ready or not

The bells are ringing at the mission church calling people to Mass right now.

Mass begins at 12:05 each day, and I'm thinking of attending. I'm not Catholic. My mother once was, and my best good friend Brianna now is. I don't have plans for becoming Catholic. However, the idea of being with a group of people coming together for the same purpose really appeals to me right now.

Anyway.

My parents just left for the 13 hour drive home, Birdy is asleep and The Hoosband is at work. Or getting the car smog checked. Or something. Anyway, I'm alone in the apartment. I am really proud of myself--instead of wallowing in sadness and crying in bed, I began cleaning and putting our stuff away and getting our house closer towards being our home. As I was silently crying and wiping the table off, I realized that with that action--recognizing my sadness but deciding to do something productive instead of something indulgent--I fully became an adult. And now, more than any other time, I'm ready for that. I don't have family near by, or friends here. I have me. I have my little family. I'm going to be Ma (who never seemed to cry in the Little House books, but I'm sure that she did from time to time. Being a pioneer is hard). I'm going to take care of me and my little family. And I'm actually looking forward to that.


This last week has been a lot of fun and a lot of work. We've been to Ikea (YESSSSSS!!) and bought two items of furniture from the as-is section (oh sweet sweet as-is section--your small imperfections and hardware issues are no match for my father) along with some plants, some storage items, a pan of cinnamon rolls, a pot holder (the pot lids go on the wall now!) and a picture frame. When I say "we've bought," I mean my parents did. Those two are my favorites. :-)

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, and my parents, Hoosband, and Birdy and I went to the Monteray Bay Aquarium, Cannery Row (STEINBECK HEAVEN), and had a very nice and quite fancy dinner on the way home.


The Monteray Bay Aquarium is amazing--if you have the chance to go, it's worth it, even with adult prices being $30. The funny story about that is that we thought the prices were about $17 according to our guidebook. The book was, upon further inspection, published in 2003. We discovered this after we had driven an hour to oogle at the fishies, so we were kind of locked in to our choice. The price was made totally worth it when Birdy walked into the Outer Bay exhibit. You come in to a circular room, with a giant round aquarium above you. There is a school of herring swimming around the ceiling. Birdy, who doesn't have a lot of words yet, walked in and said, quite clearly, "oh, wow!" It was wicked sweet. The picture here doesn't do the room justice, but gives you an idea of what it looked like. The other nice thing about the aquarium was that many of the tanks went all the way down to the floor, so little kids like Birdy could still see the fish.

Back to the making the house a home thing--I was working on our kitchen and noticed that the only people we have pictures of on the fridge are the Cory family on our wedding day, The Hoosband's grandma and her husband, and wee Harrison. We love us some Cory family, but we have other friends we'd like to see every time we go in to the kitchen. Thus, I have a boon to ask of you, dear reader. Would you be able to mail us a photo of you and yours? We are far away from home and your smiling faces would make us feel closer. If you are interested, sent me an email at heather[underscore]brackett[at]hotmail[dot]com and I'll send you our address. Please replace the items in the brackets with the actual punctuation.

More to come, complete with pictures, in the following week.