The Magnolia Story(22)

Magnolia was my baby—no doubt about that. But it wasn’t long before I found out it wasn’t the only baby I was going to have.





SIX



WHITE PICKET FENCES

I’ve been asked from time to time how Chip and I manage to juggle all the things we did—and still do. I honestly don’t have a good answer for that, other than to go back to the notion that we seem to energize one another when we’re together. Although one explanation for where we find a little “extra” time in our days is the fact that since we got married we have never had a TV in our own house.

That is one question I always field on Twitter, “Hey man, why doesn’t Joanna ever set up a TV in any of these homes?” I think they are implying I need to turn in my man card. But this is actually the answer to that question.

Before we got married, the two of us attended a few premarital counseling sessions with Chip’s friend and one of his mentors, Byron Weathersbee, and his wife, Carla. Byron had played a significant part in Chip’s life as a college student, and since then, Chip sought Byron’s wisdom on lots of things. Chip and I felt that applying that same logic to our marriage—getting advice from these two trusted and seasoned marriage pros—couldn’t be a bad thing. We wanted to start a habit of seeking outside opinions just to make sure we were thinking about everything a new couple ought to think about as we started our new life together.

One of the things Byron and Carla suggested was that we try to stay focused on each other and spend quality time doing things we loved together, especially when we were at home. That seemed like a no-brainer to us, but they explained that being in the same house and actually interacting with each other are two different things. Sometimes it’s easy for couples to get lost in their own little worlds at home—to be so focused on other things that they aren’t really together, even when they’re in the same room.

To counter that tendency, Byron and Carla suggested we try to go the first few weeks of our marriage without a TV. The idea was to find other ways to occupy our time, especially in the evenings, with activities we could truly share. It seemed like reasonable advice, and so we tried it.

Well, six months later, neither one of us had the slightest urge to get a TV. We never even found time to miss it. All our various projects kept us busy during the day. And our evenings were pretty filled up with making dinner and finishing up the day’s business, talking and dreaming together, and making plans for the next day or the next week. We couldn’t imagine setting aside even an hour to sit and watch TV.

That’s not to say we never slowed down. Reading a good book, flipping through magazines, learning new card games together, taking walks together—we found a million ways to enjoy some down time.

Now, to be fair, we’ve caught our share of TV at our friends’ homes or at our parents’. Any time there was a big game or a fun show, we would find a way to catch it at a restaurant or make a date of it at a friend’s house. So, we managed to catch up on some of our favorite shows through these outlets.

We’ve had more than thirteen years now without a TV, and I don’t feel like we’ve missed a thing.



Just when we thought our lives couldn’t get any busier—just as we’d settled into that little white house and my store was getting off the ground—I received the wonderful news that I was pregnant with our first child.

Just the thought of having a baby filled me with all sorts of new inspiration, not the least of which was imagining the room I wanted my baby to come home to. The tiny second bedroom in that eight-hundred-square-foot house needed a complete makeover to turn it into a nursery, and thinking about that actually spurred an idea that gave me a new perspective on decorating.

I had made the décor in our second home more cohesive than the ones in the yellow house. The colors were continuous, and the rooms all tied together rather than each space having its own theme. My store was so busy that I kept finding new furnishings and swapping them in and out between the store and our home, and I felt like I was starting to get a hang of this thing called decorating.

Once I found out I was having a boy, I zeroed in on earthy tones and a sort of outside-meets-inside theme in the room. Instead of the standard baby blue, I wanted something warm and comfortable that would reflect the rest of that luxurious little retreat we’d created. But I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on that little nursery. Any money we made seemed to go right into another project or investment or just to keep up the payments on all the loans we’d taken out.

I realized we just couldn’t afford any extra bells and whistles on that room, not even window treatments. I knew that window treatments can be expensive. But I decided to look at our tiny budget as a design challenge. I stood in the nearly finished nursery one day, just staring out the window, and I noticed the little white picket fence we’d put up in the front yard. An idea popped into my head immediately, “Hey, Chip, what would happen if you went and got some pieces of picket fence at the lumberyard and built an awning out of that wood for the inside of the nursery?”

I sketched it out for him, with the picket fence coming down at an angle from above the windows, kind of like an awning you’d see on the outside of a restaurant. Chip ran with it and figured out how to tack fencing to another board so he could hang it just so. We painted it, and it worked!