Is It Naptime Yet

So here is what is going on in the Blake house.

First, we put an offer in on a house. I actually have a long post about the process and why we decided to buy a house instead of taking my dream vacation on an Alaskan cruise this year, but I’ve decided to keep it private for now. The offer was put in the end of January/ early February, I really don’t remember the date, and it’s now in the banks hands because it is a short sale. There’s a joke about why are short sales called short sales if they take so long? Well I know why, and I just hope that the wait is worth it and everything goes well. Time will tell. We’ll still need to negotiate with the bank, so yeah, we’ll see if we can come to an agreement and if they can come to an agreement with the home-owner too.

Because we decided to try to buy a house right now there are a lot of things in limbo. Trips we aren’t taking, cleaning that’s not happening, and mostly just a slightly anxious Lacey.
We’re going less places because we might need the money for the house, or we might be moving and don’t want to be gone when we should be packing. (Big maybe as the summer approaches.) I’m felling depressed about our current state because all I can think of is how I want a bigger house and if I had a bigger house I could keep all our stuff, useful or not, and we’d have space. I went into full freak out mode on Jon this past Sunday, and instead of just listening to me whine about how I hate cleaning/organizing because there is not enough room, he made me do something. Men. They always love to fix things. Truth be told, it was helpful to go through the kitchen stuff, and it looks tons better, even with a sink full of dishes. He’s even in charge of getting the stuff to D.I.
Cleaning out the kitchen this Sunday helped me have motivation to clean the girl’s room on Monday, and even though we still have the boxes of stuff I pulled out to put away, we now have room to store the cello Lilah will begin lessons on this Summer.

So there is a rainbow after the storm of Lacey. Our new goal is to go over at least one area/room each week together. Our house is full of stuff and it stinks, but if we don’t move, we still have to live here, and we are still living here now, so I’ll continue to try to make it less chaotic.

Lilah will start cello lessons this month. It’s with our homeschooling co-op, or a mom who teaches professionally, so I’m excited. We’ll see how it goes.

Co-op is over and I survived teaching Chemistry! We don’t know what science we’ll be teaching next term, but it will probably be biology or physics.(I team taught with another mom.) I think I can handle biology or physics. While I did alright with chemistry, it’s not something I easily understand. It was a hard class for me to teach, even with very plainly written lessons from a manual for kids. I feel like I get it now, but boy was there lots of discussions to make sure I understood it correctly. We did jeopardy on the final day, and the kids remembered a lot. I was pretty impressed with them.

On a very bright note, the girls and I have been jamming and baking. I bought 24 pounds of strawberries and had to do something with all of them. We sold/gave some to family, made freezer jam, made regular jam and put the rest in the freezer. The girls helped me with the regular jam. Both cutting up the berries, Eden into fourths and Lilah then cut them into the smaller pieces, then they took turns mashing them. I’m so use to doing things alone, or them making the project harder, I forgot how useful they sometimes can be. The work went quickly, especially since I had other things to prepare and do for the canning.
Then last night Eden and I made some Banana, walnut, raisin muffins, with chocolate chips instead of raisins. (Ick, raisins in cooking.) I had some bananas that needed to be used and Eden suggested a recipe she read in Highlights. It turned out delicious. Lilah is now planning on making some cookies with me on Wednesday.

On a last note, we’ve been nursing Lilah’s hamster, Sleepy. He caught his leg on a toy over a week ago and we think broke it. There was no bleeding, except for the bites he gave Lilah and I while trying to help him, so we didn’t take him to the vet. Once freed he was back to his gentle self. He seems to be doing better, but has lost a lot of weight and his fur has thinned. I’m hoping with some added nutrition to his diet he’ll look better. He’s old and the injury was pretty scary. Since we cleaned his cage today, he decided to make the litter box his new sleeping spot. Strange little hamster. I hope he lives for a while longer. (His leg appears to be fine, just not quite right. He never gnawed at it or did anything that made us worry, so we let him be.)

So that’s what’s been happening here.

Have you had any meltdown moments? Have you then enjoyed the sweet things in life?