Hello?

Hello? Anyone still reading?

Gosh, where to start? Well, I'm posting this from our new living room! Okay, so we finally sold the house. Like for real sold it and closed on it and bought another one. It took 136 showings, 3 contracts, and 5 extensions on the closing date, but it got done! It was a serious roller coaster. We got the contract in February and were supposed to close March 24. We actually ended up closing April 22. There were so many crazy things to happen. All of the delays were the fault of either our buyer or his loan company. It actually caused us 3 days delay on the scheduled closing of our new house. 

Speaking of the new house, we love it. We really, really, really love it. Before we found it, during the mad rush to find a home once our old one sold (which turned out to be not such a mad rush after all), we found another home that we fell head over heels in love with. It was crazy how perfect it was for us. It's like it was actually custom built for us. But we lost the bid on it, and we were devastated. After that it seemed like nothing we saw was appealing at all, and we looked at A LOT of houses. In fact, we actually signed a contract on one at one point that we didn't just love, simply because it would technically work for us, and we were running out of time. Fortunately the inspection on it came back with some minor issues that allowed us to back out of the contract. I'm so very glad now that we didn't buy that house, but at the time it seemed like we were out of options. 

Then when our realtor showed me this one (I went without Nick the first time), I said to him, "This is the first one I've liked since we lost (the other house we wanted)." Nick liked it too, although it took him a little bit more time to get fully on board with it. But once we got our hearts wrapped around the fact that we really were not going to be able to buy our first pick, this one was the obvious choice.

Let me be clear, I know that God had a reason for us to not get that other home. Yes, it certainly was everything we wanted, but it was also a very long commute to Nick's job, and the neighborhood was not as nice as the one we now live in. And I just have to trust that there may have been other issues that would have come up down the line.

But anyway, here we are. The kids all have their own room, Nick and I have a massive bedroom and a ridiculously large closet, his commute to work had been cut in half, and.....there's a craft room! Actually it's technically a den, but for me it's an awesome craft room, and it's all mine! I'm still working on getting it all put together, but I'll get there. I'm mostly done. And the back yard is big and flat and fenced in for the kids and the dogs, and a walking trail runs right behind it. Earlier I made blackberry cobbler from the blackberries we picked along the path back there.

We celebrated our 18th anniversary last Sunday. Actually we celebrated it the Friday before with an awesome kid-free trip to an amusement park, but Sunday was the actual day. The whole weekend was wonderful, but we especially had fun on our date Friday.

I finally got Jack potty trained. And yes, he's four, but between all the chaos of having the house on the market for almost a year with nearly daily showings and the four weeks we lived with my parents it was just an impossible task until we got settled. 

Oh, I didn't mention we lived with my parents for a while? We moved out of the old house March 26. At that point there had been one extension and we were due to close on the 29th, so we cleared out so the buyer could do his final walk through. Then of course we ended up not closing for almost another month. My parents were really awesome, but it was an extremely stressful month with all five of us sharing two bedrooms and one bathroom, on top of the daily roller coaster of trying to get the sale of the house to closing. 

Morgan and Daisy will be going to new schools. Morgan really wants to go to her old high school, which could technically happen because she has an approved transfer, but she ended up failing two classes last year for a myriad of reasons, and Nick is understandably unwilling to have me drive 20 minutes to the old school and back twice a day when she's not been doing the things she's supposed to. She lost her phone privileges months ago for doing some inappropriate things with it, and she's still not managed to earn it back. I don't want to give the impression that she's turned into some kind of teenage reprobate - a lot of her issues stem from some struggles with anxiety and depression that she really battles, but some of it is just her being an irresponsible kid. We're hopeful that a new school will be a fresh start for her, and we really love the school district we've moved to.

Domestic discipline has been very much on the back burner, which I hate, but I don't know how to fix it. I've tried bringing it up a couple of times, and Nick seems more or less willing to keep it on the table. Unfortunately that's easy to say without really doing anything to make that a reality. And I'm working hard to try to keep the house much cleaner than it was when we lived in the old house (before we were showing it 42 times a day), so maybe there's just nothing for him to come down on, but that doesn't mean the need for boundaries and discipline isn't still very much there for me. It's been seven months, and the lack of it is making itself felt. Meh. Same old story.

Let's see, what else? Right before we moved, a lady at our church gave us a brand new condition couch, chair, and recliner. She had bought them for her living room about a year ago and decided they were too big for her space, so she just gave them to us. She is an older widowed lady who lives alone in a pet free home, so they were immaculate, and it was just a crazy out of the blue blessing.

Last month we HAD to put tires on my car. It had gotten to the point that Nick wasn't comfortable with me even driving it, and something had to be done. So my dear sweet unselfish husband sold his custom bicycle that Will and Kate got him for Christmas a few years ago. It hurt my heart for him to give it up, but it was sold and gone before he ever told me about it.

Nick's great aunt passed away earlier this week, and we will be going to her funeral this evening. She was a lovely lady, and we hated to lose her. Unfortunately she had been struggling with dementia for the last few months, so it was a relief too in a way. 

Morgan turned 15 in April, so sometime in the next few weeks we plan to let her go get her learners permit, and just when exactly did I give permission for my children to grow up?

We went to church camp at the beginning of June, and it was a blessing as always. We had 16 kids get saved, including Daisy, who had made a profession when she was 4, but realized she hadn't really had a clear understanding of what it meant at the time. She wants to get baptized in the next few weeks.

God has really been so very good to us, showering us with all kind of blessings!

So, an update

Life has been...full. Some definite frustrations, but some huge blessings too. Around October 5 we got an offer on the house. A very low offer, but the first one we'd had after 5 months and 85 showings. We countered and they countered and then a slightly better offer came in, which was still about $5,000 lower than we wanted to sell for, but we accepted it. 

The inspection was on the 12th, and it turned out to be really bad news. The buyer backed out without even negotiating for us to fix anything. The biggest issue was that there was foundation damage that we didn't know about. Like almost $10,000 worth, which we obviously couldn't afford. 

So we regretfully let all our family know that we would be taking the house off the market when our realtor's contract expired at the end of the month and apparently staying here indefinitely. 

Then Nick's sister Kate found out what was going on, and she and her husband offered to send us the money to fix the foundation. So our agent contacted the guy whose offer we didn't accept, explained the whole situation with the first buyer backing out and the foundation issues and the impending repair. And he matched the first guy's  offer, so we were back in business. 

The foundation repair, which came with a transferable lifetime warranty was scheduled to be complete November 2. In the meantime the second buyer's inspection was completed. The foundation repair company we hired is the top name in our region, and they obviously stand behind their work, but the guy doing the inspection also works for a rival company, and he told the buyer that he would do the repair work a different way. So, on the day that we were having thousands of dollars worth of professional, guaranteed work done, the second buyer backed out. 

So that's where we are now. We've raised our price by a little to try to recoup some of the value of the repair work, and we've also put in new countertops and backsplash in the kitchen. And we're back to showing again. It's very frustrating, but that's how it sits right now. 

But at least the house is in the best shape it's ever been in since we've owned it, so if nothing else it's a better place to live. 

And obviously God is providing. He's even blessed us with some just plain fun stuff lately. I got some really cool craft stuff for my birthday in October, and I also had a couple of photography jobs that paid me enough to upgrade my Silhouette craft cutter, something that's been on my wish list for a couple of years. We got to upgrade our phones, and the agent we dealt with put us in a much cheaper plan that not only allowed us to get way better phones than we had hoped for (I'm typing this on an iPhone 6s Plus), but we were also able to give Morgan my old phone and get her a line since she was apparently THE LAST high schooler on the face of the earth without a cell phone. AND our purchases qualified us for a $100 iPad mini, which Nick bought me for Christmas. So we have been blessed for sure. 

I will say that I've had a bit of a struggle since we lost the last contract on the house with staying as much on top of things. Up until then we were all doing fabulous with keeping the house spotless. We had to - we were averaging 17 showings a month, so we never really had time to let it get dirty! But the loss of the contract(s) was disheartening to say the least, and we kind of lost momentum. Not that it wasn't still miles better than it used to be, but we had a showing a few days ago and it was more of a mad rush to get things ready than it should have been. And I've entered my usual Christmas rush, unwisely shifting my priorities like I somehow do every year. Last night (Monday night) I stayed up all night working on some craft projects that I legitimately needed to get done, but Nick was unhappy when he got up and found that I hadn't been to bed. Tonight I got taken upstairs for a bit of a lecture about keeping the house ready for showings and using my time wisely and obeying my bedtime. Then I had to bend over the end of the bed and he gave me a hard spanking with his belt. Prior to the spanking I had just come down from my shower, so I had already taken off my pants, but he let me keep my panties up. It was only 20 licks with the belt, but I was very repentant by the end. My poor bottom is quite out of practice and I can't take what I used to be able to. I'm just glad he didn't make me get out the Cracker Barrel paddle. It's the only one we have that isn't packed away right now. 

Anyway, I was absolutely in bed by 2:30 tonight, and it's time for me to turn out the lights and call it a night. 

What happened then...

So my last post went up just after midnight on a Friday. Friday morning when Nick got up for work, he read it. My posts get auto emailed to him when they go live. And he was maybe a little extra affectionate, a few pats on the butt and a bit more attention as I got Daisy up and ready for school. But he didn't mention it. And honestly, I didn't expect him to, not then anyway. But I thought we might talk about it that night. We didn't. Nor the next night. Finally on Sunday night, he said, "I read your post." "Yeah?" "I know you've been under a lot of stress lately, and I haven't been very good about dealing with it." And that was it. That night we went up to bed and he got on his iPad and played a bit, knowing he and the kids were off for Labor Day the next day and we could sleep in.

I thought maybe he would bring it up, or even act on it, but he didn't, so I tried talking to him about it. I tried explaining some of the feelings I was trying to work through in the post, and what I needed from him (basically piss or get off the pot). And he acted as though I literally wasn't there. Not so much as an acknowledgement I was speaking. So I turned over and went to sleep. At that point, yes, I was hurt, but in a dull kind of way that just felt like something I had known for a long time was being confirmed. I wasn't pouting or working myself into a crying rage. I was just tired, in more ways than one, so I went to sleep.

The next day we were supposed to spend the day at Kelly and Grant's house. I was quiet and a little subdued, but I wasn't sulking or trying to have a bad attitude, and I was friendly and sociable throughout the day. What thought I gave to the whole DD situation was brief and not too deep and mostly centered on whether I should write him an email or just put it in a blog post that this part of our relationship didn't seem to be worth pursuing any longer. I wasn't exactly angry, just resigned a and a little sad. It was a long day with a lot of little kids running around, and by the time we got home, I was worn out. Jack and Daisy were both asleep, so we put them and Morgan straight to bed, and we both just kind of vegged out on the couch for a bit. Finally I headed up to bed to read for just a few minutes, already dreading getting up early the next day to get Daisy off to school. A few minutes later Nick came up and I heard him rummaging around in his closet, but I didn't think anything about it. When he walked around to my side of the bed and I looked up to see him standing there holding his belt, I was genuinely startled. And I got really angry. He started telling me that I'd had a terrible attitude all day, and that he was going to deal with it. Frankly I just wasn't having it. I had spent basically weeks by this time accustoming myself to the idea that he had moved on from this, and his complete lack of response the night before had more or less confirmed it for me, and here he was turning everything upside down.

He pulled the blanket and sheet off of me and told me to turn over, and I flat out refused. Several times. He warned me that he could make me, and I more or less invited him to do so. Within the next couple of seconds I was face down in my pillow, and he was basically wearing me out. It wasn't a particularly long event, but it did break through my anger, and I was hardcore ugly crying before it was over. And the crying went on for a very long time, far longer than the spanking itself would account for. I was just working through a ton of built up stress and fear and sadness. I would like to say that the evening ended with him holding me and letting me cry it out on his shoulder and then maybe some sweet time reconnecting. Unfortunately we both had to be up the next day, and he was maybe less inclined to be patient with me than he might have been if we'd had more time and had I not fought him so much on the whole thing. He basically told me to turn out the light and go to sleep, and I was left feeling more or less exactly like the hassle and irritant I'd felt like for so long.

Now, before anyone, Nick included, thinks I have nothing but complaints about him and what happened that night, I don't. Whatever the execution, it was something I badly needed, and by the next morning I was feeling much better and more evened out. It helped, it really did. And I know that I really, really needed it to be something I submitted to whether I thought I wanted it or not. I think maybe we were both so out of practice with it that we were clumsy with each other's feelings. But he did the hard thing, and that was what I needed him to do, and I'm grateful.

I don't know if this means that this is something we're doing again now or if it was an anomaly. He hasn't wanted to talk about it, and I'm reluctant to push a conversation to ask for fear of making him think that I didn't appreciate it or that I'm too needy.

Something he did mention the other night was that he felt like I maybe portrayed him a little unfairly in the last post when I mentioned the various ways he has of blowing off some steam. He thought it sounded like he's off playing all the time and just leaving me with the kids and never coming home. That's not how it is at all. He does something maybe once or twice a week. He's done the soccer golf thing on a couple of Sundays recently. He went on an overnight hunting and fishing trip Friday night, and he's at the gun range with my brother right now. But he also came home last night to keep an eye on the kids while I had a Norwex demonstration at the house. And there are certainly weeks when he doesn't do anything relaxing at all. He has a three day weekend every other week, which means that the weeks in between he works 6 days of 7, and the 7th day is spent mostly at church. And this past Sunday he cooked both lunch and dinner without even being asked.

He hasn't been doing the DD side of things, but he has tried to relieve stress for me where he could. It's just that there's not always a good way to do that other than spanking it out of me. This is just an especially stressful time in our lives between tight finances, having our house on the market, and trying to find another house. For instance, in the 11 days since my last post, our number of showings has risen from 60 to 72, and we have another one tomorrow. And that's not even counting the three that got cancelled in the last week. So we don't really get much of a break. And as we talked about, the things he does for stress relief are mostly very inexpensive or free (with the exception of the hunting trip, which he took on a side job specifically to finance), and there's just not a lot of things like that that would be relaxing for me. I really enjoy crafting, but that's not really an option right now with most of my stuff in storage and no good place to use what I still have here. I would absolutely LOVE to spend a day thrift store hopping, but we don't have any room in the budget right now. The same thing with just a girls night out. None of this is his fault in any way shape or form, and I don't want to imply that it is.

I don't really have any answers here, but I know this season will pass. Eventually the house will sell (or it won't, and we'll eventually take it off the market and stop having strangers parade through it every day). Eventually Jack will potty train, and finances will get a little better and the lawnmower will get fixed (did I mention it threw a rod through the block? It did.) Eventually I will have some sort of a place to craft and we will get to take a vacation and life will stop putting us through the wringer. Eventually. And even if that takes forever, we have God and each other, and we will make it.

A Year

We are still working on selling the house. It's an exhausting and frustrating process, and I'm tired. Today was our 60th showing. 60th. And we have another tomorrow, and one on Sunday, another on Monday. We lowered our price by $10,000, something we didn't want to do, but we felt that so many showings with no offers was telling us it was the right move. We also found another house that we would like to buy, but if course ours has to sell first, and we have to figure out the financing based on our new lower selling price. This is the fourth house in a year that we've tried to buy. I know God has a plan and a time. I'm just getting worn out.

So the title of this post doesn't refer to the year we've spent house hunting. What it refers to is the longest DD drought we've ever had. Sunday will be one full year since my last punishment. And I'm frustrated. And sad, and hurt, and weary, and angry. I have asked him multiple times if he's just done with it, and he always says no, it's just something we haven't done "lately". But "lately" seems like a flimsy term for this situation. This feels like he just doesn't want to bother with it, but he also doesn't want to be the bad guy who admits he just doesn't want to do it anymore. He doesn't want to have that conversation or shoulder the guilt for bowing out of a responsibility I've shouldered him with. Or maybe he thinks that if he "officially" stops spanking, I'll stop deferring to him and treating him as the Head of the Household. The thing is, I don't treat him that way because of any DD dynamic. I treat him that way because I believe that is the plan for marriage God has laid out, and our whole family is happier for it. 

Being honest, I don't do a whole lot to piss him off these days. The house has been clean for four months. The laundry is always done. I have dinner waiting almost every night. But I'm functioning with a high level of stress. I have no outlets left. Most of my craft things are in storage, and what is still here has to be pulled out of closets and set up on the kitchen table to be used. And the entire time I'm having a mini panic attack because it's causing a temporary mess that needs to be put away. My laptop is excruciatingly slow, which makes my photography unenjoyable. I have a craft blog that I was very active on for a while, but once we went to market with the house, the combination of the slow laptop and the inconvenience of doing projects in a space that needs to be always neat has kept me scarce over there. I've tried having some craft days with girlfriends, but with kids on hand and no good place to spread out, it's always been more trouble than enjoyment. Money has been tight, so we've not had any sort of date night in months, and we didn't get to take our annual trip to Texas for the same reason. 

Nick has plenty of stress to deal with too of course, but he has a few outlets. He goes fishing just about every chance he gets. And this past Sunday he went and played Foot Golf (like golf, on a course, but with a soccer ball and really big cups) with some of his friends. He sometimes goes to the gun range, and he has a gym membership. 

Daisy has also started kindergarten, and while she loves it and is doing great, any change of routine is stressful for a while. I'm up before Nick every day now, and with Jack home with just me all day, he's right on top of me all the time. Not that I don't love having one on one time with him, but he can be a little intense. On top of that I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to potty train him. And yes, he's three. 

I admit, it all gets to me, and it's less rare than it should be that I lose it and just have a really bad attitude. I fight much more than I should with Morgan, who started high school this year, and I'm frequently impatient with all three kids. These are the times I need him to discipline me. There was a time in our lives when he would see me spiraling and would make a time and a place to get my attention in a big way and help me reprioritize. I'm not going to lie, the actual physical experience of a spanking is one that I both dread and fear, but not so much that I don't also crave the peace it inevitably brings. 

And I feel abandoned. I feel so very hurt that he basically said "This thing is not my thing, but it's your thing, and because you are mine and need this, I will do this for you." And then he just...quit. And not just that he's quit, but that he's done it without allowing me the certainty needed to really mourn its loss and move on. This last year has felt to me like he just really doesn't care at all that this is a genuine need that I have that can only be met by him and is therefore going unmet. Perhaps he's trying to starve it to death. If only it were that easy. I've prayed so many times that God would take this part of me away if but isn't something that can be a valid, functioning part of our marriage. I would love to not need this, but I do. It makes me bloom. It leaves me thriving and capable. Or it withers and wearies me when it's absent. 

Please understand that I'm venting here, the only place I can do it. Nick is truly a wonderful husband. He's faithful and loving, and he works hard every day so that I can stay at home with our kids. And if he wants to dispense with domestic discipline, I can live with that, I really can. But I need to know, so that I can lay it to rest and learn to let go. 

Busy life

So four months have gone by. I'm sorry I've not been updating. I just haven't been able to find the wherewithal to sit down and post. But a lot of things have been happening. 

First of all, the house I mentioned back in February. We didn't get it. We kept working toward getting ours ready to market, and the Realtor called us periodically to find out how close to listing we were. Finally he called in April to tell us the homeowners expected an offer from a particular buyer any day. This would be their very first offer after over a year on the market, so we expected them to take it, which we hated, but we just weren't ready. Then the other offer got delayed. 

Finally the Realtor called and asked me what it was that was keeping us from submitting a contingency offer. I explained that we still had a few things left to do, which we were working to come up with the money for, and we knew a contingency offer would be time sensitive. We didn't want to waste part of that time with our house not yet for sale. He said he felt like they would be open to a lengthier contingency time frame than normal since no other offer had come in, so I told him we would talk about it and pray about it. We finally decided to go for it, and we submitted an offer several thousand dollars below the asking price, with the expectation that they would counter. 

And of course the other offer came in the same day. But they asked the Realtor to come back to both us and the other buyers and ask us to submit our very best offers. So we gave them an offer for the very most we were willing to spend. The next day the Realtor told us he was very sorry, but they had chosen the other buyers. So I was very sad and upset for about an hour.

Then Nick found a very new listing online for a house in close to the same price range with even more room than the one we had just lost. It was For Sale By Owner, so we called the number listed and asked for a showing. We went to see it the next day, and we fell completely in love. Like head over heels. 

It was definitely a project home, as the owners had purchased it to completely renovate and then run out of money after running into some nasty surprises. But they had fixed most of the big things, like a new roof, a new ($20,000) HVAC system with all new trunk lines, new plumbing, a completely renovated kitchen with granite counter tops, all new cabinets, and all new higher end appliances, tile flooring in the kitchen and living room, and new carpeting upstairs.  The husband is in the military, and they bought the home based on the information that he was going to be deployed to Afghanistan. They were going to used his deployment salary to pay for the renovations. They went ahead and started the major renovations using credit with plans to pay it off when his salary came in. Then his deployment got cancelled. By this time they were tens of thousands of dollars in debt with the renovations, so they decided to cut their losses and sell. 

It had everything we wanted and even things we hadn't  been looking for, like a pool and a tennis court (yes, a tennis court). And there was a ginormous craft space with a kitchenette attached to it. Okay, it was a mother-in-law suite, but it would make a dream craft room. And there was a huge detached garage tall enough for Nick to install a car lift in, which has long been on his list of someday dreams. The bedrooms were massive, and there was tons of natural light throughout the whole house.

We loved it so much that, after praying about it, we made an offer that same day. At first they didn't accept it because we weren't on the market yet with our home, but our Realtor talked them into a 90 day contingency contract, and the race was on! Our families came together to help, and we were market ready in 2 weeks. It actually took a few days for the listing to go live because we were waiting on the photographer to come take listing photos, but once it did, we blew up with showings. Like 5 in the first few days. And they just kept coming. We've had 45 showings at this point. But no offers. And our contract ran out last Monday. 

We talked to the homeowners, and they were willing to renew on basically the same terms for another 6 weeks or so. But we wanted to go by and see the home again before we signed a new contract, especially since they did not want to work with our Realtor since they didn't want to have to pay him a seller's commission. As we've only contracted with him to sell our house, not find us another, that was fine with us. But we wanted to take my parents with us to see the house, especially since my mom would be handling all the paperwork on our end if we weren't going to use our Realtor. They really didn't like the house at all, which was disappointing to us, but all they could see was the work left to do. 

It's mostly just finishing work at this point, like laying tile that has already been purchased and would come with the house, putting up trim and hanging doors that are also already there, and installing toilets that are sitting there in the boxes. But there are a couple of major projects too, the most urgent of which would be putting together the completely gutted master bathroom (no small expense). The in ground pool needs a bit of cosmetic work, and we don't know if all the pipes are sound. The upstairs hallway and the stairs need  carpet, and there are several places in the home that need drywall or ceilings installed. We were actually pretty disappointed that they hadn't finished anything since we had first seen it three months prior, but the  wife is very pregnant and the husband is frequently gone with his job, and I guess they figured they had a buyer and didn't need to do anything else.

We could do all the work ourselves with the exception of the pool, but after more prayer and talking, we opted not to renew the contract. We haven't completely ruled the house out by any means, but we feel like God was telling us not to sign anything else until our house sells. Maybe since they have to start marketing it again they will finish up a few projects, and if it doesn't sell soon, maybe they will come down on the price. Or maybe it's not the house for us after all and it will sell to someone else before ours sells. We're still just waiting and praying.

So that's what's happening on the real estate front. The good news is that my house has been pretty much spotless for 3 months straight. The laundry is always all done and the sink is always clean. I've never been such an awesome housekeeper in my life. Wherever we end up, I definitely want to continue the habit, even if I have to be the meanest mom in the world to make it happen. Jack and Daisy are both actually great at keeping things neat now. It's Morgan I have to stay on top of.

Of course now that the house is all clean I am literally perfect (ha!), so there's no reason at all for Nick to bring up anything discipline related. Except of course for the fact that I still desperately need it in my life, but whatevs. I've asked him several times if he's decided not to do it any more, and he always says no, it's just not something we've done "lately". We're coming up on 11 months now since the last punishment spanking, and 9 months since the last spanking at all, which was my wonderful birthday spanking last year. I'm halfway convinced that he really is done with it but just doesn't want to have the conversation so he keeps putting me off. That's probably not a fair assessment, but I'm on my period and not inclined to be reasonable.

We did finally get that night alone on our 17th anniversary last month. It was kind of a mixed bag. The time we had together was wonderful, but the timing was bad. Nick had to work that day, then get up early and go back to work the next day. Plus I was on my period then too, which kind of put a damper on things. We went downtown and had a fabulous sushi dinner, but our plans to explore the downtown area on foot together afterwards got rained out with a vengeance. 

Nick took this last week off, and my mom tried to give us another go at a romantic night alone. That went swimmingly until about 2:30 in the morning when she finally gave up trying to pacify a little boy who badly missed his mom and I had to go get him. But we had been about to go to bed anyway, to sleep since we'd had some crazy good sex on the back deck earlier, rather daring for us these days. :) 

So what else? Nick ended up not getting to join us at church camp this year because they wouldn't give him the time off. which was a huge disappointment. He did drive up every night for the evening meal and service, but it wasn't the same without him. Since he wasn't going to be there all week, I had just planned to drive up daily myself. This was the first year we incorporated a craft time into every day, and I was in charge of it, so I did have to be there for that, but I was afraid it might be hard to manage both little kids in that environment by myself all week. But Nick didn't want me to make the drive every day, both because of the gas expense and because it's kind of a long and sketchy drive road-wise, so he had me stay. Kelly and her two little ones, Logan and Adison ended up staying with me most of the week though, so we traded off sitting so the other could get a shower when we needed to. At 9 months apart, Jack and Logan are best buddies as well as first cousins, so it was good for them to have each other to play with, and Daisy couldn't get enough of 13 month old Adison.

Nick missing camp did mean that he still had that week of vacation, which is why he was able to take it off last week. Vacation Bible School was going on at our church all week, and I wish it had been some other week. It went great and the kids loved all the crafts, but Nick wasn't thinking about it being that week when he requested off, so it wasn't quite the break he was hoping for. But he still got some fishing time in, and it was nice for him to at least not have to show up at work. And we did have that one very nice partial night alone. :)

We're most likely not going to get to go to Texas this year, which makes me very sad. We've been every year since Kate and Will got married with the exception of the year we all went to Sea Island to vacation together. It would have to be in the next 3 weeks or so if we were able to go, and the money is just not there this year. We did get to see Kate and the kids for a week though a few weeks ago when she came in to stay, so it's not like we're going a couple of years between visits. Maybe if the house sells by then we can try to go when the kids are out of school for fall break.

Speaking of school, in 20 days I'll have both a high schooler and a kindergartner, (Sob!) We had Daisy in a one on one preschool program one day a week last school year with Morgan's retired preschool teacher who now teaches like this in her home. Daisy missed the age cutoff for kindergarten by 5 days last year, so she'll be one of the oldest in her class, and we didn't want her to fall behind. She did really great with the in home teaching, and she's reading pretty well and a whiz at math. She'll do great in school, but I'm sad to see her growing up so fast! So far it's looking like she'll be in the elementary school near our current house, which I don't love. Morgan attended there in 5th grade, and the teachers were all very nice, but the school is only rated a 3 out of 10. We didn't put in for any sort of transfer request for her, because we thought we'd be moved by now, and the house we were trying to buy is zoned for the top rated elementary school in our county. 

Morgan on the other hand will be going to the school we want her to attend. We did request a transfer for her, because the other house (well, both other houses actually) were zoned for a school we didn't want her to attend. We were actually surprised to be approved for the transfer, because we were told they're notoriously hard to get, but we sure prayed hard about it, and God answered. I have to trust that He has a plan for Daisy being where she is. When they had kindergarten round up a few months ago we went ahead and pre-registered her at the nearby school because we didn't have permission to go anywhere else, and she really liked what she saw, so I'm sure it will be fine. She'll be close to home, and it will probably just be for one year anyway.

So I think that's all the news that's news. Hope you guys are all doing well!