Life is like a box of chocolates...

"Life is like a box of chocolates...

you never know what you're going to get"!

That quote is exactly how I feel right now...

each day is a different adventure than I was planning on.

My life is anything but perfect right now.

It’s wonderful, but just extremely busy and full of daily chaos and disorganization! The hardest thing about my life right now is that with limited computer use, OR, no access to a computer at all, I am not able to keep in touch with family and friends like I like to.

I love to connect daily or weekly with the people that I care about and that has not been possible at all.

At least there is light at the end of the tunnel

and hopefully the 1st or 2nd week of November, my computer time will be better.

I have missed journaling my life, sharing recipes and family events and visiting Blogs of my family and friends and keeping in touch through email.
(updates for my journal)

(sad that there hasn’t been any typical Autumn
and Halloween happenings at my house this year)

Saturday, October 16th…

we rented a floor sander for the weekend that had to be returned on Monday morning. We wanted to make the most of our rental and so Saturday

we sanded the entire floor with 60 grit sand paper,

and then sanded the whole floor with 80 grit sand paper

and then sanded the whole floor with 100 grit sand paper.

Late Saturday night we filled in all of the holes/cracks with wood putty and went to bed. It was a VERY long and tiring day!

Sunday, October 17th,

we got up and went to church

(We made the most of our every second this weekend)

and then Tom and Lisa (my sister and brother-in-law)

invited us over to have Sunday dinner with them...

WOW! it was so kind and generous of them, delicious food and we had such a great time! We also got a new recipe for Tracy to try making in our Dutch Oven…”Zippy Zappy Chicken”. We feel so loved and spoiled by everyone! We then came home and spent the afternoon sanding all of the wood putty.

Can I just say that I very much

appreciate being able to breathe!

During the whole sanding process of two complete days we had to wear face masks to filter out the fine oak dust so we weren’t breathing too much of it.

WOW!! I have a whole new appreciation for having working lungs and being able to breathe fresh clean air each day! I truly thought I wasn’t going to make it by having to wear those masks all day long.

While we were in the process of our sanding

we had some of our neighbors stop by…

My sweet friend Brittney and her family stopped by and dropped off homemade donuts as an early birthday treat as she is due any day to deliver her 7th child. They were SO delicious and my kids just loved them!

Our other neighbors Richard, Brigitte and Sabrina stopped by and brought us a big bag of garden fresh carrots from their garden. Here it was a Sunday evening and we were furiously working away sanding floors and they were SO thoughtful and kind and most of all, didn’t judge us for working on the Sabbath.

I feel SO blessed to have friends and family that love and care about us no matter what!

10-20-10

and

10-22-10

Tracy and I celebrated birthdays.

A very cool thing we learned when we wrote the date on our birthdays, is that the day, month and year all add up to our age.

I turned 40 and

Tracy turned 42.

It looks like it will be this way for quite a few more birthdays!

So COOL!!

Our kids will never forget our ages!

(here's Kimmie's birthday list from last year)

I had the BEST birthday ever!

Many birthday wishes from family and friends!

Got to have lunch with Mr. Smith and spend the afternoon with him.

Happy and sweet sons that were SO excited for me to open presents. Sweet cards from my kids and my favorite Florences Chocolates. At our house we just do sweet thoughtful things for birthdays.
No big extravagant gifts.

Tracy is always doing sweet thoughtful things. He bought some fun retro paper and covered a cigar box with the paper so that I can have another box to store love letters and trinkets in. Since I am a lover of hair barrettes, Tracy got me the cutest spider barrette to wear in my hair on Halloween.

No time for cake this year
as homemade cake is not happening at our house right now.

(Tracy will have to wait until next year to watch me blow out 40 candles) (wink!)

We took the kids to Chuck-A Rama for a special birthday dinner as we had to be out of the house for 8 hours after applying the stain on our flooring. The kids had a ball and LOVED getting to load their plates with whatever they wanted. We only do this once a year and so it is a very anticipated event!

At this stage of our flooring project I have no kitchen. My dishwasher and stove are unhooked and sitting in the garage and the fridge is in our entryway. We had a few days where our entry was taped closed by a plastic barrier and so we had to go outside through the garage and into the front door to get anything we needed out of the fridge.

Our dishes have to be done in the sink in our laundry room as we have tried to keep water to a minimum in our kitchen for fear of getting water spots on our floor that still needs stained and varnished.

I cook our morning steel cut oats on a hot plate in the garage and that is usually our only hot meal at this stage of life. We have been living on sandwiches, tacos, crackers and crab dip which my kids are sick of. We cooked squash in our roaster last week and Tracy fired up the grill and we cooked Salmon in our garage.

We LOVED that meal!

I miss cooking and baking and being a homemaker!

My life right now is about quick and easy meals that don’t require any cooking and very few dishes. It is going to be a glorious day when we actually have a stove that we can cook up a big pot of soup and I can bake up a batch of bread as well!! OH and Ethan is going to be the happiest kid alive to be able to SIT on a chair and eat…we have stood to eat the majority of every meal for the past 2 weeks!

My life right now is filled with SO much dust.

The quote

“dust is a protective covering for furniture”

has never been more apropos than this point of my life right now. From all of the floor sanding there is fine dust all over the place. I haven’t been motivated to take care of it because we just keep making more dust each time we sand.

However, my kitchen is completely dust free on the counter tops so we can at least eat and not be in dust and I am trying to keep up on the dust in my laundry room as well. Even though I have swept and vacuumed the floors, doing laundry has been a real JOY as sometimes clothes fall on the floor and get covered in fine dust and then they have to get washed again. (this happens, because our laundry room is just “sub-floor” that still has the sticky residue from pulling up our kitchen floor and next project on our list is to lay tile in the laundry room).

LOTS and LOTS of fun, I’m telling you! Last week, I had to laugh as we were scurrying around getting Ethan ready for Pack Night and he rubbed his arm across something and he had dust all over his Scout Shirt! I’m beyond getting mad when this happens. I just have to laugh and say “Isn’t life just great”!!!

I am going to have to clean and dust every square inch of my home when we are done as everything has dust all over it and I mean EVERYTHING!

We are celebrating the dust…

as I have found love signs and notes

written in the dust from the love of my life

“Mr. Smith”

GOSH,

can I say how lucky I am to be married to him!

He is truly amazing and thoughtful

and makes me feel loved

and appreciated every day of my life!

I have enjoyed each moment that I get to be with him. I feel bad that through all of this home remodel, he has had to put more of his “Mad Skills” to work in replacing the Distributor cap and rotor on my car as it was running really rough the day we went to Chuck-O-Rama (the distributor cap was bad).

Unfortunately, in removing the rotor from the shaft (it was really stuck), something inside the distributor broke so he had to remove the entire distributor assembly repair what had broken inside (saving the $200 for a new assembly) and then “re-time” the ignition so the car would run.

As if that wasn’t enough, Tracy has noticed the front axle on my car has some odd “play” in it and so he is going to need to pull it out and rebuild it or just put a rebuilt one in.

This past weekend

was Jade’s last cross country meet

He had his best time yet…

26:42

Another happy note…

our team made the top three at district’s in both girls and boys cross and so they will be heading to State on October 29th!

Go Bobcats!

**********************
I’m SO blessed that I get to go through this wonderful journey of life with Mr. Smith and can I say we laugh each and every day of our lives, but the past few weeks of chaos, we have laughed harder than ever!

Life is SO wonderful and SO good!

BTW…I have 2 new favorite songs that I have been “jamming” too, while we’ve been working hard.

They are by “Escala”

“Requiem for a Tower” (here)

and “Palladio” (here)

They are awesome and put me in the best mood. They are a “jazzed up” orchestra rendition. I just wished they were a little bit longer. I’m sure my family is tired of hearing them as they get played over and over each day!

OH, and we have decided on the color we are staining our oak hardwood…”Early American”…stain is now on the floor and now time to mineral spirit the whole floor and then time to put on the first coat of Polyurethane! Hopefully in a week we will be done with this adventure and able to start putting life back together again!

I am really starting to feel a little like

“Humpty Dumpty”!

Happy Week!

I appreciate all of my wonderful family and friends and I hope you know that I am thinking about each and every one of you and I can’t wait to “Connect” through blogging and email again soon!

Happy Halloween week!!

Looking forward to dressing up as a family and going to the annual Halloween Orchestra Concert and getting Jade’s costume ready for his first date to the Halloween Dance this Saturday! His date is going to be Alice in Wonderland and he is going to be the Mad Hatter!

Fun, fun!!