BABES IN A POOL

When I started noticing the phrase, ‘building our deck’ was popping up frequently in conversations, it made me feel terribly grownup, in that same way you might feel when you have put on your mom's heels as a 8 year old.  I can’t help it, I’ve always associated home owning as something grownups do, and obviously in my mind, I still haven't accepted my entrance into this world. Membership, questionable. Having a baby is wild, but seems natural, and owning a home seems all of wild, a little unnatural, and firmly planted in the universe of grownups. Some may say it’s the opposite, but we each have our backstory. I’m not resisting it, I’m just commenting on how it’s strange.  Until I got married (and specifically until I got married to Ken), I actually never thought about owning a home. I thought about traveling and having babies, but the idea of buying a house never entered my brain, and it took me a while to come around to the idea. One year later, I realized that I have settled into the idea because the home that we have right now allows us to have people over and gives us a space to have community and build relationships. I really like that K. and I are on the same page about this; we previously talked about how we want our home to be a place where people feel like they can comfortably come into and hang out. I learned this past year that I really do like hosting people and I always so grateful that our home provides us a place to do so. 

I guess that’s how I feel about this deck going up? And it seems appropriate that the deck-building was successful through the willing and able-bodied friends who had the experience and/or volunteered the time to make it come together.  It was one of the coolest things to see it getting built, can I say, like magic? I have this fascination with seeing houses getting built from the ground up, so this was similarly amazing. And now we finally have a deck! We adore the fact that we have some outdoor space, the grill can now move out of our garage onto the deck, and it makes me appreciate the trees in our backyard even more.

The inaugural use of the deck lived up to the hype. We picked up a smallish (but it turns out, I can fit in it too!) inflatable kiddie pool ($10) and miniature Adirondack chairs ($5 each) at Walmart and voila, lifestyles of the rich and the famous, baby style.  We had our friends Joe, Alicia, and their little one, Bryson, over for lunch to break in the new deck with us, and really, could I not have gotten to these photos fast enough?