A slightly bigger world

I know I have been terribly absent..... again. I'm sorry to have left everyone hanging. Really we have been busy trying to get some of those never ending projects finished up around here.... and successfully this time!

Our new living room space is finished, the screened in garage that used to be there is cleaned out and all of those truck loads of STUFF(where does all of it come from?) have been hauled off, given away or donated. I hope to be able to post the before and after pictures sometime soon. The thought of everyone seeing how cluttered and unusable that space used to be makes me cringe though. Now our house just seems so much bigger! Troy keeps losing track of the kids and tends to go wandering around looking for them. He got used to being able to stand in the kitchen and either hear or see in direct view everyone in the family.... he'll adjust though and he likes our new "livingroom".

Our garden space has at least doubled if not just a bit more than that. The boys and I ran the tiller and pulled literal miles of roots and other stuff out of the ground and tilled it and tilled it and tilled it. Then I planted it in corn, beans, squash and pumpkins. It's all done now but the watering and waiting!!.... oops, and the endless weeding that goes with it all. With the garden being so much bigger it all takes a lot longer to do now. I'm just praying that the extra harvest will be enough to make me glad I worked so hard on making the extra space.

The kids have nearly finished school for this year including their end of the year research project that they displayed at our church homeschool groups end of the year gathering. All three of them did very well this year and we have big plans for next year and probably another little person will be joining us for school.

I finally began the massive task of going through all of the paperwork for the benefit programs with Troy's new job and am still wading through it but pleasantly surprised by what all is included without cost to us! There are some expenses with the health insurance but other than that I'm amazed at what a blessing this job has turned into for our family.

We are still waiting for our air conditioning to be fixed. I'm not a person who feels like I need to pamper myself with climate controlled environments on a regular basis but it's nearly a hundred degrees here and the next week or more will be more of the same. I'm HOT and I need to be able to get some rest which is hard to do when it's still hot in the middle of the night. Hopefully it will be tended to tomorrow!!

That's all for this quick post.... I have to go get some supper into my hungry kids. We went to church and didn't feel like eating because it was too hot but now we are all starving!