House is Home

When does a new house become a home? Is it after you change the first stinky diaper? Is it after you bandage the first skinned knee? Perhaps it's after the lawn has been trimmed. Maybe the house becomes home when you make jam or when the smoke detector should go off. Is it when you've got a tick and you know where to find the tweezers? I know, it's when you're able to sit on the front porch sipping coffee watching the sun get up. If all these things are so, then I'd say that our house is home. We are fully unpacked and life has taken on a bit of normalcy. The kids are working hard with homeschool again hoping to finish the school year soon. 

When they aren't schooling they're sprawled out on the lawn looking at an early evening moon with their siblings. There's more than enough property to occupy their imagination. Plenty of trails in the woods have brought out the bb guns and the tweezers for extracting ticks. Yack! They are very happy.

Jake has enough lawn for a playing field of his own. The kids have all demanded their own baseball glove so that they can enjoy their daddy's expertise on the subject. Two of the kids have already taken a ball to the face. Jake's smart and only uses soft ones with the girls, so don't worry about Lou Lou.

Even Samuel has let his imagination take flight and runs around swinging swords and making sound effects.  It's good to be home and to enjoy life outside of a vehicle.

I've found great pleasure as well. The kitchen has been active and our tummies don't fuss at us like they were 4 weeks ago. For Mother's Day I asked Jake to take us strawberry picking. We picked about 70 pounds. I've frozen some of them, left a flat in the fridge for whatever comes up and made 2 gallons of jam with the rest of it. My huge pot was slightly small and during the last bit of cooking I had to dump some jam in a separate pot. This created a minor spill which quickly set the new kitchen to smoking heavily. Thankfully there isn't a fire detector in the kitchen and there was no need to wave the broom frantically. Just opening the windows and back door was enough to suck out the cloud. With the jammy afternoon I knew I was home and that meant, I better put up a quick post. I'll post more pictures as I'm mindful to take out the camera.

Thank you again for all the prayers on our behalf. We are so blessed to be here and as I often tell Jake, I can't believe we get to live here!

We are putting together a Sitting/Pub Room for any visitors that would grace our doorstop... so please stop by and stay for toast and jam. Maybe Jake and I will have even nailed down a name for the room by that time... or maybe not.