Coronavirus (COVID-19) What I Am Doing to Prepare

I have to admit....

I got caught with my pants down on this one :(

Here is the messy situation I find myself:

We just moved.  We lived in our previous home for 4 years.  Prior to that we lived somewhere else for a year and a half.  Prior to that we lived in our RV for a bit over a year, and prior to that we lived in our first home for 13 years.

Each of those homes including the RV, I felt prepared.  I felt like we had enough food stored (yes even in the trailer), emergency supplies, and first aid stuff.

Each time we moved including this one, prior to moving we would "eat down" our food storage.  This way I knew it was being rotated, and it forced me to see what was actually rotating and what wasn't so I could be better prepared in our new home.  It was also because moving is expensive.  We would save money by eating our food storage.  That is what it is there for, right? When times are tough.  So by eating down our food storage, we weren't eating out as much, we were saving money by not having to run to the grocery store all the time, we could concentrate on packing, and we wouldn't be moving so much food.

It always sounded like a good plan.  When we would settle in our new home, I would begin building up new, fresh food storage.

But this time......

COVID-19 happened.

And we just moved.  Just two days ago, I got my bed set up in my room and am no longer sleeping on  a mattress.

But now we are in the midst of a pandemic (announced today by World Health Organization).

I spoke with my husband a week ago and he told me not to worry.  Today he told me to worry. I am pretty sure I had a full on panic attack.  My chest felt heavy, I had shortness of breath, and I am pretty sure I my heart skipped several beats.

A week ago I began (like everyone else around here) to search out basics.  Hand Sanitizer, antibacterial soap, and Clorox Wipes.  Not too serious though, but it has been a hard find around my region.  Each store I go into, I look.  The shelves are bare.

I feel so under-prepared for this.  I am too late to prep.

What I do have:

1. toilet paper and paper towels.  I was able to grab a good supply of both prior to knowing that everyone was going to run out and purchase toilet paper.  We were just out and I ran my usual errand to get some.

2.  Advil, vitamins, and prescription meds.  I am all stocked up on these supplies.  Vitamins will be good to begin taking again to get my immune system even better able to handle the virus should I get it.

3.  Some bleach, Clorox Wipes, and a little bit of Hand sanitizer.  We have anti-viral/bacterial wipes  in each of our cars. We can use these to wipe down the steering wheel, door handles, and our hands when we are out in public.

4. N95 face masks.  My husband just placed an order today.  They are on their way.

5.  Some food.  Not complete at all, but we have some breakfasts, some lunches, and some dinners.  We will continue the meal kit deliveries and will continue to use the online ordering and pick up at the store or if the need arises, a delivery service.

And I have a plan:

1. Reduce my social interactions as much as possible in person.  Avoid large gatherings, heavily trafficked public areas, and the likes.  This means that my shopping and prepping will change. I will stay home as much as possible.

2. Shop online as much as I can.  This means placing orders at the grocery store and drive up to pick the order up.  Keep looking for Clorox Wipes and Hand Sanitizer online.

3.  Food delivery services.  Right before we moved I decided to "join" Everyplate and begin getting their meal kits.  We get three dinners a week for 4 people and so far we have loved every single meal.  It is about the same as I would budget for a dinner anyway and it all comes preportioned and the recipes are easy.  I can even tell my teens to start dinner without me and they can follow the directions too.  Why do I include this in my plan? Because since we won't be going out much for a while, these meals will be something a bit different than our "usual".

4.  Cancel Easter dinner at our home.  Every big holiday we host a family dinner and all the in-laws and cousins come to our house.  Not this year.  I don't want others (particularly little kids) coming to our home and potentially exposing us to this virus.  The virus is showing that in little kids they have little to no symptoms at all and most symptoms go unnoticed.  This virus is also showing that older folks have a more severe reaction to it and more severe symptoms.  I can't risk having the little cousins over and potentially exposing my older in-laws who have some severe health issues anyway.

5.  Try to keep a positive outlook on all this "family" time we will be getting.  Colleges and universities are closing down as I type.  We expect my middle child to be told any minute that they will be sent home from college indefinitely.  My oldest will most likely also be told his college will be moving "online" as well.  My youngest is a senior this year and we homeschool anyway.  It is a good thing we got some new family games at Christmas.

Now, in a perfect world I would have had plenty of hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies, and food storage.  I wouldn't feel so unprepared for this pandemic.


What can you do if you are underprepared like me?

1.  Read as much as you can on the disease. Know the symptoms and the latest information on how it is transmitted.

2.  Wash your hands like crazy!  I told my family tonight that from now on as soon as they enter our home they wash their hands before touching anything.

3.  Clean your car, phone, clothing, and surfaces you touch often.

4.  Stay home.  Use online shopping, don't visit high traffic public areas/places.  Work from home if you can.  If you can't, stay out of others' space.  Don't use the office break room. Eat lunch at your desk alone or in your car if you need a change of scenery.

5.  Stop shaking hands and touching others. Keep a distance.  Wash your hands.

Here is a good article that I found helpful and it calmed me down a bit from the panic attack.

https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-ten-reasons-why-you-ought-not-to-panic-132941

I will continue to update as the weeks go by about how we fared through this ordeal.

Living among boxes

We are moved into our  new home.  We love our surroundings and our views all around our house.

We love our "neighbors".

Our dog meeting one of our new neighbors.

We are excited to get settled.  The kids have pretty much unpacked most of their things already and are enjoying the space.  The furniture is placed as best as it can for right now.  And we have a TON of boxes to unpack still.

Thankfully, we have a two car garage where we have most of the boxes.  We bring in a box or two at a time and unpack.  It is nice because it doesn't crowd up the house with boxes and we are able to organize and plan where things will go.

We have also been shopping for furniture.  We NEEEEEED new furniture.  Ours is so old and yucky that it just doesn't "deserve" to be in this house.  I want to throw it all out and start over again.  But furniture is so super expensive and we can't afford to buy new all at one time.  It is a lesson in patience.

Oh, and tonight we are supposed to get 3-5 inches of snow.  Tomorrow looks to be a great day to unpack more boxes.

Wish me luck!

Moving.......Again!

We are moving......again.  This time it will be a much better home for us.  While it only has 3 bedrooms and we would prefer 4, it has plenty of space for our family, AND it comes with a bonus.  A separate 2 car garage that my husband can keep his business equipment in.  We will split the rent of this place between our personal finances and the business finances.

If we don't move we will have to rent a place for my husband's business.  This way we can run the business out of the house with no problem.  This means my husband will be home more.

To fill you all in, back in October we purchased another lawn service business.  We integrated it into our existing business and it is bringing in about $12,000 of additional profit a year. This helps a lot.

Right now we are regularly servicing about 120 customers with lawn maintenance.  We have about 500 total customers who use our services from time to time throughout the year but aren't on any regular maintenance plan.  We will also be hiring another full time worker making our full time employee total 2 and will use our son as part time help as well.

Back to the move.  We love this new house because it has a ton of storage.  It has a huge unfinished space that we will use as attic storage, a two car attached garage with additional storage area in there, a separate two car garage with full attic storage above that. The master bedroom is on the first floor and the kids' bedrooms are upstairs giving us some separation.  Funny, a few years ago we were all living on top of each other in a travel trailer and having little problems.  Now we are seeking out separation.  LOL  I think it is just because they are teenagers.

The two girls will share a bedroom.  It should be interesting to see how that goes.  Right now they are in each other's rooms all the time but I know they do like their own rooms and their own privacy too.

We move the end of the month and then will clean our condo and get it ready to rent again.  The lease isn't up until the end of July but we are hoping that they will be able to rent it before then and we won't have to pay two rents for the next 5 months. Yikes!

We will be moving to "the country".  We will be surrounded on three sides by cow pasture.  We won't have any neighbors in shouting distance.  The kids can shoot their bows and arrows, play outside, and have privacy to be kids again (even though they are teens).  The house has a huge deck and a paved basketball area with a hoop.

I will have space for a garden again!  I have already begun thinking about how big I want it and what I am going to plant.

With the additional storage space and large pantry and attached garage we will be able to stock back up on our food storage and our emergency storage.

Did I mention that big bathtub in the master bathroom? Yeah, I will be spending some time in there.  I haven't had a good bathtub in YEARS!  I am looking forward to that too!

The one thing that I won't have is a space for crafts.  I am not quite sure where I will carve out a little space for my quilting, sewing and scrapbook stuff, but I am sure there will be somewhere.

A bit of hospitality in the south

One of the truly shocking things we discovered when we moved to Florida was the lack of southern hospitality.  Well, the lack of anything southern at all in Florida.  From the beginning I teased that we didn't move to another state, we moved to another COUNTRY.  Florida seemed to have more northerners there than southerners.  I even learned to speak with a New York accent!

As we were traveling back to Richmond, me in the suburban that just turned 200,000 miles towing a 12 ft. Uhaul trailer and my husband in a 1996 Dodge Ram Diesel Truck towing our 40ft fifth wheel (16,000 lb of weight) we happened upon a bit of trouble. While prior to our departure we had some work done on the truck it seemed to be having some other troubles on the road.

It developed the "Death Wobble".

This is a real term and a very scary real thing.  Watch the front driver's side wheel.  It looks like a floppy fish.  When I saw my husband's wheel doing this it looked much floppier.  We pulled over on the next exit and we lucked out.  We didn't know where we were or if we would be able to get it fixed.

We pulled into a Walmart there (we were lucky there was one on the exit). I walked into the store and headed straight to the automotive section.  I hoped I would find someone there shopping who may look like they could help us find a mechanic who does front end work.  A Death Wobble occurs when there is any type of play in the suspension. I didn't find any shoppers but I did find out that they sold tires and had a shop right at Walmart.  I walked around to one of the open bay doors and called a mechanic over.  He told me that they don't do any front end work, just tires, rotations, and oil changes. Great.  I ask if he knows of anyone in town who does work on front ends.  At that time a lady came over who had a Walmart tag on but she wasn't dressed in mechanics clothes.  She asked if she could help.  I explained my situation and told her I didn't even know where I was.  She was so helpful.  She told me where I was, where the best place to get the work done was, the address of the shop, the phone number, and their hours.  She also told me we could keep the trailer in the parking lot, no problems.  She also told me where to find a hotel for the night.  Her name was Julia and if you ever happen to be in Walterboro, SC at the Walmart and see her, say hello!

I take all this information back out to my husband who is still looking under the front end for damage, something broken, etc.  Even though the shop we need to get to is closed, my husband calls anyway.  He gets an answering service who patches him into a mechanic.  The shop also works on commercial trucks so they are available 24/7 for road emergencies on commercial vehicles.  We are not their kind of emergency but they tell us to bring it in the next morning at 7:30 am.  They will have someone on it immediately for us.  We spend the night.  Everyone is friendly.

The next morning we take the truck over to the repair shop.  They immediately put it up on the rack and discover we have a bad steering suspension.  The part is 45 minutes away and will arrive by delivery driver at 1:30 pm.  They then say that they are trying to contact a brother of another mechanic to see if he can go get it and bring it to them earlier.  The brother can't do it but no problems we are stuck until 1:30.  I leave but my husband and son stay behind with the truck and trailer.  I had to get to our destination to meet the realtor and get the keys to our new place.

Once the truck part was put on the truck they did a test drive but that didn't solve the problem.  They found another issue and solved it but this put them possibly not leaving that evening.  The mechanic who had been working with my husband invited him to his home for dinner that evening.  How nice was that!  Southern hospitality at its best.  My husband and son considered it but felt they needed to get back on the road and put some miles under them that evening.  They were still 8+ hours away from us girls who went ahead.

At one point during this ordeal, my husband said to me, "We are back in the south and it feels so good to be here."

I don't quite know where to start...

We've moved. Finally.  It all came down to (and  I am summarizing big time here) just packing it up, throwing it in a box and putting it all in storage.  It took us three full days of stress, pressure, and urgency to get it all done.  I am not sure we had anyone who didn't cry at some time during this frustrating time.  The frustration mainly was on the part of emotion competing with the need to just get it done.

We now sit at our river home (our 40 ft 5th wheel) with my husband going back and forth an hour and a half away.  He is staying with family and working until he sells his business. The kids and I plan to have a great summer here fishing, swimming, and crabbing. My husband will spend his days off here with us and then go back during the week and spend it there working.

We are strong.  It will work.

And now for something completely different....

Wasn't that the "headline" for a tv variety show or something many, many years ago???

Today we spent our morning with our school work and mid-day while the kids were finishing up some lessons, I packed a few boxes to take to storage.  This afternoon we ALL needed a bit of something completely different.

We piled in the car and went to a local park down by the river.

We headed into the woods on a path and took a nature walk.

The middle child decided to capture a few of her own photos.  She brought along her camera.

Her taking a photo of me taking a photo of her.

A cool centipede we saw on the trail.

Heading deep into the woods.

It is hard to see in this photo above but we recently had a flood.  You can see the dirt tinted leaves.  The river (this is just a stream you see) rose about 12 feet here.

Pretty butterfly we found.

The clan looking at the river.

A fun squirrel to watch.

Looking down the river.  So pretty  and peaceful today.

The green ferns and foliage was so pretty today.

We found and tasted honeysuckles.

Along the path near the boat ramp are scattered beautiful sculptures of the local wildlife.  This is part of a sculpture of egrets called "Family".

We SO needed a break from packing and the mess of the house.  We needed the fresh air and the long walk as a family.

Frustrated - because of RAIN!

Yesterday we had a bit of a yard sale.  We pulled out the stuff that we didn't want to pack and move with us.  Clothes, books, toys, Halloween costumes, linens, and lots of other stuff.  Because it was Friday and Friday isn't usually a yard sale day in our area we didn't expect much.  We did make $130.  We packed everything up and set it aside under a canopy.

There was a chance of rain.

It rained. Poured.

This morning the yard and driveway were soaked.  The canopy had water stuck in it.  The stuff underneath, okay not all the stuff, some of the stuff got wet, but most of it was pretty dry.  HOWEVER there would be no yard sale. It was just too wet outside.  So all the stuff came back inside and we gave up.

We did, though, dig up our Hostas in the front flower bed.  I wanted to get them divided.  They are enormous!  We got them dug out and I figured that I would wait a little while and then divide them when they dried out a bit.

About 3 hours later it poured down rain again.  No go on the dividing the Hostas either. UGH!

But, if the buyers of our house drove by today they would think that we were digging all the flower beds up.  LOL  If only they knew that we were actually helping them by dividing these big bad boys for them.  I do hope they love this house.

Six Boxes Down to Two Binders

Yes, you read that right!  I took six boxes worth of music CDs and fit them all into two binders set up for storing CDs.

How did I do it?  Simple, I allowed myself to get rid of the plastic cases and toss the paper covers and lyrics.  It took a bit of a hard swallow to do that.  I mean I like looking at Sting when I search for his covers and I like the ease of having the lyrics right there if I want to sing along and don't know the words.  However, in our techo age we can Google the lyrics to the songs and bring them up on our phones, ipods, and laptops.  I no longer need the paper version.

So we bought these Case Logic CD storage binders and started putting our CDs in them.  We had over 350 CDs and we didn't weed out a single one.  We have over 100 Christmas music CDs!  Wow!  That is a LOT of Christmas music.

I love that they have a zipper that closes all the way around the binder.  That way CDs won't fall out when we are traveling or moving it from one place to another.

We had 6 boxes full of these music CDs and were able to get every single CD into two of these awesome cases.

By the way, we did this about two years ago with our movie DVDs and loved that we could take our movies everywhere with us easily.

Now with three of these binders we have all our movies and our music CDs with us where ever we go.  Perfect for traveling and in our RV.  Now how cool is THAT!

Preparing to Move - Mom Style

Ba ha ha ha ha...

This moving stuff is for the birds!

We have 13 years of "baggage" here in this house and let me tell you, it is seeping out of the walls it seems.  Moving for us is inevitable.  Our plan is to put everything in storage and move to our summer/weekend home for the summer and possibly into the fall.  Until the house is actually sold (we have a contract on it but no settlement date yet) we will keep furniture here and some basic items.  There will be times we will be back here and spending the night or two.  Other than that our plan is to get all the rest of the stuff packed and out.

I posted a couple weeks ago that I was unmotivated.  I am motivated now and looking at all our STUFF is overwhelming.  Most of the time I just say "pitch it".

To date we have had three yard sales each earning us a bit over $300. The most recent one we made $450! We have also sold another $200 on Craigslist. But we still have a ways to go.  We have another room full of stuff for another yard sale which will be in a couple weeks.  That will/should be our last one.

In packing my goal is to sort, group, and pack.  I want to sort out the stuff we don't want to keep/no longer need/can't use and put that in one pile.  Then I group all like objects together and pack them away in boxes.

We have collected all our plastic storage containers and are using them as much as we can.  They stack well and can be moved easily as most have handles.  The other boxes we get from the liquor store because they are sturdy but smallish so we can handle the size and weight easily.  The big boxes are easy to pack but get heavy quickly.

At this point my house looks like a bomb blew up the inside or like it was burglarized.

We have some accomplishments at this point.  
1.  The attic has been cleaned out.  It is all over my living room right now but there is nothing in the attic anymore.
2.  My husband and I have cleaned out our closet and sorted through our clothes.  We have gotten rid of 13 trash bags full of clothing. And YES we still have clothes to wear. And YES a lot of those bags were my clothes. LOL
3.  We have moved three loads of boxes and furniture into storage.
4.  We also have sorted through all our stuff already in storage and got rid of almost half of it to go to a yards sale or Goodwill. (That is amazing! To think we were storing stuff we could have gotten rid of a long time ago....)

Things I can't deal with right now:
1. my scrapbook stuff - I have a ton of it and I just can't go through it and sort and get rid of it.
2. a final sort of our homeschool supplies - again I just can't go through it and weed out stuff.  I just don't know what I will need because I am not planning next year yet other than basic subjects.

Our move out date is the end of May.  That is putting our stuff in storage and moving to our summer place.  The house and basic stuff will stay here in our house until it is sold.  But by the end of May we should be living more time at our summer place than here in town. (fingers crossed)

I am SO not Motivated

We straightened up our house for showings.  We have cleaned walls of fingerprints, wiped down numerous counters and sinks, swept, vacuumed, and mopped floors.  We have made beds and picked up piles of junk.  But I am so NOT motivated to start getting more things packed.  I look at my craft area in particular and all the unfinished projects and say "I can do that in 10 minutes." or "I am going to sit down and do this instead of packing it up".  Ugh!!!  The packing is not getting done.

How do you motivate yourself to pack?

I need to sort, organize, separate stuff we need to keep from stuff we can yardsale or give away (or toss).  I need to begin to tackle this soon.  We have had some real interest in our house recently so I know we will be getting offers in soon.  This means that we WILL be moving.  At this point we will be moving into our trailer for the summer.  We will put all our stuff in boxes and in storage until we make the big, more permanent move.  UGH! It just all seems too overwhelming right now.

I also have a cold and that may be some reason to my "whining".  I don't know.  I really need to tackle something.

We May Have a Buyer/Renter

I hate to even post this because I don't want to jinx myself.  You all know we have wanted to sell our house for a long time.  So I won't go into the background story again.

A month ago we buried a St. Joseph medal in our yard.  He will help us sell our home.  That very same day we ran into an old friend of ours and found out that he and his wife are divorcing.  So sad. (Yes, I am going into the back story, sorry)  He said he was looking for a new home for he and his boys.  He will most likely have custody of them.  We mentioned our home to him and he said he would get back to us.  Three weeks later he called and came over and said he was interested in our house.  He toured through the whole house and I think the house "showed" well.  He liked it and as he was leaving he said he was going on vacation with his boys this past week and he would call us when he got back.  We are now waiting on that phone call.  He also asked how quickly we could move out.  We told him we could move out any time.  He said he wanted to get moved in and settled before his boys start school.  That is in only two weeks now. ACK!!!

So this prepared mom is beginning to panic a bit.  I don't want to pack up any more of our house to prepare for a move that may not happen.  I also don't want to be freaked out and be a freaky woman trying to move in three days time either. So what to do???

I am preparing for the move in my mind right now.  I am planning what I will need to pack and going through it all in my head.  We have a place to move to which will be fine temporarily but we will need no furniture as it is already furnished.  It is our summer home on a river close by.  We come down on weekends and such.  We will commute from the river house until we find something that we will either rent or buy in town.  So the lists begin.  The items we need for every day, extra cooking utensils and such, our school books, clothes, etc.  Not much really.  Everything else will go into storage for the time being.  EVERYTHING!

Visualizing helps me to prepare and plan.  I can walk through my house, pick up items I will want at our river house (the electric hand mixer) and list them on my list.  I can pack the house and visually place it in the storage unit.  I can visualize commuting an hour and half each way to work.  I feel better.  I am not a freaky woman running around throwing things into boxes and yelling at everyone. (well, that isn't unrealistic though)  I am calm, cool, and collected.

************************
I write this today as I sit at our river home looking out the window on a dreary day.  In my tiny oven  I am baking a cake for my daughter's birthday which was last week and we haven't been able to "celebrate" with cake.  I have to bake it in two shifts as the oven is too small to bake both layers at once.  The oven is funny because the back lets things rise better than the front so the cake is completely lopsided. LOL

I suppose the moral to this story is: even though your cake is lopsided and doesn't come out as you expect it to, it is still CAKE!  Have a great day everyone!

Decisions, decisions....

Wow what a difference 5 days makes!  I last posted that we had found a home that would work for us and that we had turned in our forms.  All that is still true.  However.....

We are not sure how we are going to sell our house.  We had a meeting with a realtor and she said that we would most likely have to bring money to the table when closing on our house for sale and that we couldn't ask for more than a really low amount and that would include: repainting a lot of the walls in our house and fixing the AC unit and repairing some other items as well.  We don't have the money to do all that right now. We also have a huge tax bill coming up in October that we have no money for and we have a few other bills that are smaller but still important.  Oh and did I tell you that we are planning for me to quit my job?  Uh yeah, we are.

So here is where we stand. We have a house we can't seem to get rid of and every time we turn around we have problems with it.  We have a couple major bills with huge amounts of money coming up on the horizon. We have three kids who will not be going back to school in the fall.  We have me who will be quitting her job which brings in over half of our monthly income into our house, not to mention that I also hold our health insurance and dental insurance.

What are we thinking?

First and foremost we are praying hard that everything will work out okay.  We have faith that God will provide for us our needs.

Secondly, we are thinking that if I stay home then I can not only work to manage our money a bit better than we do now, but I can also help my husband in his business and help to get it further than it is now.  With the stability that I can provide at home, we will feel less chaotic and less like we are up against a wall and being defeated with everything we attempt to do.

Does that make sense?  yeah, I know it doesn't but in some way to us it does.  So that is the plan.  For those panicked about health insurance, we are COBRAing my plan for a bit until we can get on another plan that will work for us.

What if it doesn't work out?  Well, I can always pick up another job, I have lots of irons in the fire now for a little bit of money trickling in here and there anyway.

If you are a praying person please pray for us that we may be able to take this leap of faith successfully and reap the benefits.  Thank you.

Still Moving in the Right Direction

Yes, we are still in the process of selling our home and moving.  We have a few new accomplishments I thought I would tell you about. 

1.  We think we may have found a new (to us) home.  It has three bedrooms a big dining room, a living room and a teeny kitchen, a big back porch (three season) and 5 acres of land.  It is still in our county but it is zoned agricultural so we can have chickens, farm animals, a huge garden, and a vegetable stand.

2.  We officially turned in our forms for homeschooling in our county.  We are committed.  So committed I will have some new changes to the plan for you in a week or so.

We have been praying about this change in our life for a while and asking for God to show us signs.  We have been receiving signs every single time we ask.  It has been an amazing experience.  I am so thankful that our God listens to us and moves us in the direction that we are meant to go.

If you are a loyal follower/reader of my little blog here I hope to have many new things happening here in the next month or two.  I hope that you will stick with me as I further prepare myself for all things MOM and all things FAMILY.

In a mess of Chaos, fruits of our labors

Since we have decided to sell our home we have started telling people that we are selling.  We hope to find a buyer without a realtor and that way we and the buyer can save money in the process. We are praying for a simple sale.  But nothing comes simple.  We have learned that the hard way, on many occasions.

We have told our parents our plans.  They initially took the news well and didn't say anything in comment about our decisions.  HOWEVER, we have now started to get the side comments, suggestions, etc from them that tells us that they don't approve or accept our decisions.  It will pass.

This is a huge leap for us.  We have always followed the socially acceptable path and we have always done what is "responsibly" right.  We drop everything to help others, we keep a two income household.  We moved to the largest home we could buy at the time.  We have always sought the approval of our parents and if they didn't approve then we reconsidered our decisions, most often choosing to accept the path that they approved of.

This time it is a leap of faith.  A BIG LEAP.  A calculated leap but there is a bit of unknown in there that we need to rely on God to provide for us.  He will, I know it, because he is calling us to do this.  In the end I know we will be happier, more financially stable, and our kids will benefit from it too.  But it is still scary.

On to the chaos:  At this point in time, we are decluttering our home and preparing it for sale.  We have extra furnature that we need to do something with.  We have junk we need to get rid of and we have things that we need to pack away. So our house looks like it threw up its contents inside and we have a ton of liquor store boxes that line the walls, some ready to be packed and some already packed and ready to store.  Thankfully we have a place rent-free to store our things until our home sells.  Our goal is to have the house ready to go on the market in two weeks.  But right now we are living in chaos.  Not one room is ready to go.  Not one room is complete and packed.  Not one room doesn't look like a bomb hit it.  We are stepping over boxes, around boxes and it can be unnerving.

We have our goals but there are times it seems that I am the only one who is paying attention to them.  The bigger frustration is that for 7 hours a day I sit at work thinking about all the things I could be doing at home.  Oh the frustration!

On a good note, our garden is doing well this season and we are beginning to reap the fruits of our labors.  We harvested 5 zucchini yesterday and will be eating them this weekend.  There are many more that will be ready for harvest in the next week.  I am ready to plant another round of zucchini as well and just finished pulling up all the broccoli, cauliflower and lettuce that bolted this past week.  We have green tomatoes forming on our tomato plants and have a mess of spinach to harvest and freeze or eat.  It is so nice to see that my labor and hard work there is paying off.  This will help our grocery budget this month.  An unfortunate thing though is that all the fruit off our peach trees and apple trees are gone again.  We think the squirrels are eating them.  My middle child is beyond furious.  She was so ready for peaches from her own peach trees this year.