Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!

When Grandpa Pat and Grandma Suzie came to visit a few weeks ago, they brought a Big Surprise with them. Three new kitties have joined our household!

They are growing fast, and getting into everything!

Meet Charlemagne, the littlest kitty with the biggest name.

We mostly just call him Charlie.

This is his big brother, Moriarty. He is the biggest of the three, and the most mischievous.

We call him Mori, usually because he never sticks around long enough for us to get his whole name said.

And this is their sister Irene. She's just a bundle of cuteness.

(I'm looking forward to having fewer mice around here...)

Our Second Batch of Chickens

A few weeks ago, I went to our farm store to get dog food and found out while I was there that it was our last chance to get chicks this year. I went home and told my husband, and asked if he thought we should go back to get a few, since they had the breed I'd been wanting.  "Sure", he said, "get a few of the ones you want, and then get some other kinds too. Get a dozen." So we did.

(chicks in a bathtub, under a red warming lamp)

They grow SO fast! Today was nice and warm, so we locked the big chickens out of their run and let the little chicks run around for a while in it.

Just as we were getting ready to put them back into their crate, one met with a fatal accident when she darted underneath a descending foot, so we're down to eleven already. Life in the country can be tough!

The Two Become One. Kind of.

For years, I have maintained two very similar blogs. Both have been focused on our family, but one was private and one was public, and the public one was slightly more focused on housekeeping and living frugally. I'm finally admitting that it was too much. We got busy living life and I abandoned both of them for a very long time.

Until this weekend.

I spent some time yesterday cleaning up the private one in order to make it public, and changed the blog addresses to simplify things even further. The idea is that if I only have one blog to think about updating, I'll do it more often.

That's the plan, anyway.  In the meantime, please excuse the housekeeping dust!

Reading Record 2013

January: The Dirty Life (Kimball)

February: The Magician's Nephew (Lewis)
                The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Lewis)

March: Heller with a Gun (L'Amour)
            The Horse and His Boy (Lewis)
            The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Esolen)

April: Queen Without Crown (Polland)
           The Castle of Llyr (Alexander)
           When the Morning Came (Prins)
           In the Footsteps of Jesus (Marchiano)

May: The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls (White)

June:

July:

August: Web of Traitors (Trease)
              Ten Thousand Heroes (Barbary)
              The Stolen Oracle (Williams)
              Alexander's Horses (Powers)
              The Counterfeit African (Williams)
              Hannibal: Invader from Carthage (Webb)
              Julius Caesar (Buchan)
              The Golden Hawks of Genghis Khan (Ritchie)
              The Eagles Have Flown (Williamson)
              Message to Hadrian (Trease)
              The Eagle of the Ninth (Sutcliff)
              The Silver Branch (Sutcliff)
              The Lantern Bearers (Sutcliff)
              The Fifty-Six Who Signed (Fink)
              The Prairie Traveler (Marcy)

September: The First Book of Medieval Man (Sobol)
                   Attila: King of the Huns (Webb)
                   Age of Chivalry (Bulfinch)
                   The Horn of Roland (Williams)
                   Legends of Charlemagne (Bulfinch)
                   El Cid (McCaughrean)

October: Owen's Pretty Good Book (Blickensderfer)
               Hereward the Wake (Kingsley)
               Knight's Fee (Sutcliff)
               The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo)
               Son of the Land (Bolton)
               Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde (Lamb)
               Ironies of Faith (Esolen)
               Men of Iron (Pyle)
               The Brendan Voyage (Severin)

November: Miniatures and Morals (Leithart)
                   No Parachute (Lee)

December:

I Blame My Sponges

I'm sorry to admit this, but blogging is not at the top of my priority list.  Sponges are.

I have four of them.

They soak up knowledge almost as fast as I can write out the lesson plans for the week.  They absorb food quicker than I can prepare it.  And they just will NOT quit getting bigger, so I am constantly on the lookout for bigger clothes and bigger shoes.

Yep.  The shortage of blog posts from me is entirely the fault of my sponges.

(Aaaaand now my kids think I'm nuts.)

Mt. Rainier...Again!

We couldn't help it.

We went back to Mt. Rainier again in August for the third time in four weeks.

This time we took Grandpa Pat and Grandma Suzie!

The kids were determined to climb even higher than they did the first time, 

and Mike and his parents were willing, so climb they did!

While my mountain goats family went up and around (the long way), 

I headed back down the path (the short way).

 They're on that path up there, on their way back down.

What do you mean you can't see them?

They're right there...that pink dot in the middle is Jaela.

Hm.

Just take my word for it.

They're all there.

That was our last trip to Mt. Rainier for the summer.

I wonder what it's like up there in the fall...

Four Days Later

Four days after our first visit to Mt. Rainier, the kids and I went back again,

but this time we took Grandma.

We took an easier one mile hike that had plenty of views like this one.

Our destination was Myrtle Falls,

and this was the view looking up from the top of the falls.

Half of the kids thought the bridge was great

(the other half weren't so sure it was engineered properly), 

and they were all delighted to make a new friend

(from a distance).

Too much fun and way too beautiful to only go twice...

Mt. Rainier

On Sunday, we went up to Mt. Rainier on a four mile hike.

And when I say "we",

I mean we ALL went.

See?

The hiking part was fun,

and the mountain was even more beautiful the closer we got,

but crossing the snow patches on the trail was the most fun.

(Especially when we got to slide down the snow-covered trail on the other side!)

We saw a buck, two does, a marmot, and a lot of wildflowers.

A lot of wildflowers.

(So many that I got overwhelmed trying to pick which pictures to post.

So you get to see two.

I'm sorry and you're welcome.)

Too much fun and way too beautiful to only go once...

In The Back Field

The Bookshelf Saga: Part 2

Once the bookshelves were finished, I started loading them with books, beginning with the shelves we bought.  Those shelves are at the end of my new shelving system, and I alphabetize our books by author, so I started with Z and worked my way backward until I filled the shelves...

...and ran out of room.

So I got creative!

I found this set of retro mustard yellow suitcases at Goodwill earlier that week, and I still hadn't figured out exactly what I was going to do with them.  So I used the smaller one as a bookshelf at the east end of the lighted bookshelves!

(I filled the big one on the bottom with denim I'm saving to make quilts for my kids some day.  

Storage in plain sight; I love that!)

This is my Desert/Cowboy Corner:  a rubbing of a Native American petroglyph (my step-grandma made it along the Columbia River in the 60s for an art class, before the dam flooded the area), a paint-by-number my grandpa did, jars of jawbones my kids collected in Nevada, a too-small cowboy hat and too-big cowboy boots, and a desert-scape picture my brother-in-law took in South America (the frame belonged to my great-grandma and is made out of cactus).

On the wall facing that, at the west end of the lighted bookshelves, I stacked up a few old wooden crates from my mother-in-law and filled them with books (because I knew by the time I got to the M's that I was going to run out of room), and I used a horseshoe-shaped book holder turned on end to take part of my Louis L'Amour collection vertical.  To continue my cowboy theme, I filled some too-small cowboy boots with coins to use as bookends and added a red bandanna and my father-in-law's moose jawbones.

I'm happy with my little extra shelving solutions, and the bookshelves we bought and assembled are very nice, but my hands-down favorite are the lighted bookshelves!

I love how easy it is to read the titles, even on the oldest and most worn spines,

and really I love the soft glow that showcases my beloved friends books;

especially at night!

The Bookshelf Saga: Part 1

When we moved from Tennessee to Washington, we had 33 boxes of books, and by the time we moved into this log house, I had collected just a few more.

(Boxes?  Or books?  I'm not telling!  My husband's reading this!)

That collection has grown even more during the years we've lived here, but they're (mostly) for school, and I like to plan ahead, so...

We want to put in some really cool built-in shelves along these walls on the upstairs landing, but in the meantime, my shelves were cardboard boxes, stacked up on top of each other and reinforced with boards between layers.

The shelves along this adjacent wall were even worse:

and there was no improving them.  In the last configuration the box-shelves were five rows tall instead of the three in this picture, with no wooden bookcase and with less uniformly sized boxes.

And the top two rows were starting to lean forward away from the wall.

Scary.

To save our children's skulls and their mother's sanity, we bought some "temporary" bookshelves for the larger wall,

and Mike built "rustic" temporary bookshelves for me along the short wall.

But my husband doesn't do things half way.

He built "rustic" temporary bookshelves for me...

...with built-in lighting on each shelf!

The rest of the story (or at least more pictures) is coming soon!

Moving In

We played our cards just right and got my mom to move up to Washington, where she is renting a duplex 15 minutes away from us!

(Those G-R-A-N-D-K-I-D-S cards are amazing things!)

The kids and I worked on cleaning her new place while she finished up the packing at her house in Oregon, and then towards the end of June my cousin drove a moving truck up to Washington with all of her household stuff in it.  (She stayed behind in Oregon for another week to finish up some work and house sale details.)

More of my cousins met us at my mom's new place and we unloaded the truck.

There were five adults and four kids - and when we were done, the duplex looked...

um, not empty.

Then, because my mom knows how much fun I have doing it, she let us rearrange furniture, unpack some stuff, and set up enough things to make the place livable as soon as she walked in the door.

She's been here a few weeks now, and we're still helping her rearrange and get things set up how she wants them.

I'm not sure we'll ever really be done, but it's so much fun, why would we quit?!?

Another Laundry Room Make-Over

After my last laundry room makeover, the laundry room was organized and functional, but of course it never stayed this neat.

And these ugly (albeit functional) brown shelves,

 well, I just couldn't handle looking at them any more.

Ew.

So one evening, while the kids had cereal for dinner, I painted them white.

(Editor's Note:  The shelves, Aunt Shirley, NOT the kids!  It's safe to eat cereal at my house again!)

A few weeks later, I inherited the crib that my grandpa built in the 40s.

It was the excuse I'd been waiting for...I tore out the cheap cabinets in the laundry room to create a space for the crib, and I only lost two inches of walkway.

(If it's quiet, and I can't find my girls, I look here.  They've been known to curl up in the crib together to read - all three of them!)

The laundry room is still not my favorite room in the house, but at least the new look makes me smile when I walk in there instead of cringing!