Well, I'm over a month late on my promised return to Jewel Box®, but I'm finally back. And as a Christmas surprise I'm adding a new member to the Jewel Box® team who will be helping me with the blog and Jewel Box Living newsletter. She also created the new look on the blog which I love! Tune in Thursday to meet my new partner and read her first post. I am thrilled to have her join Jewel Box® and heaven knows I need the help!
Those of you who follow Jewel Box® know that I struggle with big-house envy. Even though I love my smaller home and will never 'go big', there is still part of me that longs for a larger house. Why? I spent part of my childhood in a big house and I loved it.
When I was four, my family moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil where we lived in a house with maid's quarters over the garages, gardeners and a play house bigger than my kitchen. Twenty-five people could easily sit at our dinner table and my mother regularly entertained with cocktail parties where a maitre-de was brought in to make things run smoothly. As a young child, I thought the whole world lived this way.
My brother, sister and me on the landing
of the marble stairs in our Sao Paulo home.
I used to love sliding down this bannister.
Me at riding lessons on my horse Boneca,
which means 'doll' in Portuguese.
My parents at a party. My father is on the left
and my mother is in the center.
Very 'Mad Men' isn't it.
To make a long story short, after Brazil, we moved to Des Moines, Iowa where I spent my teen and college years. But I never forgot the house in Sao Paulo and how much I loved living there. And part of me, even at this stage of my life, longs for a big house to recreate at least a small piece of that life.
Still, I realize how much my memories are skewed by the fact that I was a small child and everything seemed bigger then. Also, I did not know until much later the protective measures my parents were forced to take to shield us from the realities of a living in high-crime country. And although larger houses here do not come with 10 foot tall gates spiked with glass to keep out intruders, going bigger has it's own set of problems - more maintenance, higher property taxes, less family intimacy - and does not come cheap.
Don't forget to come back Thursday and meet the new Jewel Box® team member!
Genevieve
