Adjustments

Sometimes when you are in a new place,

The shadows seem bigger and more active.

It seems lighter and darker at the same time

And there are different creaks in different places than you are used to.

And sometimes,

When you are in a new place,

You are so tired from getting to that place

That you fall asleep anyways

Even though it seems a vulnerable and brave thing to do.

-Jasmine Martin

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Well, we have been living in Toronto for just over a week now.

Our apartment felt surprisingly homey right from the get go, which was a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t sure if it would or not. We are currently in the dangerous stage of settling in, where the vast majority of our belongings have been put away and we are functioning smoothly and comfortably, but there’s still a lot of random stuff sitting around that doesn’t have a place yet.

I’m just grateful that we are as “put away” as we are. For awhile there, I was regularly hitting my baby toes on the edges of boxes. I could get most of my body around the boxes just fine, but not my baby toes. I also kept hitting my hands on the door knobs around here. Apparently, I really become accustomed to the geography of the space I regularly occupy, and when everything changes, I’m a wreck. I’ve been working on choosing to be spatially aware, and I think it’s helping.

Right now, I’m thinking about the past week and what it has felt like to be here. I don’t feel like I have done any real exploring yet, besides going to Hakim Optical, Ikea, No Frills, Home Sense, Dollarama, and a library. Those places are not super special places though, if you know what I mean.

There do seem to be many nice things about being here.

I like that everything is only 1.8 kilometers away.

I like that there are lots of lovely old trees on our street and I’m excited to see the leaves turn pretty colours.

I like that there are all kinds of people around here.

I like the beautiful, smart children that I get to be with all week.

I like that our apartment has air-conditioning and a bathtub.

I like the rainbow that shows up on our floor when the sun shines through the windows on our door just right.

I like that it all feels like a fresh start somehow. (Ricky and I have decided to be grownups now. It involves making our bed every morning and washing dishes regularly and so far has been going okay but Ricky is generally better at it than I am, which is annoying, but also makes sense because he is older than I am.)

I like our nice landlords.

I like our Sunday morning drive to church.

There are also things that I don’t really like.

I don’t like driving to work and back from work on busy roads that I am not overly familiar with yet.

On that note… I don’t like not knowing where anything is. I can’t wait to be more familiar with this area.

I don’t like going to a different grocery store.

I don’t like making mistakes, but I’m really trying to be okay with them and not be too hard on myself for not knowing things that I haven’t learned yet. If you don’t know… you just don’t know. Get over it. Figure it out. Learn it. It’s okay. It helped that today, Instagram seemed to be full of other people who were making mistakes too, and working on giving themselves grace. We are all just humans.

I don’t like parking within three meters of a fire hydrant. Sigh. (Learned that lesson. Never again. To be fair, it was kind of a subtle fire hydrant.)

… You know what?

That’s about all I can think of that I don’t like!

I’m going to post a few pictures of our apartment for those of you who are curious. I took these a day or two after we moved, so it looks a little more put together at this point. If you want to know what it looks like with everything put away, you’ll just have to come visit. That’s all there is to it.

When you come in the door, there are steps that you need to go down to get to our apartment.

This is the room where we keep our bikes and other paraphernalia. (But not quite so much paraphernalia as you see in this photo.)

This is our kitchen. It is very spacious horizontally, but not quite so spacious vertically, if you know what I mean. Also, that is a Ricky in the kitchen. I like him and I’m sure glad that I brought him along with me.

This is our living room.  We have found it to be a very pleasant room for living.

This is our bedroom, which, crazily enough, is almost the same colour as the butterfly blue bedroom we left behind in Hawkesville. 

There you have it, folks.

The beginning of Toronto.