Just popping in

Things are trucking right along around here. 10 days until court!!! That is certainly the foremost thing on my brain. I try and reason with myself all the time about why we will pass court on the first try, when 50% of parents don't. I do think we have a better chance than average because Asher case is an abandonment case. In those situations relatives do not have to show up to court which can often times be the reason a case will not pass. Pretty much as long as all our documents are there, we will pass. At the same time I am trying to no get my hopes up. I know in the long run, a few extra weeks will not matter if we fail. I am still desperately praying we pass though.........

We got quite a bit of work done on the house this weekend. We have a few projects we want to finish up before winter/Asher comes home. Yesterday we screwed deck boards down a good chunk of the day. I would say we have about 1/2 of them down. That is pretty good, but it seems to be going very slow.

Ryan got some more wood cut yesterday also. The last batch of wood he brought home was very unproductive, so that, combined with warmer weather, has prompted no wood burner. As messy as it is, I love our wood burner stove. There is just something cozy about it and to have at least one place in the house I know I can get warm. So Ryan got some good wood and we are hoping to be able to rotate the wood so that the bad stuff doesn't go to waste (it just doesn't burn very well). Last year Ryan cut all the wood we needed for the winter of the summer/fall. This year he has gotten us a decent stash, but not enough for the whole winter. I think he plans to just play it by ear and make a couple mid winter trips to the woods.

We finished the living room painting that I have been working on for about a week now. That has been pretty tough because my living room has been torn apart and we have had to keep the little ones out. It looks good though. The walls were really almost "too rough" to paint, but we just filled what imperfections we could and went with it. I love how clean the "lines" look and once we get pictures up and stuff, the cruddy walls won't be very noticeable.

Right now my next project is getting all the paper off the computer room walls. This is proving to just be ugly. The paper in the living room came right off, the computer room, well, not so much. Two layers of paper, a layer of paint and then two more layers of paper is just hard to work with. Also, one who wall has some sort of weird top layer that is like a really fine pressed wood. How am I suppose to scrap wet paper off that? The "wood" will scrap of also. I think I will just turn that into an "accent wall" and I have a new technique I will probably try on it that is suppose to be really cool (and cover a multitude of sins......ahhhhhh....old houses). I am also waiting on in that room for our handy dandy man to come and put the new door in (that goes to our new deck). He should be here this week.

Pretty much once we are done with the above projects, we will have the items on my list done, I am thinking though that I might want to paint the hallway that goes upstairs. That will not be an easy paint, but it really needs some work. I did a crummy job painting it the first time (it is really hard to reach certain parts) and it has some holes in the plaster in some spot (thank you my wonderful 5 kids). Plus the hands marks everywhere and the seriously drab color doesn't help anything either. Really, to paint that will just prolong the start of my sewing (which is what I intend to do for quite some time once the house is in order), so we will see whether I choose to do the "fun" thing or the "good caretaker" thing.

One last thing......my house is finally free from sickness. It hit Anna, then Gideon, then Madeline, but we have been fever free for over a day. Anna seemed to have gotten hit the hardest (and longest) and I feel pretty fortunate that it wasn't any worse than it was. Hopefully all 7 of us will remain free of the ickies for a long time!

Julie