a million tiny ways

Oh the happy joy of hearing that we can probably sign papers on our new house this week or early next week!  Buying this house has been fantastically simpler than selling our other house, and buying our other house, for that matter.  I am so glad.  The amount of hoops to jump through as a first time home buyer made things so stressful, but this time we just keep toddling along with no drama.  We plan to begin moving in next Friday. I can hardly believe it. 

We began to read Tales from Moominvalley yesterday and Lyddie loves it.  I also love it and being generally in love with Scandinavia, this quirky story has Scandinavia all over it and is right up my alley.  I am amazed at the cursive handwriting of both Lyddie and Millie.  Their copywork is looking lovely and the quick hard work of introducing cursive in early fall is paying off.  I'm really glad I went that direction.  Rosie likes to sit when we do school with her spiral notebook and make loopy "letters" and gets mad at me when I move on to the next math problem or spelling word before she's "ready."  It makes me smile and makes me realize how quickly the time will fly by until she's reading and writing, and then I want to cry that my baby is getting so big.  Today we laid the foundation for multiplication with work on doubling and halving and I loved the light going on in Lyddie's eyes when she really realized what we were doing.  On Sunday our sermon at church was about a passage in 2 Peter that speaks about false teachers.  Lyddie was listening closely, and when we had a mini lesson about our hymn (The Church's One Foundation) over breakfast this morning and discussed the line, "by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed" these were setting up a really interesting knowledge base for reading later in the morning about Athanasius in Trial and Triumph, a book of stories of the early church.  Athanasius spent most of his life teaching the truth of Christ's deity against the then-prevalent Arian view that Christ was not truly God in the way the Father is.  The story of his life is very interesting, but it was made even more interesting by all the events colliding and the ideas of falsity and truth and standing for the truth were spreading long fingers out into our brains.  Basically, school is the best.  But don't ask how our session of watercoloring went.  {It ended with children whining and me yelling and putting myself in a short time-out.  Then we danced around and did the hokey pokey and ring around the rosy and everyone moved past the outburst.  Weird.}  
This afternoon was reading and cross-stitching and an elaborate game of "Calicraters" (aka Calico Critters in Rosie-speak), and researching photography (me) and baking a batch of Snickerdoodles because even though I'm trying so hard to lose weight, sometimes you just need to have a few baggies of cookies in the freezer to pull out for dessert.  To cap off a really nice day, I got to have a scheduled phone date with a friend who is also using Ambleside Online to homeschool her son and it was a joy to talk and visit and laugh and dream about ways we can be alongside each other in our journey of homeschooling.  

We took our old couch to the dump when we moved.  It was completely awful and I had never liked it that much to begin with.  In our ten years of marriage, we had one couch I liked well enough but it got pretty ruined in our move across the state and we got rid of it a long time ago.  We have been really hoping for a leather couch and Jesse has been watching Craigslist.  We had a little money set aside from Christmas gifts so we could jump if he saw something.  This afternoon a beautiful set was listed a few hours away from us in lovely condition and for a price that we couldn't pass up.  Jesse flew to his car.  The sellers are a retired couple and they are downsizing from a huge house to a smaller apartment and they said they would hold it for us until five so he drove over the pass and got there right in time.  I haven't seen them yet besides pictures since he's on the road as I write, but oh I can't wait.  It's a couch, a loveseat, an ottoman and an armchair with brass nail trim! For less than we thought we'd have to pay just for a couch!  What?!  I think they will be really beautiful in the new house.  

Speaking of which.  I haven't posted any pictures of our new house yet because it was too emotionally charged for me to "put it out there" until now.  But I'm ready.  Here are a few pictures I snapped when we were there for the home inspection last month.  Obviously the belongings aren't ours but the idea is there.  The kitchen has a lot of knotty pine and the room that will be our master bedroom is floor to ceiling pine as well.  There are a lot of other places with the same pine (a hallway of pine with built in cupboards).  It's really lovely.  Four bedrooms and two bathrooms, an upstairs living room and a downstairs family room.  Two beautiful woodstoves, a big covered front porch, several outbuildings, and a pasture.  2+ acres with trees, even some young fruit trees, and a gorgeous view.  There were several times I'd drive out around this house and think, "I really wish I lived in this specific area of the valley for its beauty."  It's exactly what we dreamed of in a million tiny ways and I truly never expected we'd find each of those little things we hoped for in one place.  We are scheming about how we will make it "ours" over time but I'm really thankful to be buying a home that is already beautiful in so many ways and only needs a few things up front (e.g., kitchen floor and countertops updated and we will replace the roof).  That's pretty different from our last house that was 100% project and even then there wasn't much hope of it ever being what we really loved.  We are feeling so thankful for the ways the Lord has gifted us this home that will very soon be ours.