A quick update

Here I sit at the Brighton Library checking email and letting the kids play. This is a fun library! (one of the 4-5 branches within 2 miles from our new house). 

Here is a quick list of updates:

1. Our mattress is no longer on the floor. Lishawa's to the rescue again. They had a platform bed in their attic that they didn't need and let us use! It is great to have our bed off the floor and to be able to store our camping stuff somewhere!

2. Our storage unit is completely empty!! Yeah! Special thanks to Fray for coming over to watch our kids for a little bit yesterday and let us borrow her van to make that possible!!

3. We have lost 78 pounds. Glenn took a load to Goodwill yesterday. We have lots more to lose though!!

4. We have lots of stuff on Craigslist. If you know anyone who wants a roll top desk, a twin sized bedframe, a large dining room table with 6 chairs, a bike or two, a cherry stained double bed frame, a double boxsprings or anything else that you remember us owning let me know. We are trying to get rid of lots of stuff to be able to fit in our tiny house. 

5. I measured our house today. I am not sure how exactly square footage is measured but I am pretty sure that no matter how it is measured our house is less than 600 square feet. (Hence the reason we have to get rid of so much!)

6. Sunday was the last message in a 7 week series on Fighting Fair at church. It has been an amazing and life changing series that I am so thankful for!! If you want to listen to the messages  (which I would highly recommend!) the church website is www.northbaptistchurch.org and you can listen or download the messages.

Well, I need to get home and get supper going. Until next time.

Am I home yet?

written 10/9/08

We have spent a bit of time yesterday and today over at Brian and Kristina's packing up, cleaning up, checking internet and loving on Sampson. I always wonder when our new place will feel like home. Though we had slept at our house for the first time on Monday night I had my first taste of "home" on Tuesday when we took a walk through Highland Park to get to Highland Library so I could move my voter registration again. It was so fun to wander through the park and play with the trees and pick up buckeyes. It made me feel like I had come home. We LOVE Highland Park and have missed it living on the other side of the river :). On our way home from the library we saw "Miss Betty" and chatted with her for a while which was so much fun. We have missed her! We also saw Bill and Felix, our old downstairs neighbors and said "hi." They all asked if we were picking up Daddy from work and we said, "No, we are just walking home from the library." They were excited for us that we had gotten our own place again.

Today I baked bread and brownies... does that mean I am home? I still haven't prepared a decent meal for my family yet unless loaded nachos, bologna sandwiches, or fried potatoes and PBJ count :). I will get it together soon, hopefully! Tomorrow is Friday – pizza night! Is that a decent meal? I don't know but at least there will be leftovers so I don't have to worry about lunch on Saturday.

One thing I always worry about when we move to a new place is if the kids have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I am always afraid that I will find puddles in the morning or hear kids crying in the middle of the night because they can not find the bathroom. So far, that has not happened this time but something else bathroom related has happened. Our bathroom is on the first floor off the kitchen. At Brian and Kristina's house the bathroom is on the second floor near the bedrooms. I actually like that set up better but that is a different story. Yesterday (I think, the days are all running together) Abigail went running up the stairs. She got about half way up and then said "Silly Abigail" and turned around and came back down and went into the bathroom. We cracked up. I love how much she talks and how much of a little person she is. "Silly Abigail."

Well, I have lots more unpacking to do. As I picked up our scale yesterday I decided that I am going to weigh how much stuff we give and throw away and I will keep track of it here. We need to get rid of a lot of stuff! We have kept and moved way too much over the last 9 years/ 13 moves. I want to have a simpler life and that means less stuff :)

Moving Day 3

written 10/7/08

Sunday was a pretty crazy day with church at 8:30, helping in 2s and 3s at 10 then I watched the video for the Daniel study during the 11:30 hour while the oldest 3 were in HighPoint and Glenn and Abigail hung out in the library. Thankfully I had made chili and thrown it in the crockpot so we came home, ate, then got very little done Sunday afternoon before heading back to church for Vertical Worship. Needless to say we did not get much done on Sunday moving wise.

Yesterday we decided to get everything out of Brian and Kristina's. We took a pretty full load over and started unpacking some then needed to head back over there for small group. I am really not sure how we are going to make this house work. I am kind of depressed that we are paying $75 more a month for this house than our last apartment and we have so much less space. We are going to have to get creative and get rid of a lot of stuff which is hard for me. It will be good though because a lot of what we own is not practical for how we live. Glenn has some fun ideas for furniture for us that he has found from browsing some small spaces websites. We'll take pictures along the way so you can see our progress. But here is a picture of the wall of boxes from yesterday, the kitchen/ dining room side of our downstairs (with bonus boxsprings that won't fit up the stairs or through the window), and Hannah helping Glenn put together the bunk beds. I am hoping to make a lot of progress unpacking today.

Adventures in Moving - Day 2

Well, today was a busy day. Last night I had emptied our dressers. We had moved our dressers here instead of to storage so we would have a place to put our clothes. Most of the clothes were shorts which really aren't necessary right now when it wasn't supposed to get much above 55 today. I am looking forward to digging into the "fall/winter" boxes that are at our new house (I think) so that my kids can be dressed appropriately.

Back to my story... this morning the kids and I went up to Seneca Park for the AWANA Sparks hike. We all went even though Hannah is our only Spark this year. It was a lot of fun and it turned out to be beautiful weather for the hike (even though there was rain in the forecast for this morning). All of the pictures on this post are from the hike. My girls particularly liked hanging out with Heidi. There is a picture of them there with Heidi and her brothers Kip and Derrik. I had the girls wear their pink rain coats today to be a kind of a wind breaker. It was easy to find them when they were wearing them but I kept coming up with 4 girls (which I know that I do not have) because Ruby was wearing a coat the same color (you can see her in a couple of the pictures). My girls had all ditched their coats before I took any pictures. Caleb mostly hung out with me and was disappointed that Will was not there to hang out with like last time. It was fun going on the hike with Mrs. P because she always has such interesting information and the kids just love her!

While the kids and I had fun at the hike Glenn was back home moving. A couple of couples from our young couples Adult Bible Class - John and Kirsten and Peter and Christina came over to help him. They got a load from here including dressers and the kids mattresses and then a load from storage including our table (minus the pedestals) and our bed. We showed up when they were just about done and rode up the elevator to grab a little bit more (it truly is amazing how much will fit in the Burb!) and the kids played with the balls in the halls again then we headed to our new place to drop everything off. We were just about unloaded when they tried to get our box springs upstairs to where we are planning on sleeping. It won't fit up the stairs so it was taken outside and they tried to get it through the window. Still a no go so back inside to try the stairs again... nope. I really wish I would have gotten pictures of all of this... the camera was in the car. It was frustrating because if we only had about an inch... but no. I am not sure how people got beds up there before. I am not sure how we are going to be sleeping. I was really planning on using that space under the bed to store stuff. It will all work out. There was a fun idea in Ready Made that we might do... we'll see. Depends on how creative we get. We really need more nomadic furniture and not so much "normal people" furniture. Glenn found this fun idea here that I would be interested in. It sounds like a great idea.... we'd just need a couple extra of the bed things.

Anyway, we have 3 loads down, not sure how many to go before we are completely moved in. This afternoon I left Glenn and the kids at home while I went to do a Cooking Show. There weren't a lot of guests but I met some new people and had fun making a yummy chocolate peanut butter cup torte. 

The Moving has Begun (again!)

Today we decided to start moving some of our stuff into our new house from our storage unit. We decided to get school and lunch out of the way before going and Glenn was finishing up a couple of more secondaries (they are almost all done!!). Our stuff is stored on the 3rd floor of a business and we have to use a freight elevator to get it down. Putting stuff into the storage unit was pretty easy. Fill the Burb, drive it there, put the stuff on the elevator, take it to the unit. Taking it from the unit was not quite so easy. We like to have the Burb really full whenever we take loads because, well, we might as well... it takes less trips. It is amazing to me how much the Burb holds! It really is a great vehicle in that regard!! We got to our storage unit in the mid-afternoon and someone was using the freight elevator. (We really need to call first next time to make sure it is available.) We had a pallet so decided to fill the pallet with boxes so we could just cart it to the elevator when it was free. It was a much longer pallet than I was used to and it had little indents on the side that I thought that the little dolly forklift thing (I have no idea what it is called) would fit in so I convinced Glenn that we should turn it the other way in the hallway. It was about half full of boxes at this point so we took all the boxes off turned the pallet then filled the pallet the rest of the way up. Then we waited... and waited... and waited. I think that there was a delivery for the business and someone else was dropping off stuff from a BIG white truck for their storage unit. We were probably on the 3rd floor of this warehouse building with our 2,4,6&8 year olds for at least an hour, if not an hour and a half or more waiting for the elevator. We sang and danced and ran and played games and looked at pictures from the picture tote that we'd put on the pallet and waited. There were a few windows that we could look out (at least the 3 of us who were tall enough) and waited. Finally the elevator was free and we brought the aforementioned thing that I don't know the name of to our pallet and guess what? I was wrong! The pallet was supposed to go the other way, oops! We quickly unloaded the pallet and then flipped it and reloaded it then took it to the elevator. The man was wondering if we were really going to fit all of those boxes into our vehicle and we assured him that they would fit and they did with lots of space to spare so we went back up and grabbed 20 more boxes then there was still room so we went and grabbed a few more. We got all of our Baxter boxes out of storage and a couple of totes and a few other things. We still have quite a bit still there but we did put a dent in it. If I did my math right I think that we moved at least 70 boxes to our house today all in our Burb in one trip. It is days like today that I love our Burb (and days like tomorrow when I need to put gas in it that I hate it :)) One load down, ?? more to go.

Oatmeal Bread

Today Glenn and I sat down to look at the next week and figure out when he'd be working, when we'd moving and when we'll be staying where, etc. I decided to bake some bread because with moving, trying to keep up with school, finishing Glenn's secondaries, etc, etc, etc and we are probably going to be hungry at some point this week and bread is a good thing to have in the house.

My favorite cookbook is the More With Less Cookbook ( love, love, love this cookbook, a definite must have!) and my favorite bread recipe from More With Less is Oatmeal Bread. It is so yummy! After baking it today and eating a sandwich with it I thought that I really needed to post the recipe on my blog just in case I want to bake it and can't find my cookbook (which would be the end of the world!!) or want to make it at someone else's house. Also if you feel adventurous and would like to try it feel free. As I have said before, it is tasty!

Oatmeal Bread
(says it makes 2 loaves, I usually double it and make it into 3 loaves in my 9" loaf pans)
Combine in large bowl:
1C quick oats
1/2C whole wheat flour (I usually do more than that!)
1/2C brown sugar (I usually do less than that!)
1T salt
2T margarine
Pour over:
2C boiling water
Stir in to combine.
Dissolve 1pkg yeast in 1/2C warm water
When batter is cooled to lukewarm add yeast.
Stir in:
~5C white flour (less if you've added extra wheat flour)
When dough is stiff enough to handle turn onto floured board and knead 5-10 minutes. Place in greased bowl, cover, and let rise until doubled. Punch down and let rise again. Shape into 2 loaves and place in greased 9x5x3 pans. Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes. Cool on rack, brushing with margarine for a soft crust.

I laughed as I typed the recipe at several of the things that I do differently than it says to. I love home made bread! I have only bought probably 8 loaves of bread in the last year so this is the bread we usually make sandwiches on (unless I get lazy and make Mom's French Bread recipe which I'll save for another post).

Here is a picture of the 2 loaves that are left after having sandwiches for supper (there are also a few crumbs from the first loaf visible on the counter.) Now one is in a plastic container for enjoyment tomorrow and one is in the freezer for us to eat in a couple of days. Yeah for homemade bread and having food in the house!