Twenty years ago (plus six months) when we first set forth on our nomadic tour of the country, moving every few years, we were living pretty close to the edge. Church mice lived more luxurious lives than we did back then. We lived in a small apartment, a basement in a friend's house at that, when we last lived in the Boulder area. The idea that we would ever host my in-laws for a holiday was years away in my future. As we moved all over, we returned to Colorado as often as we could, always meeting either at my mother-in-law's condo, or one house or another of my husband's siblings. Once I was able to have real houses of my own, I started wishing I could host a big family holiday, but it was never feasible to have the whole family fly out to where we were, when the four of us could make it back here in one car/airplane. Once my mother's side of my family came to my house for Thanksgiving, and once my dad's came for Christmas, but we don't add up to nearly the same size crowd as my in-laws.
Fast forward to now, when I have a modestly-sized but open concept home in the metro area, and I can finally cash in on all those saved up opportunities to have the family here. I may not have the biggest space, but I think I have the biggest desire to host of all of us, having banked decades' worth of wishing that I could graduate to that level of hospitality. I still need my sister-in-law to bring a stack of folding chairs to seat us all, but as we get fully moved in here, I'll find places to store extra tables and chairs so we don't have to borrow. I'm happy to build that ability.
I got up early and started cleaning. We still have so many boxes and piles of "we'll unpack that later" lying around, so we forced ourselves to attack some of the clutter. Or maybe the way to look at that is that we created more clutter. I opened several boxes that were purely decorating items, and scattered souvenirs and art everywhere. We hung up a couple corner shelves to house some stuff, and even more things are hanging on the walls as of today. I've become keenly aware of just how bad my addiction to lanterns is, having unpacked at least a dozen of them, and not having found the one particular one I was looking for. I keep telling the man, it looks bad now, but it will be awesome come summer when we are outside and the back yard is full of little fairy lights with candles in all of these lanterns.
I also learned that I am an evil, evil woman. While I stayed home to clean, I sent the man out to do some last minute shopping. I asked him to pick up some chocolate to put on the tables tomorrow, and then sent him unsupervised to the grocery store. He'd already proved himself untrustworthy after coming home yesterday with half of the freezer section of King Soopers, namely the half with the ice cream that was on sale. Today I got a texted photo of the shopping cart, with the top basket full of bags of chocolate. I should have known better than to put him in the way of temptation so soon after yesterday's trials.
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