Demo

Here are some fun pictures of the demo work phase of the house. Thanks to many friends and family for coming out to help our weekend warrior efforts! We love you all so much and cant ever thank you enough for all your help!

Cameron got to take the first few swings to the wall!

The kitchen is looking good right?

You can see how tall the weeds were before we brought over the goats and alpacas to go to work!

Stuck in a chair.

I am a bit foggy still and stuck in my chair following a simple meniscus repair surgery on my knee last Thursday. As usual, I have done too much since then and find my knee to be quite painful and a bit...."squishy" or "balloonish" feeling at the moment. I think a water balloon might describe it best. So I will try to catch you all up on the crazy maddens of our lives the last couple months while I "ice". It all started when I was on my way to drop Leah off at her usual piano lesson and happened to notice a "FOR SALE" sign in the neighborhood on the way. I am still not sure why I called on it but I was interested in how much land was there with the home. Turns out it was a short sale and the agent told me it had around 5 ACRES of land. I will save you the details about how difficult a decision it was for us to leave our little world we have created here in our yard, and in the end we gambled that it may be worth it to have almost 5x the amount of land(turns out the agent was a little off at it was around 4.7 acres total). There were many sleepless nights, I lots a bunch of weight, and we bought a new house that was a complete shit-hole!  Since then it has been all consuming. The kids have gone through phases where they refuse to even get out of the car at the new house, they call it "the dirty house", but all in all they have been so very good through the whole process. Here are some pictures of the house before we bought it. Yes, we saw it like this and STILL wanted it. It must be true love right?

Sorry these have no order. Our life has no order right now either.

detached garage

looking west out to the barn

the barn will be super fancy when we get it all cleaned up. You can tell someone spent some serious money building it but the last owners let it go.

so much hay storage/alpaca shelter

the blank slate pasture

The home is very structurally sound, built in the late 70's and brick!

Wow it felt good to see this all ripped out!

Keep in mind every inch of carpeting was soaked with dog urine! Holy smell! We have chosen to have zero carpeting  in this home. After pulling it all out, carpet is the last thing I want to put into my house. 

The interrogation chair. WHAT THE!!!????

A handy way to attach your TV to your dresser....rope. And yes, that carpet in their bedroom they were living is is also urine soaked!

The kids bedrooms have very nice big windows

we took out both upstairs bathrooms and rearranged them to have a much more "open "feel

You can get a little glimpse here of the urine circles

Now thats a master bath...HA!

I will say iIdid like the blue shower but it had to go,  it was way too small.

WOW!

So much is happening here! The quick version: We are moving! Don't fret, it's just down the street. But this move involves a whole house remodel and taking on almost 5 acres of land! We are busy beyond belief. I will very soon try to post pictures of the new place and the remodel progress but for now (DRUM ROLL PLEASE!!!) Our new additions to the family!!!!!! I am beyond excited to add these boys to our farm next spring as soon as they are old enough to leave their mothers. I met them all for the first time today and I am in LOVE! I know they still won't make a dent in the amount of pasture we have but it will be so fun to watch them all run around together out there. And talk about fiber color variation! Perfect! If you would like to see more photos of them as they grow keep an eye on the blog at Blue Moon Alpaca Ranches.

Cousin Torture

These kids did this over and over all afternoon. Lauren is a good sport!

Full Days

The days seem so very full with 5 kids around. I only have them all a couple days a week but it's crazy how much fun and how much work it is. It really makes me wonder how large families keep up with daily chores and find time to relax! It is so worth the extra effort to see how well they all get along and how much they are teaching each other about friendship, conflict resolution and so much more. They are very good at including everyone and are very often playing in a tight group like this....

The kids all really enjoy the daily dance party.

Arts Fest

It has been so very hot here the past couple weeks! We did venture out in the heat to play for a while at the arts festival. The kids had a ball and were all VERY interested in all the art. Leah and Lily were especially interested in reading the prices of the art as we just had a math lesson that week about hundreds and thousands and place value. I am not sure the artists were super happy about the price of their art being so openly discussed, but whatever.

"MOM!!! This one is EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!! That is so much money right?! Like a million dollars?"

Clearly we need to spend more time on math.