Week of June 9

Week 30.  Only 10 weeks away!  If only I could sleep better these days.  I'm pretty sure my lack of sleep during the past week caused me to get sick this week.  Boo.

I hope you like pictures.  I have lots this week.

Sunday
I like Sundays. 

Monday
MOVING DAY.  The day we have longed for.  We got up and I felt pretty icky.  The day must go on!  We showed up to our new house and there were a couple of people from church along with several of Caleb's family members that were there.  The trailer was unloaded in less than an hour.  Some of the ladies from our church were so sweet to make lunch for everyone.  After lunch we went back to the house and felt a little overwhelmed because we didn't know where to start.  My mother in law helped me get the kitchen cabinets wiped out and all of the kitchen boxes opened up and unpacked. Caleb and the rest of his family were busy getting some of the other rooms put together or at least getting the right boxes in the right room.  By the end of the evening our house actually started looking like a home.  I don't know what we would have done without all of their help.

Getting started

His muscles

 

Waiting ever so patiently for someone to hand him something that he can take inside.

 



Making sure to keep the washer warm with a snuggie.

 

My father-in-law taking a nap.

Tuesday

I woke up still feeling icky.  I had taken a sleeping pill Monday night so that I could at least get a whole night's sleep.  I woke up shortly after Caleb did and after he left to go to work I went back to bed for a couple more hours.  It felt so great to be able to sleep after so many sleepless nights.  Tuesday afternoon we headed to Mexico to get the rest of our stuff from Rachel's house and to go to Wal-Mart.  Don't you just dread those trips to Wal-Mart after a move??  You always end up spending way more than you care to just because there are so many things you need.

Wednesday
More ick.  But Caleb and I were able to get more unpacked.  I also was able to start in on making curtains for our new house.  We have several big windows and no window coverings...not even mini blinds.  It kind of feels awkward at night when you know people can look in on you.  :-/  Also, we got a lawnmower!  I found a really good deal on a nice lawnmower so we went and checked it out.  I love the way God provides for us :-). 

 

Also on Wednesday, the Centralia newspaper came out, and guess who was on the front page?

If you want to read a portion of the article, you can find it here:
http://www.firesideguard.com/?p=4702


Thursday
My parents came to visit!  The morning started out rather rough for them.  They brought my dad's truck and loaded up the back of it with the baby crib, a dresser, a changing table/dresser, outside trash cans, and some other things.  As they were driving down highway 70, my dad saw the crib go flying out of the back of the truck.  He stopped real quick and once they got out, they saw that the crib was on the other side of the highway, the dresser was in pieces all over the highway and the trash cans were gone as well.  A sweet lady pulled over to help them pick up the pieces so traffic could start moving again on 70.  It turns out that one of the bungee cords my dad was using snapped.  :-(  They got pulled over at the next exit and were able to secure everything again, along with reducing their speed the rest of the way to keep anything else from flying out.  Praise the Lord that none of the flying baby furniture hit any other cars or caused any accidents.  The crib has a little bit of damage to it, but nothing that a little sanding a new coat of paint can't fix.  The dresser is indeed in pieces, but Caleb is pretty sure that he can piece it back together pretty easily as long as too many pieces aren't missing.  It will just have more character now.  :-)

Once my parents got here, they started in on helping us around the house.  My dad started working on closing up a hole that is in the roof of our porch.  The wood is starting to rot and there are critters that seem to be making their home up there.  We had one angry bird on our porch for the rest of the day! 

My mom started tackling the pantry.  The pantry is really the ugliest thing in our house.  It had ugly green paint with all sorts of stains all over it.  There was carpet in there that needed to leave with the 60's, and overall it was just blah.  Caleb ripped the carpet up and my mom got the place looking amazing with the help of a can of paint and some contact paper! Also, a family from church gave us some left over peel and stick tile that they had leftover from a home project.

Before:

That's carpet at the bottom, not puke.  I know you might have been confused.

 

And after:

 



And filled with food!:

 

My mom also worked on the stove.  I'm not sure what happened to the stove, but somehow all of the paint was crackled on the top.  The landlord told us we could scrap off the paint if we wanted to.  My mom also asked me if the inside of the oven was clean.  I told her that I wasn't sure because I hadn't opened it.  She opened it and the look on her face was not what I was wanting to see.  The inside of that oven was the nastiest looking oven I've ever seen. It's not a self-cleaning oven but fortunately my mom is awesome and scrubbed the inside of that too so we could at least be able to use it. 

 

Before

 

 

After:

It's not perfect, but I think it definitely looks better.

I got to working on more curtains, and Caleb and my dad also put up a rod and a shelf in a closet for me to use.  What kind of a closet doesn't have a rod or any shelves?  Anyway, those guys are pretty handy to have around.  :-)

 Before:

 After:

Friday
The baby doctor appointment went well.  I did my glucose test but we won't know the results until Monday or Tuesday.  Also, I'm in trouble if this child ever gets too much sugar.  After drinking that glucose drink, he was wiggling all over the place and wouldn't stay still for the nurse to listen to his heart beat.

After the appointment we went to see Caleb's sister and her tots.  Caleb always loves getting to be a super hero.



And be in a band.

 

And love on this little guy...

...who apparently needs three limbs to drink a bottle.

Then we got home and went Mulberry picking!  So last Sunday I discovered these little berries all over our back deck and all through the backyard.  I immediately went and bought a broom so that when everyone unloaded the trailer through the back door they wouldn't be tracking these berries all over the house.  I told Caleb about these "nasty little berries" and how they are really hard to clean up off of the kitchen floor, let alone carpet.  He informed me that these "nasty little berries" are actually mulberries.  I don't really know much about mulberries other than a nursery rhyme song to go along with a bush of them.  I looked up mulberries on pinterest and apparently these little guys are very delicate and don't last long once picked, so most grocery stores don't even carry them.  I read up on how to pick them and such (not that it's rocket science).   So Friday Caleb and I went out and he shook out as many branches as he could reach to get these berries down. 


Shaking the limbs.  He also used our snow shovel to bat at the tree limbs



The harvest

 We brought the bucket inside and filled it with water.  I put on some rubber gloves since they stain really bad and picked out all of the ripe ones.  There were these tiny little brown bugs that were all over the berries and started crawling all over me.  Sick. 

Here's all of the berries soaking in some vinegar water to kill off any more of the little bugs.


 Drying them

 

 

Anyone have any good mulberry recipes??

Oh yeah, Caleb also found a wild strawberry!

Saturday

While I worked on even more curtains (we have a lot of windows!) Caleb pieced the dresser back together that took flight out of my dad's truck.

 

Here's what he had to start with:  (minus the drawers)

Pretty much anything that could have fallen apart did.

 

And here's the finished piece:

Yeah, I know, my husband is awesome.  :-)  There was only one piece missing so because of that the bottom drawer doesn't slide very well.  Since it needs to be painted anyway, I've been trying to come up with a cute way to make it turtley to go with the nursery.  Unfortunately pinterest doesn't seem to have many "turtle dressers", and I have zero creativity without pinterest.

 

We also lost power on Saturday night.  I saw a bright flash of lightning and looked outside to see sparks flying everywhere from the electrical line that crosses the street.  I figured it would be out for quite awhile but it was actually only out for less than an hour.  Caleb looked out and saw a bird sitting up higher on the power line.  He said it was probably the bird from the front porch that caused the power outage just to get revenge.

 

So now I'm going to leave you with some of Caleb's philosophies about life that he has declared to me this week:

 

- If you can cut it with a butter knife, you can cut it with a fork.

- If it's small enough that a Band-Aid will help, I don't need a Band-Aid.

- If you have all of the pieces, I can fix it.

 

I thought I would document these in case he ever gets interviewed by a newspaper again and they ask him what his life philosophy is.