Along for the Ride

Shortly after buying our home, Mike and I started our homesteading tasks.  We borrowed equipment from my parents and spent Saturday afternoons mowing our yard.  I even bought beer for the occasion so we could proudly stand amidst the freshly cut lawn, drink a cold one, and admire our handy work.   On a trip to Borders, I had visited the home care section and purchased a (quite pricey) Martha Stewart book called the Homekeeping Handbook .  It was the pre-Pinterest resource, and I was thrilled to read it from cover to cover, learning how to make my own dish soap, plant and grow veggies, make a welcome basket for the guest room, and properly host a dinner party.  Those 752 pages were my ticket to becoming the best version of myself - a Bree Van de Kamp version of hospitality.   Well, it got old.  It got old really quickly.  I found myself spending all of my precious weekend days trying to clean, run errands, prepare meals, help mow, ...

Shortly after Mike and I got married, we started hunting for a house.  The plan was simple...  find "the perfect" home in our price range, close to work, modest, spacious enough for possible kids, big enough to not outgrow anytime soon, small enough to be manageable, and preferably new.  The hunt was hard.  Every weekend, week after week was spent searching, searching, searching for the perfect location, builder, and home.  Finally, the stars and planets aligned, and we put a deposit down on a new build in McKinney.  It had all that we had hoped for and more. I once said that the true test of a marriage was putting together something - like a grill (which we tackled the week after we got married) - without ripping each other's hair out.  Boy was I wrong.  That was small beans.  But to a newlywed, it was the first time that Mike and I had ever really "gotten cross" with each other, so I thought it was a test.  At that point, though, w...