I'm still here.....

Well, we are all still alive..... barely. Just kidding- actually I'm doing much better this week. I think I haven't cried for 3 days in a row now! So things are looking up. :-)

The last 2 weeks were pretty rough. We couldn't have gotten out of our last house without help from my mom and grandma. They were there helping almost every day: holding the baby making food, packing boxes, etc. And I'm also so grateful to my dad, and friends from Grand View and Twin Falls, who helped us load and unload the truck (multiple times), clean the house and even brought meals too.

We are still staying at my parents house while Joel and I finish getting the house ready. It's taking some prep work because as many of you know, this new house is less than half the size of our last one. It's smaller than our CJ Strike/Grand View house and smaller than our little house we owned in Twin Falls 5 years ago. I seriously didn't know how we would fit the beds and dressers into the bedrooms, let alone any of my sewing stuff and bookshelves and we have LOTS of books. Even if we didn't homeschool we would have tons of books- but homeschooling just adds a whole new dimension to our book owning tendencies. To help with the space issues, I am planning to turn the coat closet into a homeschool closet, Joel carpeted and I painted the storage room off of the garage to make a bedroom for the boys (it's actually turning out to be the best room in the house!), Mom and I turned part of the garage into a walk-in pantry/ storage room to house the crock pots, Bosch, Vita-Mix, micro-wave, griddle and bulk food, etc. My new kitchen doesn't have a dishwasher and it doesn't even fit my fridge either. Okay, I take that back. The fridge fits the spot as long as you don't need to open the doors. Sounds like a great way to help me shed that excess baby weight, doesn't it? But the kids insisted that our new house have a working fridge, so for now it is pulled out a foot or so into my 4X4 foot kitchen and continues to remind me of the beautiful, well designed, spacious kitchen I left behind.

I may be telling you a sob story but don't worry, I'm over the crying. Cried buckets and bucket the last few weeks and I'm pretty much all cried out. I'm even done crying about the fact that the previous tenants had 3 huge dogs that urinated all over the carpets and gave the house a horrible smell. Now everything seems strangely funny. A few months ago I never would have guessed our family would be living in a tiny stinky house in Hagerman and that I would get over it and that life would go on. Life has a way of doing that.