Busy Weekend Ahead

We lost our buyer. But it's OK. We'll keep on, keeping on. Lucky for us they weren't in our house when they decided to split. That is such a curious thing to me. One minute they think they want to make a huge purchase together and the next minute they are taking a break from their relationship. Maybe they knew they needed big changes, but weren't sure which extreme end of it.

We are in the countdown to summer break! I'm excited. However I have a class that starts before my kids are done with school, and that's no fun. It's a CPR/First Aid class. I picked up my supplies for my summer classes and Joel was flipping through my book for this class. There are a lot of gross pictures in it, and I am not looking forward to the class. There's a reason I'm not going into nursing! I hope none of the kids in my class lose their fingers or have a broken arm with the bone poking out while I'm in charge! Eeek!

It has been raining here a crazy amount this last week, and we have more on the way. Our rain gauge said we got almost 4 inches of rain on Wednesday and Thursday. Some of our plants are growing so much! It's exciting to see them all come up. Although, I am still waiting for my Elephant Ear to grow, I'm excited to see how it turns out. I plan to spend all of tomorrow and Monday working in the yard on various things. I haven't forgotten about the pictures I took last week that I promised to post for you, Mom! I will get to those too!

Today I learned that our beautiful plum tree, which is about 10 feet tall, has a disease called "black knot". I have to treat it this weekend by cutting off branches that are affected, and burn them, then I have to treat the tree with a spray. I hope it works, because we were super excited to see fruit growing on a tree we thought was an imposter "mock" plum tree.  Our apple tree has a lot of fruit growing on it, and we are excited to see that too! We didn't see any bees out when the trees were in blossom and we got super cold after the blossoms too, so we thought it would be a bad year for fruit. Happy it's not! I think it might be a Golden Delicious tree.

The kids are also bugging us to get the pool up. We have some friends who are moving and sold us their pool and trampoline. So I might try to get that up too, we will see if we have time. I could have used it a few days ago when it was super hot!

Update

We might have a buyer! I advertised, on Saturday, our home as a possible contract for deed and right away got a call from this couple who were very excited about our home. I was so scared we were going to have to advertise and advertise to get some decent interest. But these people said they had to make a decision by Friday and could I show them the house on Monday? So when I met with them Monday they were in love with it. And what's even more amazing... the huge puddle in the road, the screaming neighbor, and the kids running up and down in the puddle did not deter them one bit! They even wanted to give me $1,000 in earnest money that night!  I was floored, thinking, "how is this possible?" So, I am cautiously optimistic. I really want it to be true and to be a good fit for all of us! I hope, hope, hope this works out. We really could use the financial relief. But, sometimes I have been excited about something, and then something bad happens and I feel so rotten. They want to put down 10%, which is awesome! They also are talking about paying it off as soon as they can so they can have some financial freedom too.

Jake is on his own now. We have the car he's been using, back in our hands again. He bought himself a car and insurance. He's done with his associates degree.  He's still living at grandma's and says he wants to go on his mission after this summer. Letting him be a grown up is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Even harder than the 18 hours of labor I had giving birth.  Harder than the 18 years of raising him. Often my heart aches for when he was a little boy and still here. Every evening he would  help me make dinner, and it was so nice to talk and chat during this time. Just me and him. Now I don't know where he is, where he's going, who he's hanging out with, what are they doing, when will he be home? Has he eaten anything healthy today? Does he have gas? And to top it all off... I know his car doesn't have a good seat belt that he will use regularly :( this scares the daylights out of me. It's so hard to stand in my spot and know I've done all I can and I just have to worry about me and the rest of the kids I'm raising, and let go of them in their own time too.

Tonight I got out with my camera for a little while and hope to soon give you a small tour of some things going on around the property this month. Unfortunately I had put my camera away before the dogs noticed a group of deer in the field behind the house, and had chased them off by the time I got it back out. Bummer.

The house has been very warm the last few days, and it's been very tempting to turn the air conditioning on, but I've resisted, mostly because we can't turn it on until we have it serviced by the company that repaired it last fall while we were waiting for closing. I'm thinking of naming the property Breezy Acres because we always seem to have a breeze going on here, and that was helpful in keeping the house a little cooler. I'm taking suggestions if you have one, for names. Some I've thought of are Wood Wind Acres (because I've been amazed at how loud the wind in the woods are since we moved here, it's a sound I'm not used to), Windy Acres... and a few more.

May 11, 2012

My garden is all planted now, yippie! I can't wait to watch the plants grow. Tonight we are having corn on the cob and the kids were commenting that they can't wait until they are eating OUR corn on the cob, and how they think ours will be so much better. I'm sure it will, especially since tonight's corn is probably from last season, ha!

I also have a lot of herbs growing in pots on my porch, so that they are easy to get to when I'm cooking. I love cooking with fresh herbs!

I'm done with school for the semester now! YIPPIE! I haven't heard my grade for one class yet, but I know I got an A in Art, and B's in Children's Literature and Math. I'm happy I did that well, it was a really hard semester for me and I struggled a lot with my Math and also in getting all my homework done while working at my job. A lot of things at home didn't get done. I didn't like that, and as a result, I'm burned out. Also I have been dragging my feet registering and applying for financial aid for the coming year. I don't want to go this summer, but while I registered for Minnesota State Moorhead, they told me the program requires some summer classes. This really bums me out. I've done classes for the last 3 summers and don't want to any more.

I hope my mom gets her card before Mother's Day.  I hope you have a wonderful day Mom! Love you!

May Day ~ 2012

I finally found some time to put up some more pictures of the things me and my family have been up to.
First off, my art....
This is a charcoal rendition of an image our teacher gave us of a table with a very big spread of foods. I chose to focus on the fruit basket in the image. We had to cover our paper with charcoal until it was black, then take it home and erase in the image. This is what I got....

The next big project he gave us was a graphite photorealism drawing. We had to bring in several pictures to choose from, I brought in a few of my own images. I decided I liked the image from one of our maple syruping outings we do every year, because I wanted something I could frame later, and also it is relevant to our family. This is kind of the finished project. In the picture I cropped out the 2 inches of white border I have around the image. Also this photograph of it is darker than the original...

We also dug up a very large area of sod to make a garden. Unfortunatly the job ended up being a lot harder than we expected, so although we cut sod 2x bigger than we removed, it is still a rather large area we have made for planting.  The kids have been a huge help, especially this little country girl! She's not afraid to get in there with us and work hard!

And this guy was laying in any cool spot he cound find, including our freshly plowed rows. Can you see that he's earned two stars from Joy, on his rabies tag? One gold, one silver. Good Duke.





This is two images put together to show you the part we did get cleared off for planing. Behind Joel is another spot not quite as big that we haven't gotten all up. Might have to wait until next year to get the rest. I'm pooped with moving sod! I think if you click on this it will get bigger.



Here's Joel working hard on his mower pulling his plow. He's so cute!

We got a lot of the garden seeds planted last weekend, and have some plants started indoors that I will wait a bit on before I put them out. But a big chunk of hard work is out of the way, yay!