DITL - July 2013!!

Someone, somewhere was asking about what a typical unschooling day (is there such a thing?!) looks like, which reminded me of my Day In The Life's!

This DITL is actually a bit abnormal since we usually are homebodies, but Russ was leaving for 5+ days (and taking the van) and we needed to stock up on groceries, etc. before he left.

Okay, I'm up at 6:30, like normal.  I would like to sleep in a bit more, but the sunshine absolutely assaults our room in the mornings, which I love.

Besides, the house is so quiet and calm.  There's a breeze blowing through the house (we don't have air conditioning, so rely on the cool nights to cool our house down each night.  Thus far, we've only had a 3-day hot spell that we had a tough time handling), the pines smell delicious, the sun is streaming through the windows...I love it.

Time to grab some tea, check the email, check the Quicken, make the To Do list...

...get my compadre up and at 'em...

...feed the chicks, er, creepy teenage chickens...

...tuck all of the tomatoes into their cages and pinch off suckers...

Yay!  Squash blossoms!

And lavender!  We were happy to find that it does fantastic here!

...and...a hole.
BRIN!!!!!
THOSE WERE MY POTATOES!
Sigh.

Do some priming on Brooklyn's climbing wall on the fort.

Clean up the wall in the laundry room in preparation for our new chest freezer!
We will have almost 100 pounds of chicken to store in a few weeks...

Good morning, sweet boy!

First things first, "Mom?  Can I have some gum?"

What's a mom to do?  He's going to do it even if I say no.  Even if I say, "That wall is turning black from your feet!" or "But I'm afraid you'll kill yourself!"
Yes, a compromise is better.
"Can we stay from here to halfway?  Yes?  Fantastic."
I can deal with a black wall.

I never posted a photo of my first woodworking project!
Here's my end table made from 2x4s.

We've been working on cleaning up the trees on our property, and are accumulating a nice little wood pile.  Oddly enough, there is a creature of some sort that lives in here that sounds exactly like a slime sounds on Minecraft.  It's quite hilarious.

Sam asks for some blueberries and to watch Kratt Brothers and for a warm blanket.
I deliver and hang the laundry.

Then decide it is time to actually finish the table that we started refinishing almost 6 months ago.

A quick load of dishes.

We are headed into town and are stopping by Home Depot.  This always gets my wheels cranking.
I really want some very specific built-ins on this wall of the living room upstairs...

...buuuut in all reality, Russ will be bringing back boxes and boxes and boxes of toys and books from CA and THIS is the wall that needs the storage.
Thinking I want to build some cabinets with shelves to the ceiling.
Then I crunched the numbers.
Ummm...it's going to have to wait.

Sam says, "Can I have something?"
"Um, yes.  What kind of something?"
"Uh, Daddy's things."
"What Daddy's things?"
"...can we open all of the cabinets?  I need to find them."
"Sure."

Ah, Oreos!
So an Oreo and bowl of applesauce for breakfast for the boy.

And my normal eggs, tomatoes, avocado and cheese (this was homemade by our friends the day before!).  YUM.

"Mom, want to watch Kratts with me?  Oh, nevermind, Maddie is calling me."

Good morning, Brooklyn!  ...and Maddie!

While there is Minecrafting going on all around me, I listen to The Bachelorette while figuring out food storage.  SO excited to actually have room to store it all!!!

And we head out.
First stop?  Xtreme Hang-Time.

This photo makes me so sad.
Both were so tired and just wanted to be home.
Truth be told, I did too.  But we needed groceries and supplies and had to pick up auction winnings.

Poor babes.

Got project supplies for the long weekend.

"Mom, what does this say?"
"SWEET TART"

This is Brooklyn's sarcastic "Oh yay, I love Sprouts..." look.

Brook took control of the camera in Sprouts.
I forgot to put it on Auto for her.  Whoops!

Shew!
Xtreme Hang-Time.

Auction place.

Costco.

Home Depot.
Sprouts.
Can we go home now?!

Ahh...almost there.

Finally!  Our safe haven.

A snacky dinner is requested.

Daddy's home!!
With a giant freezer!! 
And even better, a giant box!!!

Isn't she pretty??  And we got her from Sears for half off!  Yeah!
Cannot wait to fill her with delicious things!

We were all a bit grumpy from a long day, so we all ended up heading to bed shortly after.
Zzzzz...

June, again.

Okay, I lied, I'm not done with June. 

I thought I was, and then another 30 photos jumped me from out of nowhere.

We'll start off with a House Tour first.

Although, I look at these (taken a month and a half ago) and am amazed at how much has changed just since then!  I want to tell you all about everything, but I think I'll just take photos along the way.  There is also so much I want to say about what our future plans are but...there are just too danged many.

 No really, I made an Excel sheet because there were hundreds.  It's divided up by rooms and ranked by importance, cost, has notes for when they need to be completed, and links to information on the projects.

I love Excel.

We'll start off downstairs.
This is my laundry room.  I heart it.  So much.
It's bright and clean (usually...this is also Brin's room, so not always) and makes me happy.
The stairs are right behind me, the garage to the left and the back door leads out onto the back patio where I hang my laundry and check my tomatoes and squash.

To the right is the guest room, which currently holds a lamp and a chair.  And some boards that are primed, waiting to be painted.
Hopefully soon we can get a real, actual bed in there so that we can have all of you over.
Just not all at once.  I don't have room for that.

The guest room.  Okay, so this is pre-chair and post-moving table upstairs.

But I had the lamp right.

Guest bath and shower, leading into the family room (which goes out to the side deck).

Family room.
Pre-much of anything.
In fact, at this point it was known as the gymnastics room since there was enough room to do 3+ cartwheels.

View out the side deck, which looks west.
You can see the Sandia Mountains back there, and this is actually the site of the new fort.

On the side deck, looking to the left (south).
Going in the gate takes you back into the fenced-in backyard.

Alright, time to head upstairs.
Laundry room behind us, family room to the left.

Standing in the entry, looking up into the living room.  That door leads into the kitchen and dining room.  And if you take a right at the top of the stairs it goes down the hall to the bedrooms.

The hall.  Pretty boring currently.
This past weekend I started working on that closet, which is a bit of a catch-all.
Not good when there's only one shelf in there.

Door on the left is the hall bath, master bedroom straight ahead, Sam's room/playroom is the open door, and then Brook's (and Sam's sometimes, since she has the bunk bed and currently he is into playing Musical Beds each night, never quite sure where he will land, ha) is at the end to the right.

Alrighty, so I'm in the kitchen (which is at the top of the stairs), looking into the dining room.
There is my Chair I Will Be Buried In and the table that we refinished (and looks so small in this room!  I did, however, finish the leaf that goes in the middle, so it looks like it actually fits now).
The sliding door goes out onto the deck that runs the length of the back of the house.

The kitchen.
Which I am dying to dig into.

View of the living room from the top of the stairs.
Soooo much to do here too.  Including lots of built-ins.  Which are expensive.
So they can wait while I save my pennies.

The chicks came!!  They were 2 days old and at that age, you'd never guess that they'd get to 5 pounds in less than 2 months!!

We were going to take chick photos each week so we could document how fast they grew, but they just got too big and cumbersome to hold, ha.

We could manage the two-day old photos though!

Sam found this Angry Birds garden thing and was SO excited to take it home and put it along the front walk.
It's official, this is now Sam's Home.

We had some friends over for a beer-brewing get-together.

It was freaking hot, so we kept watering the deck (and the kids were using our redneck pools up there).  Derek snapped this lovely photo for me.
(Sidenote:  That's South Mountain in the background there.  I love looking at it each morning and evening when the sun rises behind it and then sets opposite it and makes the mountain turn purple and gorgeous.  And then if there is a storm out there, it's just beautiful...)

More artwork for Momma's crafting table!

Brooklyn was so excited to help me with this project--we took a table that was previously being used for a tv console and cut the legs down to coffee table height.
It's now in the playroom, covered in Legos and trains and art projects.
Perfection!

Ha, the kids love hoping in this giant planter (another score at that garage sale).
Someday I hope to put trellises going up and across the garage doors and have a viney plant growing out of here to grow up them.

Baby chicks, One Week old!

So, a weekend came and Russ and I were looking longingly at our projects list.  The problem was that we didn't know where to start.  After awhile Russ says, "You need a miter saw for the majority of these wood projects."
Miter saw?  Okay.  Tell me more.
The first thing I did at the store was go pick up that giant box and put it in my cart.  Silly, since I had a billion other things to get.  But I couldn't risk someone taking my saw!!
And it made me laugh as an employee walking by said, "He's going to love that!" and I replied, "If I let him use it!"
Seriously, I was excited.

So, here's my first project.
The Before:

The After:

And then I moved onto the bathroom because I needed to make something else to hold all of my aluminum foil, etc. before I could organize that drawer.  And I didn't want to organize the other kitchen drawers before organizing that one...oy vey.
So, bathroom ones.

And now that I have a shower curtain in the master bathroom, I need to put some of these in our bathroom so I can stop running from one to the other!

This is a Before photo of our closet.
I don't have an After shot yet, nor do I expect to have one anytime soon.
Just sharing with you the frustration of this closet.
You can't even walk in straight!  You have to turn sideways and shuffle.
So, there was a 30 second discussion before we ripped that shelf on the left down.  And then I lived with my clothes on the floor for 2 weeks until Russ brought our dresser back from CA.

Another benefit to living in the mountains...rainy season ROCKS.

Our neighbors said that around July 4th then we would start getting rain every day.
I didn't believe them.
But guess what.  The last day of June, and HELLOOOOOO monsoon season!

And we have had rain at least once every 24 hours for every day but 2 or 3.

(This is looking off the back deck.)

And we love it.  It doesn't get old.
Probably because the storms only last for 30 minutes or so.

But the humidity is lovely and the smell is absolutely intoxicating.

We keep talking about how perfect this place is for us.  We have the warm (but not super hot) summer, we get snow in the winter, we have pine trees, we have an amazing homeschooling community, our best friends live just 10 minutes down the road, we have our land and a fantastic house that we love, Russ has a great job and was surprised to find out that he actually enjoyed his commute, we have monsoon season with storms that rival those in North Carolina (the thunder is deafening!), and after those monsoons everything greens up.
It's good to find a place where you can 100% say "Yes, this is Home."