When our ‘stuff’ did arrive I wanted to take the beds, table/chairs, and couch and tell them to keep all of our boxes. Unpacking is terrible. Unpacking with two maniac toddler boys is strangely similar to attempting to read a book when you are exhausted. You continue to read the same sentence of the same paragraph and after multiple attempts you just throw the book on the ground and go to sleep. I’ll be honest, there are still 2 full boxes in the boys’ room that I’m not remotely interested in unpacking and various boxes in the guest room closet and outdoor shed. I’m over it.
Our dogs showed up 3.5 weeks after we left Maryland after not eating a single bite of food during their cross country journey. We have old anxious Labradors and neither one of us was comfortable with putting them on a plane. I’m pretty sure they thought we had left them and my mom had sold them off to this over friendly stranger from Kentucky. We could call the driver to check on them. He was say odd things like: “they are a real gentle pair”, I would thank him for taking care of them, quickly get off the phone, and shake my head. Adam Sandler’s voice from Billy Madison going off in my head “What a weirdo!”
When people ask what it’s like to live in California I’m not exactly sure how to answer. Here’s my best shot at it…there are two notable differences to living in California….1) the weather 2) the diversity. The weather is surreal. We haven’t seen a single drop of rain since we moved here, it’s sunny and mid 70’s to 80 every day, and outside of some initial clouds in the morning there is rarely a cloudy sky. We are close enough to the coast to get a nice breeze off the Pacific and it feels like a Maryland fall or spring day every night here. We are super close mileage wise to the beach but realistically w/in 30 minutes of 4-5 different beaches. We are outside all of the time which suits our active lifestyle and the boy’s incessant requests to go outside and play!
The diversity was apparent from our first trip to the park on day #2. Our kids played with White, Black, Asian, Mexican, and Indian kids. In 20 minutes of play they were exposed to more diversity they had been exposed to in their whole lives. The awesome thing about kids is that they don’t see skin color…my kids have literally never asked me about the color of someone’s skin. When they describe a friend or someone on TV to me they could easily say, the black boy or girl but they don’t…they say, mommy, look at that person in the blue shirt. It makes me smile and it makes me sad that grown-ups or tv or shitty life experiences are to blame for discrimination.
It was one of the things about Maryland that worried us or conversely, one of the things that excited us about LA. Our neighborhood in Maryland had one black family and a bunch of white people. We talk to our kids all the time about different kinds of families….families with two daddies or two mommies or just grandparents or aunts or uncles raising kids. We tell them that all families are different and that’s what makes them special and unique. But in Maryland it was all lip service because 99% of families were white bread with a mommy and a daddy. The kids don’t even realize it now but for us it has been a refreshing change.
I admit…we are in the honeymoon phase and I’ll keep you posted for when it starts to wear off. But for now, we’ll enjoy our vitamin D and rainbows!