Grandma, House, Wedding

This has been a week of decisions.

Most times when people talk to us, they assume we're very busy because we're working on the wedding.  As Ben said yesterday, "Of the 75 decisions we made the past few days, about 4 of them had something to do with the wedding."

He's exaggerating a little, but not too much.  The situation with Grandma Lila's hip/leg has taken a lot of thought and concentration, between trying to understand what would be best to do to help her heal and trying to work out what would be best to do to the house to make it ready for her.  We were more or less expecting to just get the house ready a bit before the wedding and then work more seriously on modifying it to have Grandma move in afterward.  The decision to let Grandma heal naturally means she will be moving in much sooner so we can give her more one-on-one attention to keep her healthy; and this means the house needs to be modified at lightning speed.  We've also been going back and forth to the hospital to keep Grandma company and try to give Mom Turner a chance to be at home.  This has made our schedule fairly complicated.

Once we began working hard and fast on the house, a lot of decisions were required that we hadn't yet made a plan for and needed to figure out and decide on quickly.  Some of it is on fairly complicated stuff, like the electrical system in the house; some of it's cosmetic and can be easily changed if we make a mistake, like the paint colors.  Even so, it takes constant attention.  What's been absolutely wonderful is how our family is working right along with us.  Benjamin and Leah have been at the house every day, often when Ben and I can't even be there.  Mom and Dad Turner and Jenny have been in and out and spent a lot of yesterday feeding everyone (and that's a big job!).  Benjamin built a beautiful arch where the wall between the kitchen and living room used to be; his brother Isaac spent all day yesterday up in the attic modifying the electrical lines to accommodate a bathroom being where a bedroom used to be and moving plugs and switches around to make up for the fact that the walls they used to be mounted on disappeared; my siblings spent all day yesterday painting the house with us; and Dad spent much of that time hanging new interior doors...that he gave to us as a gift when we realized our budget probably didn't include them right now.  I sort of figured we were just going to have to do them a little at a time someday down the road, but to have them now is really, really nice!

A lot of random house parts left over from jobs are getting used, like a new entrance door that comes from the very first job my family's business did years ago.  We ordered the wrong style and it's been sitting in the garage ever since.  Benjamin's family gave us a shower pan that had been sitting in their garage for 10 years.  We found all kinds of things in my family's basement, like all the faceplates for new plugs.  Benjamin had drywall and drywall mud.  And that doesn't even begin to touch all the time everyone is putting in.  We have a budget for these things, but every little bit helps so much.

The decisions on the wedding this week have been pretty straightforward.  We needed to ask two people to be ushers, so Ben called his good friends Jason and Paul.  We needed to pick out a bouquet for me and that took us about 20 minutes to settle.  I got a veil.  Ben has straightened out some mis-communication about the tuxes with Men's Warehouse.  The hall asked us what color napkins we wanted them to put in the center of the tables.  And this morning we reviewed the seating chart with Anna and approved the final version.  Not nearly the thought-consuming task trying to sort through Grandma Lila's future or deciding on our house's layout is!

So when people say, "I know you're busy with the wedding," we sort of chuckle.  Because only a very small percentage of our mental and physical energy is going to the wedding: it's the rest of it that's keeping us busy.