and makes me want to kiss them. I can’t resist that.

“Ack! Kisses!” he squeals, but he turns his cheek toward me instead of away.

We sit together rocking, we two. His hair tickles my nose and he strokes my arm and I think about how I have almost used up all the cuddle time I have been given because he is bigger today than he ever was before. Soon, he won’t fit on my lap. It is almost over, and I don’t want it to be over, not yet.

I wonder at how I’ve changed, how these five little people have worn away the parts that didn’t fit. When I first became a mother, the constant closeness with another human felt suffocating. Someone was on me all the time, and I was desperate to be able to carve out a little space in the world to be alone.

I’d listen to the clock in the hall and watch the birds fly outside the window while I waited, weighed down with nursing or a child who wouldn’t sleep and I’d think about how I couldn’t wait to put that baby down, shake out my arms, and be free.

Now here I am, holding on to this boy who loves to hold on to me, and I do not want to be free at all.

Time is funny that way. It wears you in. It makes things fit that once rubbed you raw.

Of all my children, it is Paul who has worn down my independence the most because it is Paul who lingers closest. It is Paul who is so unlike me in his need for nearness. It is Paul who makes me think I’ll miss these days when I can hardly get a moment to myself.

Soon, I will miss these days.

I stare at his face and try to remember the first time I saw him. It is a hazy dream because of the medication and the fierce lights of the operating room that made it hard to open my eyes, but if I try, I can be right there in an instant.

“This one has red hair!” the nurse exclaimed. Just seconds before, Paul’s twin had flown by my eyes. I had only a moment to stare in wonder at Micah before Paul came bellowing through, but that was long enough to know that Paul had red hair and Micah did not.

“Do any of your other kids have red hair?”

“No!” I said, and laughed out loud because I had always wanted a redhead, and it was just like God to give me that frivolous little gift just because, at the end, like a love note pressed into the hand when the good-byes are being said.

That red hair was just for me.

Paul knows it, and he holds it in his eyes like a secret. “We have red hair, right Mom?” he says, and grins with a grin that is two parts mischief and one part reckless, unbounded joy. He can’t hold in a giggle. It bubbles up from deep in his belly and ripples through the house.

I smile every time I hear it because that is Paul.

Paul who thanks God every night for the pretty horses and Jesus dying on the cross. Paul who once burst into tears in the middle of Rite Aid because Kya told him she wouldn’t marry him that day. Paul who can’t talk to me without touching me. Paul who wiggles and squirms next to me in church until I am exhausted and he is content because he knows we are close.

We are not very much alike that way, I’m afraid.

Sometimes, I step back when he reaches out for me. Sometimes, I tell him he must stop tugging on my pants. Sometimes, I tell him I want him to go outside.

Then he looks at me and says, “But Mom, if I go outside, you will be all-a-lonely,” and the mischief goes from his eyes and I know he’s aching for me because he is too little to know that we are different.

He can only see how we are the same. He wants us to be the same.

And I wonder at God who has the sense of humor to give me a boy with my red hair and a personality so unlike my own. It is the truer gift, I know, to give me a child who can’t let me indulge the selfishness and independence that is my tendency.

Because Paul has sharpened me, like iron to iron, and I have become a little less reclusive, a little less independent, a little less ready to shake out my arms and be free.

By the grace of God, we are becoming more the same.

In fact, I think I’d like to stay here for a while. Maybe there is time to linger a little longer with a little boy who has red hair just like me.

The White Crib

My first baby in the white crib

*100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: 34

I remember when we first found the crib. It had been tucked away in the attic of our seminary apartment building and forgotten. We were the supervisors of the building, so when no one claimed it, my husband brought it home because my swelling belly reminded him that we were going to need it.

All the parts were there, so we cleaned it and set it up in the walk-in closet of our one-bedroom apartment because there was nowhere else to put a crib. I cried when I saw it and shut the closet door. I was not ready for what that crib represented.

Just a few months later, my first little baby was asleep in that crib. I would stand there next to her and watch her sleep, rolling the word “daughter” around in my mind as if to make the idea less foreign and more real. Some things just take time, I learned. But I didn’t know it then.

There was another baby soon, and another—enough to dull the edges of early motherhood until it did not feel strange to call another person mine.

Every single one of my babies slept in the simple white crib with the arched wood ends and the wheels that liked to fall off if I tried to move it. There were scratchy little teeth marks on the railings from slobbery, teething toddlers and places where the paint had been chipped off by Matchbox car wheels when the twins were supposed to be sleeping, but weren’t.

Years passed the way years do, and it came time to take the crib apart and move the twins into real beds. But I couldn’t do it. I kept them in their cribs even though I often found that Paul had climbed in with Micah. Once or twice, he even got his fat little leg pinned against the wall as he tried to make his escape, and once or twice, he even fell headlong onto the carpet and Micah had to tattle all about it in pantomime because he couldn’t say all the words for “That fool tried it again.”

They needed a real bed, and I knew it.

But there was that crib. The crib that held all the babies that softened my independent, selfish heart into the heart of a mother. How different I had become over the course of the years. How different it felt to set up that crib for the first time than it did to take it down for the last time!

The last time.

That was the thing. Every other time the crib had been vacated, it was because a new baby was getting too big to sleep in the bedroom with me. A new baby needed the spot occupied by a now-big-brother or sister. A new baby had come into the home.

But these little babies stretched up and thinned out and turned into little men right before my very eyes, and there were no more little babies to take their place. There aren’t going to be any more babies.

I took a screwdriver to the old white crib with the scratchy teeth marks and the chipped paint and the railings where five little babies had learned to stand up before they had learned to sit back down.

And I cried hot, mama tears for all of it.

My husband walked by and crinkled up his eyes at me and wrapped me up in a hug because I really am the most psychotic person on the planet.

The white crib has stayed in the garage next to a gnarly old bookcase that needs some attention. I came across it this weekend while I was attempting to organize and straighten out and clean up all the stuff that has piled up in this house. “You should sell that,” my husband said.

I should.

But I am the kind of mother who likes to keep the things that remind me of where I’ve been and what God has done. That simple white crib represents many years of God at work in my life. It is a symbol of my stubbornness and my redemption and the incredible mercy of God. It seems as if things like that should be set up and looked at and remembered. But you can’t very well keep an old white crib forever.

Or can you?

My mind started spinning when I saw the crib in the garage, and while I really didn’t intend to keep it, a crazy idea came into my head. Perhaps I could set up a stone of remembrance in the form of an old white crib. Perhaps I could find a way to keep a memory of the incredible miracle of God in my life. Perhaps the old white crib was not quite ready to move on.

Join me tomorrow to see what became of the crib I couldn’t seem to give away.

My last baby in the white crib

« Previous Page