Thursday, April 26, 2007

Absent

I have been absent. Partly because this blogging thing is not routine yet (I am a journaling/diary/recording my life failure most of the time) and partly because it has been a tough week to find lovely things and because the guldarn sun won't shine so pictures are awfully hard to take. So there are my excuses.

We had a very unfortunate death in my extended family this week and it has me in quite a funk. I would appreciate any prayers you all offer up. It is my normal get a little depressed week anyway, so that hasn't helped. I have tried very hard to focus on lovely things in spite of it all. Here are a few that have kept me going.

*The mama robin who is building in the almost blooming pear tree outside my kitchen window. (I have an almost blooming pear tree outside my kitchen window, that is pretty lovely in itself).

*Buying seeds to plant my garden next week!!!!!

* The weather men promise 70 degrees and sunny this weekend.

* I was actually able to find some sewing time yesterday. I will post pictures when the sun decides to shine.

*Just being so incredibly thankful to be able to be home and be authentic. Sometimes the gratitude is overwhelming.

*HOPE

I pray that you all are finding things to make you smile inside and out today.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Bird Watching

The front view of the new house. I love it!

I noticed some bird nests this morning on the top of the corner posts of the big front porch.
There is a finch family on one post and a mourning dove family on the other. The papa mourning dove is stupid evidently and flew to the wrong nest where he was quite quickly and effectively attacked by both mama and papa finch. He finally realized that he was wrong and flew to the other post where mama mourning dove appeared to be in the middle of laying her eggs. He immediately started pecking at her and seemed to just be annoying her. The girls were watching part of all of these antics with me. At lunch, I was telling Curt about the silly birds and I got to the part where the papa mourning dove was pecking at the mama (annoying her) and Emma speaks up and says..."I don't think he was pecking her, I think he was helping make the hole where the eggs come out of her a little bigger." While she is saying this she is picking up one "cheek" and pointing down there. I laughed so hard I cried and Emma says, "What? I am pretty sure that is what he was doing."

Friday, April 13, 2007

The Complete Story of the New House


Sooooo.... Once upon a time...

The last weekend in February, the weather men were predicting a major blizzard and that we were going to be pretty much snowed in for a couple of days. It was Saturday morning and it wasn't snowing yet, so I decided to take the dog for a walk before it started to snow and I couldn't go anywhere for a few days. I was only starting to get around really well after recovering from my surgery, so I had a relatively short route planned out in my head (cuz I am anal like that and can't just walk, have to have a plan). I started walking towards one of the parks in town and got to the end of the park and the sidewalk wasn't shoveled, so I had to change my plan and turn around and go the other way. I conferred with the dog and we decided to walk through the 1 block long downtown and look in the some of the store windows instead of the original plan. So I am walking along, minding my own business when out of the corner of my eye I spied a For Sale by Owner sign. So I looked to my right and said (out loud... to the dog), "I have always really liked that house." I noticed that there was one of those boxes with the information sheets in it and I decide to look, just to see how much they were asking, fully assuming the house would be out of our price range. {I must make a side note here to tell you that we were not in the market to buy a house. We were planning on building in 3-5 years on land that Curt's parents were selling us super cheap. I had house plans picked out and everything. Now back to the story.} Well the house was not really that far above what I assumed would be our price range. So the rest of the way home, I didn't so much look in the windows at the cute shops, but rather thought/prayed about the house and whether or not I should tell my husband about it. When I got home, I kind of mentioned it to him, real casual like (not letting on how my heart was racing about it). I looked it up online right away and she had the price listed $6000 less than on the flyer that I had looked at. They also had interior pictures. OY!!! Then I had to kind of share my excitement with Curt. I didn't sleep for the next couple nights. I finally asked Curt if we could at least go look at it so that I could get it out of my head. He humored me and made an appointment to go look at it that Monday night. We fully expected one of us to hate it and then we could move on with our lives. We didn't hate it. We both loved it. Earlier in the day before we went to look at it, I had made a list of things that the house had to have for me to even consider it. It has all of them. I also realized that the floor plan is remarkable similar to the plan I had picked out, only this house is 100+ years old and has all of the old house character that I could never afford in a new house. We had wanted to live in the country, but had said that if we were to stay in town, we would want it to be on this street because all of the houses on the west side of the street have large yards that slope down to an old branch of the river that used to be used for a mill and power. There are less than 20 houses on this street and this is the only one that has ever been for sale since we have lived here. So we spent the rest of the week talking and praying and talking and obsessing and stressing and... On Saturday we took my dad, Curt's dad, my mom and my sister to see the house. We were expecting the dads to be the voices of reason and find some reason why we shouldn't buy this house. They didn't. When we left, they all pretty much said "this is your house." The next day, Curt's parents had us out to lunch and surprised us by offering to buy our house from us so that we didn't need to list it. Wow! They gave us exactly the $ we needed to get out of the house. Amazing. That afternoon Curt called the owner and made a verbal offer and after several phone calls back and forth we came to a verbal agreement. We signed an official offer on that Monday. I was very nervous about the financial part of it, because our previous house was CHEAP!!! I prayed for some financial assurance and for the 1st time in 4 years we received a refund on our taxes. We have payed in LARGE amounts for the last 4 years as my husband owns a business with 3 other guys, so this was amazing to me. The amount we got back was more than a 1 month house payment. So in 1 month's time total, everything came to be. And now, Curt's parents have sold our old house also. Curt went to breakfast with a business client this morning and their waitress was the woman who is buying our old house (gotta love small towns). She was telling him how she has gone over there everyday this week and just enjoyed the house. This makes me so happy to know that the person buying it will love it also. So that is my story in a really large nutshell. The coming posts will be very photo heavy I promise. The photo at the top of the post is a picture take of the back of the house and I am down hill by the river, so really it looks bigger than it actually is, but it is a quite large old house (almost twice as big as our old house... I have only lost Abi 2 times in it I swear). I don't actually have a picture of the front of the house. I will need to go stand out in the street and do that tomorrow.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Old and New

We are all moved in and slowly getting settled. I have the tendancy to get overwhelmed quite easily, so I have worked really hard to focus these past few weeks and just get a little done at a time. Our main living spaces are mostly box free and I even tackled the garage yesterday. I will be posting photos of various parts of our wonderful new house over the next couple of weeks in a "Corners of my house" fashion (inspired by SouleMama). Monday night, Curt and I went back to the old house to clean and shampoo carpets. I got there first and walked around and took some pictures of favorite things. I try not to be sentimental about "stuff" but I guess I am, because I cried. I really love that house, but we were starting to outgrow it and I really believe that God wants us in this house. This is pretty much my dream house.

(Part of the murals painted on the walls in the girls' old bedroom.)


The little yellow cottage is the first house that we owned instead of rented. My parents helped us with the down payment and we were able to qualify for some special loans through the state to help renovate parts. I was able to have a brand new kitchen that I designed. Nothing fancy, but I really liked it. My Dad did the majority of the fixing on the house and he and I grew closer than we ever were when I was a child and there was a lot of healing in that for me. As I was shampooing carpets, I had a lot of time to think about all of the things that our family experienced living in that house. Emma was 9 months old when we moved there, she is now close to 6. Abi was born 1 year after we moved in and is now 4. Those years contain a lot of growing up and firsts. I also lost 2 babies and had a hysterectomy while living there. My love of gardening and quilting and all things creative hit full blast while living in that house. Really, as I think about it, I have done so much growing and maturing in so many ways in the 5 years that we lived in that house. I really started to discover who I am. So many lovely memories, and yet it is a little bittersweet. My inlaws bought the house from us so that we wouldn't have to go through the hassel of listing it and getting it ready to show, etc. This has been such a blessing and was completely their idea. Well, amazingly they have sold the house already! They close the deal on Monday. I will do a whole post possibly tomorrow about how this house came to be, the whole thing is amazing.


I leave you today with our Spring Wonderland (???). I was so bummed about it snowing in April, and the girls snapped me right out of it. They were so excited to get to play in the snow one more time. We had a ton of fun out there and the view of the river in the snow is awesome (in the true sense of the word, not the 80's version of it).