eat sleep and farm

Need I say more? ;-) Sometimes we have days where we just need to be out.  Away from the kitchen table.  Away from chores around the house.  Away from the everyday, mundane.  My kids recently told me they love doing their art lesson out in  nature, so I've been trying to do just that on the days we do art.  Sometimes that means we go sit out on our trail, behind our house.  Sometimes I means we drive to the beach.  This beach is called Seahurst Beach Park and its one of our favorites.  It helps that one of my favorite coffee shops and used clothing  stores it just up the street from it :)  We use an art program called Artistic Pursuits and we love it.  Its taken us a while to figure out which curriculum we like most and this  one has been a favorite.  I read the lesson and the story, then we talk about what we learned,  we try to find real life ideas and then they draw...

I saw the title and intro to my last post and laughed out LOUD. Oh well. I'm not even going to talk about it anymore. My only defense is that for most people, blogs are a thing of the past. I refuse that to be true for me (I still sit once a week and catch up on my favorite blogs). To me, it is as personal as you can get, without being face to face or talking on the phone.  My run-down for how 2016 has gone so far can be summed up in 3 words. Wonderful and unexpected. I think when you come close to death the way I did last year, it takes a lot to get you in the depths of despair (as Anne would say), so while parts of this year have been beyond sad; Jason's Grandma passed away, my health continued to cause major issues, etc... I am still forever so grateful to have life. I see my kids growing each month, learning new things, struggling with big kid issues, having "the best day ever" many days over I've lost count and I realize those things alone are blessings we...

I'm getting better at this blog thing!  I think its because I updated my side bar with all the blogs I read and now I come here to check those out and read up. Its a win-win situation. The New Year started off fun with a trip to the Children's Museum in Olympia. We drove an hour south to this museum for 3 reasons. Its tradition for us to venture out to a new place every new year's day. We've heard uh-mazing reviews on this museum and I've been wanting to check it out for a long time. I found a Living Social deal that we couldn't pass up! So we drove down and we all had a blast, not just the kids. We spent several hours there and needed many more to really cover the whole place and enjoy each spot, so we're definitely going back. We also visited the state capital for the first time. I felt really bad doing that (finally) after living here 7 years, but my good friend who's lived here 38 years told me she's never been, so... guilty feelings averted! ...

Remember that song? "Christmas time is coming, the goose is getting fat... please put a penny in the old man's hat. If you haven't got a penny a hay penny will do, if you haven't got a hay penny, God bless you!"  My Mom would probably laugh so hard if she knew I walk around my house singing the silly songs she taught us when we were little. I know so many more like that one. My kids think I'm super cool at this point and I'm hanging on to that opinion as long as I can. Christmas is a few days away and since I'm still in "healing" mode, it doesn't fully feel like Christmas. The other day I found myself saying "I miss NORMAL!" and as I said it, I asked myself, "but what IS normal?" Like, isn't normal where we are right now? Why do we always think normal was the last time we were happy or stress free? Before I was married I was single. Single at one point was the norm for me. So why didn't I freak out after I ...

This has been an interesting year. It started with me telling Jason in mid January, "this isn't going to be a good year." and I hated that I said it the minute the words came out of my mouth. I hate being the pessimist, but I was admitting what I felt deep inside. The truth is, I typically don't like the odd numbered years. I can go all the way back to 1983 when my Grandma died so suddenly of Ovarian Cancer and that kind of started all of it. Some odd numbered years haven't have anything terrible or tragically significant happen in them (that I can remember) but 1989 was full of deaths and a very bad earthquake, 2001 was September 11th, 2011 is when we lost 2 babies, etc... There are more in-between but I didn't want to completely depress you :) This year seemed to be going fine. I was actually shocked, especially when we found out we were pregnant! September greeted us with that exciting news and boy, were we excited. It was going to be the biggest age gap...

I'm not even going to apologize anymore for the lack of posts - mostly because I think I gave fair warning that I wouldn't be posting on here *that* much and because, I don't even think anyone reads this, haha! I'm pretty sure this has become more of a journal for me and less of an actual blog for readers, which is cool. September has been good, fast paced and exciting! We started the month off with a week long trip to a beach house on the Washington Coast and it was SO much fun! I got hit with an icky head cold while we were there, which put a damper on the trip for me, but it was still pretty amazing. We went back to Seabrook Cottages, about 16 miles from Ocean Shores. {I realize if you don't live around here these names mean nothing to you, but in case anyone is interested, its a great place to rent any size beach house and a really fun way to spend time as a family.} There's no Internet service which we love, there's a fully stocked kitchen in each h...

Summer has been delightful. I want to blame it all on the fact that we've stayed local and have already soaked up so much relaxing family time, but who knows. We have a pool and hot tub, so we swim a lot. That's kind of an understatement. We swim all the time. And the other night, my husband got home from work and I thought it would be romantic to surprise him by pulling him in the pool with me. Thankfully due to the 95 degree weather, he thought it was funny and refreshing. I'm not feeling as wordy these days so I'm going to do more of a run-down of our life the past month. *We've enjoyed using our fire pit and making all kinds of sugary deliciousness. *kids have lost teeth and the tooth fairy is going broke. Rachel likes to pull her own teeth out and this impresses her Dad, so she tends to get quite a hefty amount of moola ;-) *If anyone's wondering... mosquitos still adore me. Burts Bees and Honest Company make amazing bug sprays THAT WORK! (yes,...