Settling in

After living in our new house for 2 1/2 weeks, we finally got our internet hooked up yesterday. The electricians have been pretty slow at getting things done around here. They still have a few things they have to finish up. And our other contractors have plenty of work to do too. It's kind of crazy living in a house that isn't totally finished yet.

The other day I made a list, room by room, of all the things that Dan and I need to work on in our house. It was a LONG list. Some things clearly won't happen for a long time, but others are more urgent. And as always, a lot of those items are dependent on time and budget. We'll have to save a little here and there to get all that stuff finished. And annoyingly, some of these items have to be done in proper order. For instance, we'd like to hang curtains in our house. Seems like a reasonable thing to want to do when you move! None of our old curtains really work, size wise, for the new house. Not to mention all our old curtains are just that...OLD. We've had them at least 10 years and some longer because they are hand-me-downs. Buying new curtains for an entire house is expensive. Plus we have to buy curtain rods for every window. The old part of the house has blinds on all the windows, so that's nice. But there are no existing hooks to hang curtains in the old part of the house. And the new part of the house is...um...new, so it's just bare walls. We have to buy curtain rods and start from scratch. So even if we are able to save up money to put curtain rods and curtains up in the whole house, we still can't hang curtains just yet. No sir! We have to paint first! All the walls in the new house still need a first coat or at least a touch up coat of paint. And in the old part of the house there are cracks in the walls and holes from old wall hangings. The walls are a mess! As you can see, we have a lot of work to do to even hang up curtains. If we get curtains up anytime this year, I think we'll be doing well.

There's so much we'd like to work on before the baby arrives in November. Once the baby gets here, we'll both be too tired to do much of anything extra. But our productivity has been slowed somewhat due to my broken foot. I must say, though, that this foot has only slowed me down a little bit. I guess I should probably slow down and rest more, but being the mom it's hard to just sit and rest. So much is dependent on me. We've been so thankful for all our friends and family who have come to help us unpack, care for the kids and brought us meals. You all have been a huge help to us! Thanks to all of you, our house is mostly unpacked. Even though there's still plenty of work to do, our house is certainly livable.

Now if only we could get our yard livable. It's been really frustrating having the yard be such a mess. There's construction mess in the back yard still. (My mother-in-law, Christy, can vouch for that as she stepped on a nail in our back yard while she was here helping us.) The deck isn't built yet. And in the muddy area in our back yard there are hundreds of maple trees growing. When the contractors spread out the big dirt pile in our back yard to even out the land, it was perfect timing for the maple tree near by to drop off its spring seeds on that muddy area. It was perfect conditions for growing trees. With no grass to get in the way, the seeds took root and grew happily. We literally have hundreds of tiny trees growing in our back yard. We have to remove these trees so we can plant grass seed. It's overwhelming.

Anyway...this is getting to be a long post. I just wanted to add that my broken foot is doing as well as a broken foot can, I guess. I still hurts sometimes, especially when I work too hard. I'm 23 weeks pregnant today and our baby boy seems to be doing fine. We certainly hope so. Now that we have our internet up and running again, I hope to keep in touch better and not write such long posts. :-)