Oh What a Beautiful Morning!

 I don't think I'm ever going to get tired of the view from our house!  We had such an amazing sunrise this morning.  I had a hard time making myself get ready to head into town for the daycare.  I'm in between two houses right now, keeping the daycare open at the old house through the end of the month.  I'm really looking forward to being able to stay out at the new place all day :)

You'll probably get sick of seeing all these scenery pictures.  I know I won't be able to resist posting a bunch of them.

 

 This morning I kept hearing a little squeak - almost like the sound the smoke detector makes when it needs a new battery.  I finally figured out that we had a little bird in the house.  Yesterday I had left a window open (the only window that doesn't have a screen.)  I think it must have come in through that window, but it could also have come in through the torn section of the screen on one of our sliding glass doors last night.

 I opened the nearest sliding glass door so he could go out.  The picture above shows him sitting on the entry of that door.  Even though the door was open, he would hop up there, then come back inside.  I think he must have hit that door trying to get out or something because he had a hard time believing the door was actually open.  He finally did go out though.

Here's a bit of randomness for you.  I bought this watermelon last week and had the strangest thing happen when I went to pay for it.  It was too heavy for the store scale!  I've never had that happen before.  They said the scale goes up to 30 pounds.

This watermelon is bigger and heavier than my two year old!

We had a minor catastrophe while moving over the weekend.  The four year old broke a glass lampshade and scratched his leg.  He needed a bandaid, but only wanted a Mater bandaid (from the movie CARS).  Unfortunately we were out of those ...

 so I improvised.  It worked, but he wasn't thrilled about it.  I can get Mater bandaids at the dollar store.  I just have a hard time paying $1 and only getting 10 bandaids.  Guess I better suck it up and buy a box.

Speaking of the four year old, he thinks he's big enough to play football.  Ha.  His brother had practice again last night, and he has a game Saturday morning.  He's pretty excited because his Grandpa is coming from Nebraska to be at the game.  (Not that he's coming just for the game - ha.  He's coming to visit and help us move.  YAY!)

Wanna Peek at the New House?

Let me just start by saying this is the view from inside our house!  I took this photo from the dining room which in the picture below is the middle floor, sliding glass door on the right.  We have amazing views from every room in the house.

 This is actually the back side of the house.  Top window is the master suite, main floor is living room, dining room, kitchen and playroom.  It appears that I forgot to take any pictures of the basement area.  There are two bedrooms and an open main area, a nice large full bathroom, and an awesome laundry room. I guess I'll have to do a second post on that part.

 If you look behind the tree you see our garage/parking area.  We have a really large yard, but no grass, so I'm not sure how fun it will be for the boys (though they found the dirt and rocks really fun.  I see a muddy mess in our future).

 We started moving a few things in on Saturday.  It was pretty late when we got unloaded, and this is how we all felt.  You should have seen us after the weekend!

I'll give you a little tour from before we started moving stuff in.  It looks a lot different now.  We spent the whole weekend working on moving stuff and still have a ways to go.  I will wait until we get everything arranged inside to post pictures with furniture.  For now, here's a tour.

 This is the view from the sliding glass door in the dining area - where I took the picture of the mountains from.  If you look in the top right you will see the door to the garage, which is our main entrance - even for guests, which is a little odd.  Everyone enters through the garage.  The stairs to the right lead up to the master suite, and just past that are stairs going down.  The living room is the carpeted area, and beyond that there is a lower level which is a playroom.  The kitchen is to the right of the stairs.

 Here's a view looking into the kitchen.  There is a bar dividing the kitchen and dining room.

This is a better view of the bar.  The kitchen is smaller than I remembered when we looked at the place, but plenty big.  I'm definitely going to miss my walk-in pantry though! And the chest freezer will once again be banished to the garage :(

Okay so this is the view from the entry door.  The sliding glass door to the left of the photo is where I took the other pictures from - the dining room.  Can you see out that window to the mountains beyond?

 This is the playroom.  There is an elevated platform where I am standing. I think we'll put our car rug there.  It has streets and a town setting on it for driving cars on if you know what I mean.  Anyway it's a fun area.  It's surrounded by windows and has two sliding glass doors - one up on the left leading out to a ground level deck where I think I'll put the kids' picnic table, and one behind me leading to the big deck.  There is a chalkboard, and just to the left a painted scene.  (The owners left a desk there I'm hoping we can get them to move.)  If you look straight ahead in this picture, you'll be looking outside, where the next picture is taken from.

 Okay, so the sliding glass door just past my nine year old is the playroom, with the short deck between him and the door.  The bushes are honeysuckle, and there were birds tucked up right next to the windows when we first went over.  I think I'll set up a bird feeder inside the trees - or maybe we'll make some as a homeschool project so the boys can watch the birds from the playroom.  The door to the left is the main entrance, which leads in to the side of the garage first.  There is a doorbell there so we will hear our guests.

 This is the master suite, which is really hard to get a good picture of.  This room is enormous - the same size and directly above the kitchen and dining room.  There are built in wall lights for each side of the bed.  To give you an idea of the size, we put our king size bed in there and it looks tiny.  We're going to put some bookshelves up here for mom and dad's books.  The rest will go downstairs.

This is looking back toward the stairway.  One major drawback (in my book at least) is that there is no door.  Not good for a master bedroom.  And there is a sloped roof, which is okay, but since the bathroom is in the shorter side (the wall on the right), it's a little hard to change in there.  It's plenty roomy though.  I only notice the sloped roof in the bathroom when I'm trying to use my hairbrush and hair dryer. Then I bump the ceiling.

 The master closet is inside the bathroom too - much larger than it looks.

 The vanity and double sink are opposite the closet, and there is a shower just past that.

We have amazing views of mountains and pastures and awesome sunrises and sunsets.  This was the sunset Saturday night looking past our neighbor's house.

And this one was taken heading out of town toward our house.  We're about 5 miles from town.  And we can see the "city lights" from the living room too.  I'm enjoying just sitting and looking out the windows!

I wake up each morning to cows mooing, horses neighing, roosters crowing and a sense of total peace.  The first morning we stayed there, it rained, and there's no better place to be to experience a rainstorm than in that master suite with the ceiling within your reach when you're laying in bed, and the windows open. :)  I love rain.  Can't wait for a big thunderstorm.

August Reading

Well I didn't get as much reading in this month as I had hoped, and September looks like it will be worse.  We have been casually browsing for a new place to rent and found something we loved, so we're moving much sooner than we expected to.  So reading will be on the back burner for awhile.  Anyway, I did manage to finish six books in August.
- Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
- Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline
- Miss Buncle's Book by D. E. Stevenson (this is a newly printed version of a book from 1936. It was a really fun read)
- Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
- The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein - our daytime library book club's pick of the month.  Odd. Narrated by the dog.  I'm totally not a dog person ... more like an anti-dog person, but it had a good story line. Plus, I'm really into racing, so that helped.
- Gaining Ground by Forrest Pritchard (another farming book - I seem to be creating a trend here. This is my third or fourth book about farming.)

So my stats for August are:
6 books
8 1/2 inches
2,049 pages

Which brings my totals for the year to:
58 books
71 1/4 inches
17,722 pages

Football

 The nine year old had his first "game" yesterday.  It was more like a scrimmage.  They have four teams - white, green, black and orange.  So each team played against each other color for a short half - switching sides like you would at the quarter.  I'm not sure how long each period was.  It was hard to follow because there was no announcing, no scores posted, and they had two "games" going at once - one on each side of the field.

 It was great experience though.  My nine year old is number 71 on the white team.

They have an interesting pvc contraption for a drinking fountain.

The two year old was especially impressed with the water fountain.  He kept telling me, "I need to play in the water!" or "I need to drink the water."

 They even had cheerleaders.  Our high school team doesn't even have cheerleaders - it never has.

This is the two year old warily watching the cheerleaders.  He had to move onto the stairs to see them well.  (He didn't really have to - he just thought he did.)

This was his reaction to them. ;)

"Take a picture of me!" the four year old said.  He was most interested in drinking my diet pepsi, and kept telling us, "I need to go play football!  I need a helmet."  His brother let him wear the helmet after the game.

 The nine year old was SO exhausted after the game, and thirsty and hungry too.

Papa and Bugga came to watch the game with us.  When I was showing the boys the pictures from the day, the two year old very excitedly said, "That's MY Bugga!"

Summer is Flying By

 Last winter I found these styrofoam planes at the dollar store. I bought a bunch of them and stuck them in a box.  Winter isn't the most friendly time for flying planes in Wyoming.  This week, my snoopy boys found them (which is good, since I had forgotten them and summer is nearly over).

They were the kind you have to decorate yourself.  So out came the markers and now the planes ... and their hands... are nicely decorated.  The nine year old and I had a great discussion about the president's flying habits, so two of the planes were labeled Air Force One.

It was a lot of fun watching the boys launch their planes.

 We've been enjoying the fresh fruit available in summertime too.  I'm definitely going to miss that. We got these plums from a tree in my sister's yard in Colorado.  They sure have been good.  This is only about half of them, and there are around 50 in the picture.  They've been disappearing fast. I like to buy as much as possible from fairly local places, but since fruit doesn't grow much in Wyoming, "local" to me means Colorado, Utah and Idaho.  We've enjoyed fresh peaches, apricots, cantaloupe and especially tomatoes this summer.

I also get two dozen fresh free-range eggs each week from a local family. I'm really not much of a fan of eggs, but I do like fresh eggs.  The yolks are so much brighter.  I made "bird nests" for lunch one day, which was a huge hit.  (I didn't think to take a picture after they had finished cooking.)

Are You Ready For Some Football?

The nine year old joined football this year.  He's very excited.  The red jersey is just a practice jersey.  He's holding his game jersey - white with green and orange lettering #71.  First game tonight!

For the Birds

 It's been nice having a yard set up for the birds.  Everywhere you look there is a birdhouse or feeder.  The boys - especially the two year old - have enjoyed watching them all summer.  This morning I was sitting in my favorite chair waiting for the first daycare kids to arrive.  I could only see the top part of the feeder, but noticed there were an awful lot of birds around it.  When I got up to check, a whole flock took off.  

 They kept coming back and leaving.  At one point I counted over 40 birds around the feeder at once.  Of course I didn't have my camera in hand at that point.

I've also been watching this bird.  It has really been digging a lot at the base of the tree.  I've seen it there at least three different days, and before that I had thought the kids must have been digging around the base of the tree because the ground was all torn up.  Now I'm pretty sure it was just the bird.

It appears to be some sort of woodpecker, and I'm guessing it's digging up bugs.  I think it must be a female since it has just a hint of red on it's neck.

We've had a lot of hummingbirds around too, but I neglected to get them fed so we haven't seen as many as I would have liked.  I had a feeder up just after my boys gave me one for Mother's Day.  That was before the four year old played pinata with it and a broom. (insert angry face here) lol

We will definitely miss the trees and grass in this yard.  I will not miss the irrigation ditch.  The view at the new place is amazing.  And while I wish we could have trees too, at least there is a large deck on the main floor, and we have a walk-out basement under it, so there will still be shade to relax in while I watch my boys playing in the foreground, cows grazing just beyond them, and a magnificent mountain view beyond that.  Sounds idyllic, don't you think?  Oh, and did I mention, I'll be dropping the daycare, so it will also be quiet and peaceful... well, if you consider living with three young boys quiet in peaceful lol.  In comparison to my current life, trust me.  It will be quiet and peaceful ;)

Brand-Name Finds at Yard Sales

 This past weekend was full of great brand-name finds.  I found these two Pampered Chef stone casserole pans - the one on the right is really deep.  And there was a scraper included too.  I'm almost as excited about the scraper as I am about the pans - lol.  I have been needing a new one and trying to get one for a year (long story you don't care about).  I got all this for $10.

Then there were the Miche purses.  I have one of the bigger bags but had always wanted a medium sized one too - especially with this particular brown and black cover.  It came with the orange cover too - the whole set for $15 which is amazing.

And then I also found a Scentsy warmer in my decorating theme - moose, bear, fish.  I have one already that my oldest son gave me, but it's a Christmas one (not that it mattered - I use it year round).  But I really like the look of this one, which I snagged for $5.

I'm ready for snow too.  I didn't get these on a yard sale, but through out local facebook for sale page.  The two on this side of the trailer are my recent purchases.

The red one is a Yamaha Phazer II.  It's my most recent steal.  I picked it up for $200.

The Yamaha VMax 500 was $300.  I've showed you that one before.  Now we have three machines - enough for everyone in our family of driving ability to drive (that's if you consider the nine year old old enough to drive one lol).  The other machine on the trailer belongs to my father-in-law.  Okay, I'm ready.  It can snow now. Wait.  Maybe not until we get moved to our new place (which we will be starting to do this weekend).  Didn't know we were moving, did you?  Well we found a new rental which we love.  We sign the lease Friday so we'll have the long weekend to work on moving.  Should be fun. :/  I'm excited to be moving, but not thrilled to think about the amount of work involved.  Oh and a bonus ... we can head out on the snowmachines from the house!  No trailer :)