Birthday Musings

Well, this has been a really busy year. Buying a home and the subsequent process of remodeling said home has really been a time consuming project. Today we had concrete poured in the front, increasing the width of our circle driveway by five feet at the center and also filling in the ugly strip between sidewalk and street. I am so excited to begin the planting perennials in the half circle. Looking out the front window will soon be a pleasure instead of a pain. Tomorrow we have home teachers coming over to help work on the basement. I am hoping that Mary's room will soon be occupied.
Benjamin has a bad cold and the past two nights have been awful. Last night after falling asleep at ten, he woke up three times during the following hour....I stopped keeping track after that. We walked or dozed in the corner of the couch, with Ben on my shoulder so that he could breathe easier. Hopefully tonight will be at least marginally better, I am sooo tired!
The kids love being back in school. In his own words, Isaiah has "the best teacher ever!" Rebekah is thrilled to have brought home her first homework today and Mary is very excited about participating in either band or orchestra this year. Emma ranges from being moderately to severly disgruntled about not being in school, and tells everyone she sees that she will be in kindergarten very soon. Benjamin is talking just a bit. His words are hi, uh-oh, and hot (at least those are the ones that we understand).
We are thinking about getting a cat. This would be our first real pet. (We had fish when Mary was a baby) The only reason we haven't already gone out and got one, is that Steven and I are somewhat concerned about how much love it would recieve. (Way too much?) Well...I have one more bathroom to clean and the little girl's room to straighten.

Patience Iago

Well, we did it! We made an offer on a house. Now comes the hard part. Waiting. I must confess that I get overly excited about most things and that I HATE waiting. Even though we could know as early as Wednesday, it seems like such a long time. We have already started planning the changes that we want to make to the basement, and I have priced out many of the items we will want for our home...lighting, paint, appliances, etc. I have picked color schemes. I hope that if our offer is accepted that the month it will take to close will go fast. Thank goodness February is the shortest month.

Other news of note for us is the winter weather. We got about a foot of snow Saturday and Sunday. Since we already had some on the ground, we have several feet in the yard now. The roads are horrible, even though they have plowed some of them. The kids got a snow day today, and around dinner time they canceled school for tomorrow as well. Tonight and tomorrow we are supposed to get a few more inches, then more on Thursday, and still more this coming weekend. Emma keeps asking when summer will be here.

On a side note, on Sunday Isaiah said that he wished he could speak another language so that he could talk to the Wales in Wales (meaning his cousins). Steven told him that they also spoke English and Isaiah was relieved apparantly this has been weighing on his mind. It will be so much fun for the cousins to spend some time together this summer.

Self Control is Over-Rated

As Steven has mentioned in his blog, we are looking for a house. I really hope that it will be a fun process, I will admit that I am a little nervous about it. But what I am really struggling with as of late is the impulse to pack up the entire house. (I haven't mentioned this to my husband...). I have always been an early packer. During our first year of marriage we considered moving and I packed everything up one day while my husband was at work, and we lived in and out of boxes for a short time before we decided that we were staying. So then I had to unpack everything and put my house back together. However this time I know that we will be moving, but the timeline is uncertain. Truthfully though, the only thing stopping me from pulling out the boxes from the shed (we have moved so much, that we keep all the boxes handy) and packing everything up, is the fact that our house is so small, that there is no room for them once they are packed up. This fact doesn't keep my fingers from twitchng and my brain from trying to find a solution. I know my husband will be shaking his head as he reads this, but he has likely been expecting it, he knows me too well. I will most likely restrain myself until something is certain, but then again, maybe I won't.