Apple Farming

We took the children to a great apple farm last weekend, snotty noses and all.










Did somebody say, "Apple Cinnamon Doughnuts?"

welcome to Michigan

We arrived in St. Joseph, Michigan on Friday June 3, 2011 after months of packing up all our belongings without all of us completely understanding where the things in the boxes were really going and weeks of traveling while living out of our super cool conversion van and after being torn away from cousins (and one of the coolest Aunts ever, sorry all you other Aunts, you're pretty cool, too) who lived next door (as in we practically lived with them) and both sets of grandparents and a swimming pool under our house, and bikes and a rock pit and swings and great grandparents that have a perpetually full cookie jar and a freezer with an endless supply of ice cream cartons you can take back to your own house any time you want and a garden with carrots to munch and sunny mild non-humid non-freezing California weather.....




Anyway, we all handled this tumultuous time very well.  In the next few weeks after our arrival our children were a delight and always very well behaved. 

And Mommy was always the perfect picture of patience and serenity, with her hair always done and her attire always tasteful and fashionable.  Even if she didn't have a washing machine to combat the quickly multiplying dirty articles of clothing and even if she was sleeping on the living room floor at five months pregnant in a sleeping bag surrounded by those horrible cardboard boxes that need to be unpacked.  

 Ok, ok, so maybe our children had a little bit of a hard time adjusting and maybe Mommy was very close to losing it completely and maybe she was not so very patient all the time.  But somehow we survived.

I think Rivers' unfathomable sadness pictured above stemmed from the fact that her brown skirt that matched the particular shirt she picked out to wear was still in California in Grandmommy's laundry room where a basket of mending got left behind.  I don't know why she chose this particular time to even remember she had a brown skirt because she certainly never wanted to wear it when it was in the same state with her.   Grandmommy has since mended and mailed the skirt to us and she has happily worn it many times. 

After arriving in Michigan, we stayed in a hotel for a week.  Couldn't complain too much, they had complementary washers and dryers for us to use, we were staying there at a reduced price thanks to the hospital Brian works at, we weren't paying for the electrical bill of running the AC full blast on some very humid days, our room had a kitchenette with a stove and a full sized refrigerator, and there was a jacuzzi tub in the bathroom.  I never used the tub. 

But she did.
Daily.

And since during our move she had turned into the scariest four-year-old monster I have ever been acquainted with in all my three decades and counting, we were very happy to let her soak in those bubbles for as long as she wanted.

 

 And soak and soak and soak she did.

Really, she was very. very. scary.  Only a few have seen her at her very scariest.  It's impressive.  

Even though our accommodations were nice, they were still expensive (even with the discount) and small and our children weren't falling asleep until ten o'clock or later and nobody was napping.  It wasn't pretty.  We spent our days looking for a place to live.  We ate Taco Bell and/or McDonald's several times.  And we briefly checked out a couple local attractions as a diversion.  Mostly, we were looking for a place to live.  The rental market is not so great here in St. Joe.  We saw a lot of places that might have worked but not so nicely, and we saw some places that were downright scary.  We looked online, we drove the streets and we started calling realtors of houses for sale to see if the owners might consider renting instead of selling.   In the end it was a realtor who found us a house.  It was a house for sale but the owner was willing to rent to us.   We are very happy with our home.  Our landlady is very kind.  I think the realtor told her about our children and that she felt compassion for our little family.  She accepted our offer of how much we could afford to pay for rent and she has been happy to allow us to make changes in the house to accommodate our needs.  We are grateful. 

Our home is a 1970's ranch house.  It has three bedrooms and a full bath in the west wing.  Doesn't that sound Jane Austinish?  I live in a house big enough that I can describe parts of it as wings.  Crazy.  The very large living room and the kitchen and dining area are in the middle and then in the east wing there is an additional room that has become our playroom, another room that Brian put the needed plumbing and electrical in to make my laundry room (I know, I know I am sooooo spoiled and I couldn't be happier about it) and a half bath.  Lest you become too jealous, let me assure you that all is not perfection and that we have put some serious work into this place.  This house has been vacant for most of the four years our landlady has owned it.  It's humid here.  There was no dehumidifier in the basement.  Some water seeped into the basement.  This all means that the house smelled.  It really smelled like a moldy basement.  A really moldy basement.  The half bath had some water damage as well.  Brian found the source and it has since been fixed.  But that bathroom was a moldy mess as well.  The day we moved in I first wiped out the dishwasher and ran it to clean it.  I think I started there because it was the mildest of the tasks that were before me.  I then went and cleaned the toilet in the main bath.  And then I had to clean the bathtub so that I could bath my children for church the next day.  It took me a very long time to do those two things.  Sometimes I think that I overreacted to the condition of the house and that my OCD tendencies just made me a little hyper, but then I look at these pictures Brian took before we moved in and I think my feelings were justified.

 It was bad.  Really bad.

But nothing that some serious cleaning and work couldn't fix.  The bathtub looks like this now.




 Nothing we can do about the sweet seventies coloring but I can bathe my babies in it without freaking out.  There were some retro-cool brown palm tree anti-slip stickers in there that I had time to remove a few days later as their peeling palm fronds were poking my babies' tender bottoms.  The bathroom is great now.  Brian replaced the nasty torn toilet seat with a super cool seat that closes slowly on it's own instead of slamming shut and has a built in potty seat that magnetically sticks to the lid when you don't need it.  I recaulked around the tub after I tore out the ugly old caulking.  The bathroom is all clean.  It would be perfect, unattractive wallpaper and all, if it weren't for the fact that it is carpeted.  Seriously.  I think that carpet in the bathroom should be against the law.  It's morally wrong.  Do you know what happens around toilets and bathtubs when you have small children?  What happens around bathtubs isn't so bad I guess, but the toilets... help.  It's a good thing I have a little upholstery cleaner.



The main bath was not the worst of our problems.  Brian worked like a maniac in the basement.  There was a bunch of moldy wood and other random items in the basement that needed to be taken out and trashed, it needed to be vacuumed, walls and floors and even ceiling tiles in some areas were scrubbed.  And then he painted the entire basement floor with special paint.  It looks really nice.  He built shelves for storage and more shelves for his tools and a workbench.  I also have pantry shelves for food storage.  The basement no longer smells and is no longer a scary place.  Except for the bugs.  There are a lot of bugs around here.  The half bath was also a major cleaning project.  And don't remind me about the fridge.  If I could afford it, I would have just gotten a new one.  I don't want to think about it anymore.

We were very fortunate to receive a lot of help initially.  Our new ward (church congregation) is one of the nicest, most service-oriented I have ever belonged to.  Brian and I were very grateful and humbled by the welcome we received.  We were invited to dinner during our first two Sundays when it was discovered that we were living in a hotel and then that we had just moved into a home.  There was one evening when a bunch of members came and helped clean.  My kitchen cabinets were cleaned out, closets and walls were wiped down, and some of the men helped Brian get a jump start on the basement.  Even some who couldn't help clean gave invaluable service.  One sweet sister in the ward brought us Panera Bread for lunch, she brought us so much it was dinner as well.  And another family watched our children.  They had their three small children and our three small children all bathed and in bed on time at their house.  I seriously need to take notes, their parenting skills are amazing.  The evening everyone came to help the missionaries thought they were just going to a dinner appointment, but the family who had signed up to feed them brought the food here for them and put them to work.  They, of course, got stuck with the two nastiest jobs.  One cleaned the half bath from ceiling to floor with bleach water to kill all the mold.  The other tackled the large concrete utility sink in the basement.  I was so grateful.  Even after the bleach cleaning it took me about four hours one night to clean that tiny closet of a bathroom.  Every little hidden crevice was plastered with thick oily black mold.  Do you know just how nasty an unused toilet tank can get?  And you can't ignore it or every time you flush the toilet chunks of mold come swirling into your toilet bowl.  I think that was the bathroom that while cleaning I kept screaming out spontaneously, "This is so disgusting!"  Brian fixed the water damaged ceiling and wall, painted, and put up some vinyl baseboard along the tiled walls and linoleum floor.  Now it is a very pleasant little bathroom that we have unofficially dubbed the boy bathroom.  Partly because Brian uses that bathroom the most and partly because that is where Sidon will be potty training because I'm a little nervous about potty training a boy in a bathroom with carpet.

Brian stayed up until four in the morning regularly in June painting and fixing and what not.  But now we are feeling much more settled.  There are a few items of furniture that we're still on the look out for but that seems minor compared to what we've accomplished.



Things I love about this house are:


The windows.  Very large windows all along the back of the house.  It's really very lovely.

The closet in the kid's room.  It's a small walk-in closet with built in drawers.  There is room under the mirror for the girls' dress-up trunk.  I think they like the closet as well.

Brian's office.  The third bedroom (the smallest) is Brian's office.  It's really nice for him to have his own office space and a separate little closet for his scrubs and white coats and what not.  And someday I get a treadmill in there.

Closets.  I have a linen closet, a coat closet and a utility/cleaning supply closet.  That's a lot of closets.

The living room.  It's large.  Lots of room for the children to run in circles and for Brian and Sidon to wrestle.

The backyard.  It's fenced.  It's pretty.  It has a patio.  The children can play outside.

The laundry room.  I cannot be more excited about my MAIN FLOOR laundry room.  It's amazing.  It's not in the basement.  It is also my mudroom.  At the moment we don't actually use the outside door, but come winter when the kids play out in the snow and come in with snowy dirty boots I will make them use that door.  There are hooks for coats and bags, benches to sit on and store shoes under, shelves for everyone's clean laundry baskets so I can sort the clean laundry as it comes out of the dryer, space for all the dirty laundry tubs, and two wire laundry lines for me to hang stuff on.  It's amazing.  Brian is amazing.  Don't you think?  I just kind of tell him what I want and he builds it.  We brainstorm together to figure out how we can make it work with what we've got already and what we can afford to get and then he does all the building and I do all the organizing.  Works out pretty well. 

So things have settled down.  The children are feeling better now that we have a home that feels like a home and that there is a more predictable schedule and routine.  Mommy feels a lot better, too.  I remember our first night in our new home Brian suggested that we all sleep in the living room (where he and I were sleeping) like a big family slumber party for our first night in our new house.  I looked at him like he was completely insane.  We'd just endured nearly a month of a big family slumber party and now that there was a room at the end of a hall that I could shut my children into for the night, he wanted to have them sleep on the floor next to us?  Seriously?  They all slept in their brand new bedroom that first night and every night since.  



So, very long post about boring house stuff.  I do have more pictures of kiddos and our life this summer.  But I need to drink a large glass of water and go to bed because if I have this baby this month I'm going to cry.  A lot.  And I'd rather be happy when my baby is born.