The times, they are a’changing…

We have a saying in this house that the only routine here is no routine. With Dennis being a teacher and baseball coach, and the addition of his two youngest boys during the summer, the routine around here changes with every season. It’s just controlled chaos as usual and we keep plowing through.

Tonight was no different. The end of the baseball season is fast approaching with the last regular season home game tonight. Dennis went off to work this morning and I went off to bed having worked last night and got up in time to make us some supper after school and before the game. He was getting ready to leave and it suddenly hit him…this may very well be his last regular season home game at this school. The end of an era so to speak, or should I say ‘inning’?

He has been there 5 and a half years and this has been the only school he has taught at since deciding to quit corporate America and follow his dream to teach. The coaching was an unexpected benefit. It all just fell into place and he has made his mark there after all these years. Although he feels it is time for him to move on, it is still tugging at his heartstrings now that the full realization has hit him that the time to actually move on might very well be here.

I believe we are going to go through alot of this in the next few months. I have never liked this house. It’s not the style I would have picked and we have never had the money to fix it up or even decorate it. The place looked like a warehouse when I got here since his ex had basically stripped it when she left and I brought nothing but what I could ship down in boxes. The furniture is all hand-me-downs from his parents or what we could pick up cheap or from Wal-Mart. And the kids have certainly taken their toll on this place. They have put holes in every wall, stained every rug, broken a kitchen window that we couldn’t afford to replace so I had to make curtains to cover it up, the pets have grown old here and the evidence of that is also on every carpet. The whole house is in a pretty sorry state, but I am finding I too will miss it here.

This is where we started off on this crazy rollercoaster of a life together and hung on to a bunch of kids for dear life as we dragged them along with us. We had to throw one kid out, and watched the others bond and fight and grow up. We lived through the chaos and drama that comes with 3 teenagers in the house and just to add a little more drama, we even moved in the biological mother of our kids when we found out she was sick. We had no intention of letting them spend time with her since that would entail sending them to Louisiana without our supervision, there were reasons after all for why the the courts took away both parents’ rights and gave the kids to Dennis. But we found out she would probably not live until they were old enough to go on their own. Her residence here was 6 months of hell as she divided our family and covered for her own kids, resenting our parenting of them while she was here. By the time she left I had almost lost my mind and was near my breaking point and she HAD to go. She did so on her own thankfully, but we don’t regret taking her in since she did indeed pass away 15 months ago. Stephanie found out 1 week after she found out she was pregnant. That 6 months in this house represents the longest period of time these two kids lived together and with their mother in some kind of peace and security. I don’t know if it helped them or not, but we did it for them and we hope it did help.

And this is the house where we got the dreaded call in the middle of the night telling us our daughter had been in a horrific car accident. One of the kids didn’t make it, but ours walked away with a broken dislocated jaw that had to be wired shut for weeks. We held onto her and helped her through the devastation and watched as a procession of friends filed through over the next few weeks keeping her up on how the others were doing. We watched the kids as they all grew up, all making good and bad choices, and we watched them all move out. We also watched them all find their way home for a Sunday dinner every now and then and always at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And through the years before they moved out, we heard them as they stayed up at night laughing and watching TV, complained about homework and cleaning their rooms, and rolled our eyes and breathed sighs of relief as they thought they quietly crept in past curfew, making sure they didn’t step on the two stairs near the top that creaked. We have seen many many highs and lows and been through a lot of life in this house.

And this is the house where Dennis and I talked for hours when we decided it was a good idea for him to go into teaching even though it was going to mean even more of a struggle for us financially. It took 5 years of college credits where he could get them, online, summer classes, night classes, whatever it took, not to mention the cost, but he did it. He is now certified and can teach anywhere in NC. All the planning and struggling for the last 5 years has been to get to this point. Two years ago we realized we just couldn’t afford this house and we didn’t need to with all the kids gone and life got even crazier as we tried to do what we could to fix the place up while still working and having the boys up for the summer, and the other kids still coming and going. We have been so busy and overworked and tired and still running that we never noticed that it was so late in the game and that it might all be over but the memories soon.

We know we are still young and we have a whole new world and life open to us now and we are looking forward to it. Dennis and I both have a good feeling for the new town and school, and the house we buy will be one that we have picked out together. But it will not have all these crazy kids of ours, or the kitchen window they broke while fighting, or the stairwell Steven used to drop his alien dolls from on Saturday morning to make the other kids laugh, or the creaky 2 stairs, or the 3 bedrooms that the kids have all switched out and traded through the years, and Dennis will not be coaching at the first school he ever taught at where it all began, the realization of his dream and the added joy of another dream…coaching baseball. Our whole lives have changed since coming to this house.

Yes, the times, they are a’changing and they are bittersweet at the moment:) Somehow this life and house has creeped up on me and I will miss it all. But time moves on and so must we….