Tonight's progress...

I have two goals as I reassemble my house. The first is to only bring back in what we actually need and use. The second is to have an efficient order that lends itself to being beautiful to look at.

Here is a room which overall looks chaotic:

But up close you can see the order coming together:

I guess that is all for tonight... More tomorrow!

Chipping away...

So far today I have gone through and emptied around 8 boxes... and the night is still young (for a weekend, especially)... I have a huge pile of give-away and need to find the perfect home for some other stuff. Every time I get tired of unpacking, I pull weeds or plant something.

As I have been unpacking this afternoon, I have also been cutting some neat squares of cardboard to make some simple flower presses. The girls have really gotten into pressing flowers this spring and I am growing weary of watching the pages in our dictionary get all warped.

I have altered my plans for a very busy day tomorrow by recruiting someone else to take photos at a church function so that I can keep working here. We have some things coming up in the next couple of weeks which will divert my attention from the unpacking, so I am digging in and working hard this weekend.

I am excited by the thought of not letting anything back in that we don't really need. After all the boxes are empty I probably need to go through my craft supplies and be brutal... but since they are neatly arranged within appropriately labeled bins right now, they are low on the priority list.

Has anyone else caught the spring purging/reorganizing bug?

Oh! And I took a car full of stuff to donate to the Women's shelter today as well! Yippee! I am loving getting rid of stuff!

A friend checking in...

I have a friend checking in on me from time to time...
She is asking how I am coming along on putting together my Child Training Bible...
Have you ever seen one of these?
You should check it out...


www.ChildTrainingBible.com

I am excited about working on this...
And it is fun to have the kids swarming around checking it out too...

And now for motivation...

The week is slipping by...
Monday was spent sharing coffee and catching up with a friend who has moved away (but was in for a visit)...
Tuesday we drove out to Blanco to enjoy a day in the country and let the kids play with friends, including a plunge into the Blanco River after lunch...
Wednesday will be filled with kid-watching for a friend, piano lessons and art class...
Thursday is a trip to the Zoo and our weekly excursion to the Farm...
Friday is empty except for picking up my mom at the airport...
Saturday is one of those days where we will bounce from activity to activity from breakfast to bedtime...
Sunday we are going up to the Doss Cabin with E's parents...

And the question is... how will the garage get unpacked?!?!? And the house settled??? I need to start redeeming my time... instead of emailing or blogging... don't mind me if I drop off the face of blogland for a little while. :)

Slow and steady...

I am moving back into my home differently than I moved out. When we were prepping our home for sale I worked tirelessly through the day and night to get pre-packed, moved into storage and staged. Now that I have my stuff back I am moving slower. I don't want to just find places to hide stuff, I want to make sure I need/want it to enter back in. And I want to give away what we don't need or aren't using, no more taking two or three years to see if we might someday use it or need it.

Last week I was plagued with some terrible upper respiratory bleh, and thanks to some restful days and antibiotics, I am beginning to feel more normal every day. While I was feeling so under the weather, I did go through our DVD collection and did some much needed purging and reorganizing. I discovered I needed one new case to hold nature documentaries and historical films. I gave some movies away, and threw some movies away. I cleared out three boxes from my garage without taking up any space in my house. That was awesome.

We are excited about our gardening endeavors. The six fruit trees seems to be taking to their new homes. Our vegetable and fruit garden are doing nicely as well, though I need to get some cages for the tomatoes and some trellises for other climbing items. I also acquired three new plants at the San Antonio Botanical Society's Plant sale this past weekend. They need to be planted. And I need to buy more mulch.

School is officially on break. Every year I try to muscle through the Spring. And every year we spend the entire season staring outside wishing we could be outside. This lovely weather is quickly followed by the Texas summers we are so accustomed to, where we sit inside with no hope of much outdoor play due to the scorching temperatures. So this year, we are swapping. The kids have been living out of doors for a couple of weeks now, and with the temperatures beginning to climb into the 90's, we will be hunkering down for school in a few weeks. This also gives us time to go camping, as well as work on finishing up with moving back in.

So, we are plodding along. If you feel like stopping over for coffee, we will likely be here. Plodding.

Productive week...

Despite illnesses for the youngest two of our clan, we have had a pretty productive week...

A friend came over on Monday morning so I could run to Costco to purchase 6 fruit trees (2 peach, 2 apricot, 1 lemon and 1 lime). Later in the afternoon the kids and I cleared the grass and set up our two new 4'x4' garden beds. Then, as a reward we went to Lowe's to buy all the dirt (16 cubic feet of it), as well as mulch and some good dirt to use in planting the new trees. We also picked what veggies and fruits we wanted to grow. We know we are a little late in the planting season this year, but we tried to pick some hardy plants and will just hope for the best. :)

Tuesday we filled the beds with soil, planted the plants and started to plant the trees. We got two done that evening before we got attacked by mosquitos. They apparently only liked the taste of my right arm.

Wednesday we were busy with piano lessons, friends coming for playdates, putting mulch on the new plants, and going to a dentist visit. Elliott went to a Spurs gave with work, we ate a Chick-fil-A and watched Beatrix Potter cartoons.

Today was great too. We started the morning with moving some furniture. Now that we are staying here, I wanted the girls beds all back together instead of split up into the "staged" fourth bedroom. So, I moved the sleigh bed back into the girls' room, the rocking chair into the upstairs game room, and the black eurolounger into the extra bedroom. As well, I took the black IKEA shelving which was temporarily in the boys' room for showing and put the small piece in the game room and the larger unit in the guest room (it will soon house my yarn). We returned all my friend's stuff that we were borrowing for "staging". I also asked the guy who mows my yard to dig the last four holes for my other fruit trees and he happily did and I planted them. The twins and I pulled grass from all our other trees and mulched them. I counted my trees today. 17. And yet, my yard still looks barren. I know in a few years it will look super and we will have shade in different areas, that will be really nice.

Friday will be busy too. School. A couple of errands. Dog-sitting. Elliott and I are going to our final weekend of NANC training for this year's sessions on Friday evening and all day Saturday. And Sunday we will have church. I think I will crockpot...

This coming Monday we will be having a moving company move our stuff back from storage. It will be lovely to have all our craft stuff back. I plan on trying to be selective as I unpack, making a donation pile as I go. I have enjoyed living leaner, and I want to set an example for my children. The plan for next week is school in the mornings, unpack in the afternoons. It will be busy, but hopefully also fun. 

Of ear infections and walking pneumonia...

And the Mom of the Year Award goes to... Me.

Caleb has not been feeling well for a while. But nothing acute, no list of symptoms we were "watching", no fever. He has just been "off". This week he had finally been feeling and looking "off" long enough that we decided he should go to the doctor. The whole drive there he is asking me why he is going, says he feels fine. One look into the ears, massive double ear infection. And after a long, very long, listen to his lungs and questions about asthma and wheezing (of which he typically had neither), our doctor tell us he has atypical pneumonia. He is on an inhaler and antibiotics.

And then there is Caleb's sidekick and twin separated by 20 months, Micah. He hasn't been "off" for as long, maybe only three weeks. But as of late he has been putting himself to sleep in weird places. One day it was on the kitchen floor. Another day it was on the red chair in the living room in the midst of mid-day chaos. The most comical was when he went upstairs to change and fell asleep naked on the rug in his room in front of the closet. He has been crashing without warning and without lunch. And for four and five hours. I will admit, the quiet has been nice. The cuddles have been fun. But, after a trip to the pediatrician today, he received the diagnosis of "ditto". He is a day behind on antibiotics and not so far gone as Caleb to require breathing treatments, but sick none-the-less.

I feel bad having not stopped being around people, but considering that the atypical part of this pneumonia is that it is relatively asymptomatic, how would I know?!?!? The worst part is that I thought I was doing well not being overly cautious, rushing off to the doctor for every little runny nose. Oops. 

So, we will hunker down and read some books, play some quiet games and cuddle as the need arises. As sad as I am for my boys, I am thankful for the reminder to slow down a little. 

Off the market...

After a relatively busy week of house showings, we have decided to pull our house off of the market. There are a myriad of reasons, all individually strong, which taken collectively made the decision an easy one. This is just not our season.

The kids seemed to take it well when we shared the news with them. They were a little saddened to find out that we would not be able to raise livestock for 4-H (our HOA doesn't even allow chickens), but they quickly rebounded and remembered how much we love where we live, close to friends and family. Plus, they can work on other projects for 4-H which we will join in the fall.

We now need to "move back in". We pre-packed a lot of stuff, crafts and toys and extra clothes. Now we have to go retrieve it all from storage and find attractive places to put it in our newly redecorated home. We are keeping nearly everything the way it was staged. We even like the dining room and will be using that large table for our school table. We gave my mom back her bistro table and bought a new small kitchen table that will fit our family for meals and give us good additional room for when we have guests for dinner, as well as more work space for school.

This week, we are going to plant two 4'x4' raised garden beds, as well as purchase some fruit trees from Costco. Then, we need to get started moving our stuff back from storage. I am praying for a cool front while we get this work done.

Thank you for all your many prayers as we went through this process. The Lord is good, He has shown us many things, taught us much about Himself and shown us how to seek His will in all things.

Bluebonnets, take two...

We arose early and dressed up. We went out into the chilly, but quite sunny, morning. We trudged through trails and past spiky, thorny vines. We took bluebonnet pictures. Again.

Now I feel much better about our bluebonnet photos. Micah made us all laugh, in fact, in well over one hundred photos, he was never looking at the camera at the same time as the other children. He would, however, finally look at the camera and smile after having done something somewhat goofy, which would then distract all his siblings away from looking at the camera and making strange faces while they laughed at his antics. No one got bit by a rattlesnake or impaled on a thorny bush. A successful photo shoot by all accounts.

My early morning plans...

Tomorrow morning I am taking the kids to a really neat bird sanctuary to take the traditional "bluebonnet pictures". We did an emergency photo shoot two weeks ago in case the famous wildflowers had all gone to seed before I got my act together. Well, thanks to my mom and some persistent shopping, we got our acts together this past week, all the way down to the shoes we found this evening.

However, I forgot to cut the three boy's hair... so I will wake them up early to do that. I would skip it except that they need it so bad... and it is getting hot, so it should be pretty easy and fast... can anyone say buzz?

Another family is meeting us there as well, I will take their photos and pray my children don't get lost in the woods while I am looking through the lens of my camera, which is thankfully charged. I don't really know their kids, she is the daughter of a friend of mine, so hopefully they will respond well to my silly little wanna-be photographer antics. I really just hope I don't freak them out and make them cry!

And then back home for piano lessons, school and art class. A fun and busy day to look forward to! If I am going to get up earlier enough to pull this all off, I better head off to bed. I promise to post photos!