Outside

Well, we have a closing date, finally, which gives my life some focus finally!  May 3rd we have a scheduled closing and we move in two weeks... woo hoo!  My FIL mentioned to my husband that he'd like some exterior pics of the house so I got right on it.  We went to the house yesterday and measured rooms so I could plan furniture layouts, and walked the property, and I took some shots of the house and grounds!

Yellow, I love yellow houses!  I'm already seeing the garden!

The "front four" and the long, long driveway, which I have plans to flank with flowering trees, probably fruit trees and arbor day foundation freebies.  Picture: chicken tractors, fiber animals, a milk cow and her calf, and maybe even pigs!

Daddy and five little people.  OK, one is getting awfully big to be called little.  The woods are beyond the road which is the boundary of our property.   

This property is just ideal.  There are neighbors, which is good, but the property really seems private and secluded in many ways, and oh, so beautiful! There is a creek, which in the photo is swollen due to lots of rain, and a fishing hole just a bit down the road.  I can envision puddle playing and a willow tree and paper boat races.  We even met some neighbors, which was just ideal!  Sometimes it's hard to meet your neighbors in the country, OK, sometimes it's hard to get to know your neighbors anywhere nowadays!

I want to pause here to say that I do not deserve this wonderful blessing!  I am so thankful for grace, so needy of mercy, and so very, very undeserving of this!  I have to get a little overt here!  Praise God from whom all blessings flow!  OK, that says it all I think!  (Have you noticed how many exclamation marks I use?  That's just how I speak... I exclaim!)

A Winter's Walk

Well, I'm finding that this farm is just as wonderfully beautiful in winter as in summer and fall. I'm smitten with this place. It so often reminds me of the farm I lived on in Upstate New York when a girl. I hope my children experience that kinship with nature as I did growing up. I always felt as if I could almost feel things growing, like I could sit on a big, old rock and almost hear it telling me the story of the land, of glaciers and floods, of plows and boys in overalls planting trees, of seedlings and flax crops. I think I've lost some of my imagination, but I can see it alive in my children. They roam the farm and name all the little places they like. There is a group of rocks arranged in a large circle that they call "The Cathedral", a little bit of clear ground overhung by an arch of branches from trees that just happened to grow in two rows that they call "Trinity Church." Grand Grove, the Treehouse, and Muddy Bottom are all places that my children have named and inhabited as their own. They don't have the waterfall and mill and apple orchard and ancient graveyard of my youth, but they have magical places of their own, and sometimes they let me in.

Yesterday we took a hike since deer season is over. We sort of were looking for nuts, as we've been studying the wild foods that Native Americans ate before Europeans came here, but of course the squirrels have hidden them all away in their larders. Instead we found a turtle shell right next to a hole in the ground. A freshly dug, neat little hole into some animals winter home. Maybe a fox or badger? We've been reading Wind in the Willows so the children imagined all sorts of wonderful little furniture and comforts in there, but realized that the turtle probably met an unfortunate end in it's dealings with the inhabitant.

Mama's Day Out

Coming to you live from Panera Bread in Warrenton... I needed a vacation, bad... so my husband, wonderful, beautiful, generous man that he is offered to give me a whole day to do whatever I wanted now that the youngest is old enough to leave alone for a while. So, this morning, I took a walk on the farm, which I'm always wanting to do, but never actually doing. I took a few pictures, which I thought you'd perhaps enjoy.

Pretty, huh?!