County Archery Competition

Last Monday, our nine year old competed in the county-wide 4H archery competition.

He had quite the cheering section.  We had lots of family in town, including my dad and his oldest brother and sister, along with the rest of the family who live nearby.

His brothers had fun watching him shoot.

They shot both 3d animals and targets.

 There was even a dinosaur :)

He got a perfect score of 30 on this one - his first arrow bounced back after hitting the center, making all three arrows 10-point scores.

 The younger boys really enjoyed playing in the dirt and throwing rocks.

 We had to wait a really long time for the results because one participant in their class arrived late.  It was worth the wait though.

He won reserve champion - which is 2nd place - with a score of 208.  The grand champion in his class scored a 218.

The New Place :)

 So we're all pretty exhausted after our big move.  But thankfully we're in the new house and slowly getting settled in.  I still have a lot of sorting and unpacking to do, but we're getting there.

 The new place has nice big picture windows in the front and back, which lets me spy on my little people who decide they're going to have a strawberry picnic lol.

 We have a nice, huge back yard.

I'm going to have the gravel area fenced in to keep our daycare kids and toys somewhat contained.

It's a nice, big play area.

This is the view from the front.  It's nothing flashy, but I really like it.

 There is a galley kitchen, which is much bigger than it appears in pictures.  It is very long.  The door at the end that you can barely see is a little bathroom with a toilet and sink - perfect for the daycare.  And I've got my diaper changing table on the wall at the end there, right next to the bathroom.

 This is looking back toward the front door and front window.  I set up the living and dining room as daycare space.

I put our toy storage unit by the door and put hooks on the back of it, so there is a contained space for the daycare kids to take off their shoes and coats and store them there.

This is taken from where the last picture was - right by the toy sorter in the entry.  The cove is missing it's fabric top in this photo - usually it looks more like a tent.  And our stuffed animal "zoo" is in the corner.

 Looking from the front door toward the dining room, which I have set up as a preschool space.  There is a short table with small chairs.  We serve daycare meals here and do all our crafts, coloring, etc in this area.

Pardon the kid on the sleeping cot.  This is what you see straight ahead when you walk in from the front door.   The chalk art picture was my grandmother's, created by a former student of hers out of appreciation for my grandmother encouraging her in her interest in art.  The dresser is full of fabric and sewing supplies ;)

 The guest room is currently being used by my college-aged daughter.  My mom came up to visit and help us move and we found this bed at the local thrift store.  It snaps together easily and when we don't have company it will be easy to take apart and store under the boys' bunk beds.

Then it will transform into my sewing studio! Woohoo!

We also have the piano in that room, which my daughter has currently covered with jewelry and pictures, lol.  It's nice to have it in a room where we can close the door.

There is a big open area in front of the washer/dryer closet, which is on the left in this picture, with a big coat closet to the right.  (The kitchen and pantry are straight ahead.)

 Our bedroom is the same size as the guest room, and smaller than the one we put the three boys in, but big enough considering we only ever sleep in there.

 And here's one of my favorite features - a huge walk-in pantry.  It is 9x10 feet and has all sorts of built in shelving and other fun things like a can crusher, jar opener, can opener and an old style pencil sharpener.  We put our chest freezer and a spare refrigerator in there.  The refrigerator in the house is incredibly small - especially when we have to have extras for the daycare.  This refrigerator was one we already had.  It needs a little work, but beats buying a new one.

 The pantry already had all these shelves and can organizers in it.

It's so nice to be able to have room for everything without overloading the kitchen cabinets.  We do a lot of once-a-month shopping 100 miles away. We live in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, where we are literally 100 miles from the nearest Walmart ... and there is nothing in between here and there.  So it makes sense to stock up (although now I order most of my supplies from Walmart.com, which is much cheaper than going to the store, where I see all the things that aren't on my list that I suddenly think I could use - ha).

When you walk into the pantry, the shelves to the right (shown above) are used for food supplies, straight ahead is the fridge and freezer (and a tool chest), and to the left, shown above is all of my extra appliances, baking pans, etc.  Like I said, I don't have everything unpacked yet, so there are some extra boxes in here too.

 This is my favorite part of the house.  We converted the garage into a library/movie room/dining room. I've always wanted a library :)

We put our fancy safe in there too.  It only took 9 men, 2 2-wheel hand carts, and a whole lot of grunting and groaning ;)

 We set up the dining table out there, since we're using the short table for the daycare inside.  This makes a perfect family retreat area.  We bought an infrared heater but haven't needed it since we have a gas fireplace in the house that shoots straight toward the door to the family area.

The treadmill is going near the window and there are cabinets for my extra sewing stuff out there for now (that might change when we send our daughter back to college.  I'll probably move more of the sewing stuff to the sewing room then).  Obviously I still need to organize all these boxes of sewing supplies.  That and the boxes in the kids bedroom, which I am not going to show you until we get it a little more organized.

We are in a wonderful, quiet neighborhood, very close to a park that my four year old is obsessed with riding his bike to.  This picture was taken the first day he decided he was going to ride his bike by himself to the park.  We got there and he quietly exclaimed (more to himself than anyone else), "I did it!"

The day we went to the park, the nine year old was determined to take his one year old brother in the bike cart.

We made quite a troupe!

We're really enjoying getting settled in.

A Mixed Up Catch-Up Post

Okay, so it's been an incredibly crazy month.  My husband lost his job on the 10th of April, which sent us into a frenzy.  The biggest problem with the loss was that our housing was tied to his job.  The house I do daycare out of.  Not an easy thing to replace.  Along with all the packing and moving to do, we also had the insurmountable task of finding a place that would be suitable for daycare, in the right zoning district, with enough square footage for licensing, and able to pass three separate inspections - the most difficult of which is fire.  On top of that, we had to convince a landlord to allow us to have a daycare, and then get everything moved and set up and inspected three times so we could have the place licensed and be able to get moved into it.  Oh, and did I mention that the former employer so generously gave us 30 whole days in which to accomplish this?  Can you say STRESS?

Well, we're all moved in and settled now, but it really shook me.  I realized that I haven't even been taking many pictures since the whole thing started.  Now that things are settling down, I want to do some catching up, so here are some very random things I had intended to post about.  The next post will be about the house where we are now, which by the way I LOVE way more than where we were before.

 Okay, so back to the topic of allergic kids.  I'm always on the lookout for things my one year old can eat, and I've been shocked to see that tuna almost always contains soy.  Really?  Talk about sneaky.  I thought all this time that I was buying fish.  Anyway, he used to love tuna, so I always check the cans to see if there are any he can have.  I stumbled across this - Tongol.  I had never heard of it.  It's a kind of tuna, and it only contains fish ... no soy!!!  Bonus - when I found it, our local grocery store had it on sale for 50 cents a can!  Cheaper than I can usually find regular old tuna :)

 The one year old really enjoyed all the packing boxes we have been using.  I'm still unpacking too, and all the kids love them.  This morning my four year old asked me to get him a box to hide in ;)  Oh and while I'm thinking about it, the four year old told me yesterday he was going to buy a zipper for his head ... lol. I may make a donation toward that - ha.

The one year old got his hands on an apple.  When I found him, the apple had several little crescent moon cuts in it from his teeth.  I put him in his chair and let him go at it.  He did this one day in the grocery store too.  Except that time he had the bag of apples and made applesauce of one of the apples.  I put it on the counter to pay for it and the lady thought I had picked up a bag of bad apples and suggested I get a different one.  I explained what had happened, payed for that bag, and went home to rinse off all the other apples - lol.

On the 22nd of April we had a pretty good snowstorm. It came down first in little pea sized snowballs.  The daycare kids kept saying, "They're throwing snowballs at us!" Not sure who "they" are, but the kids were pretty concerned about it for awhile.

 It snowed several times that week.  We had pretty good accumulation from it, and now it has been raining the last three days, which is pretty unusual here.

Love this picture with the icicles.
  

 Bird tracks.

My nine year old called this a "polar ice cap." :)

See the red ink someone colored on the end of this pencil?  The four year old saw this and thought we ought to get a band-aid for the pencil.

 One of the daycare kids has a horse purse, but the day she brought it, my one year old played with it all day.  Might have to get him one.

 My reading came to a screeching halt when my husband lost his job.  I only made it through five books.  In fact, I'm just now getting started reading again, and we're halfway through May.  I made the mistake of mentioning in my evening book club last month that I just wanted to take a day to escape from all the stress.  I wished that I could take an entire day to do nothing but read and not feel guilty about all the things I should be doing instead.  Well, be careful what you say you want. Ha.  I made that comment on a Thursday night, and became very ill Saturday morning.  Surprisingly I was able to read even though I felt extremely ill.  It was a two-day illness too, so I was able to finish Stones from the River and read The Samurai's Garden in it's entirety in those two days.  It was a very needed break.  I could have done without feeling so sick, but then I probably wouldn't have taken the time to read otherwise.  I would give you my reading stats, but at the moment I can't find my reading journal ... or the book I wanted to read next. :(  So I'll have to update that later.

 It has been such an exhausting month (both mentally and physically),  I found the four year old crashed on the floor one morning, looking like this.  I love all the ways he sleeps :)

I also found time to give all my guys a haircut.

The four year old did not take it well.  He had a complete melt-down, then went around covered by blankets ... three of them, I think.  He was as much upset by the bath after the fact, in which i had to wash the hair off of him.  It was impossible to get him to settle down, so I had to forcibly hold him down.  I'm sure he thought I was trying to drown him, but there just weren't any options.

He stayed that way for a very long time, only peeking out after at least half an hour.   He's told me since then when it's time for a bath that, "we're not gonna push me down in the water."  Poor guy.  I wish I could make it easier for him.  He has so many different areas that are huge stressors for him.