what's up weekly. (celebrating two weeks' worth of news, and a house update!)

Okay, well, whoopsie daisy.  I never got back around to blogging again last week, and I left you hanging, so I owe you two posts in one today.  I will do my best to deliver.

So let's back up - we have had a LOT to celebrate over the last couple weeks, so let's make "Celebrate" the official word of this post, shall we?  When I left off last time, Ophelia just had two teeth, so let's start there.  She has popped through two more!  Her top two little chompers.  And good gravy is she cute (and much happier now that they're through.)  She has also moved to her own room overnight and we are both getting more sleep.  Let's celebrate!

Ophelia has been sleeping in the room where Juni was, and Juni has moved to the bedroom with the big girls.  Everyone is growing up so fast!

We celebrated Father's Day with our very, very favorite father on the planet.  The kids had all cooked up gift ideas, and Penelope and Laurelai literally cooked up Dutch spice cookies for him.  He opened presents, and we had popcorn party for dinner while we watched Courageous.

Look at all the lucky kids who get to call him Dad.  They are privileged.

"Hape Fothrs Day i Love Yuo Dad love Rocco"

The deep freeze came unplugged somehow (let's not celebrate that), but I didn't lose anything (let's definitely celebrate that).  I had already started a pressure canning project, so I just expanded the work to include what was in the freezer that needed to get processed to be saved from spoilage.  I ended up making 21 quarts of broth, 5 quarts of cooked chicken, and 12 pints of canned strawberries.  Let's celebrate!

The "Sold" sign finally went up in our yard, which just makes it feel all the more official. Yay! (Although, it's really starting to hit some of the kids that we're moving and they are having a hard time.  Callista is particularly sad about leaving our house - it is the only house she's ever known.  I don't blame her for being sad - a lot of great memories have been made here.  Ophelia was literally born here.  There are lots of feelings swirling.)

Look how terrible our grass looks.  Between the heat and the moles, and the fact that I really can't get grass to grow where the tree used to be, our yard is looking sad.  Luckily, all our neighbors still have worse yards than us, so if you can believe it, this is still the best lawn on the block.

DeeVee got a new home.  I think he's celebrating.  We were a little sad to see him go, but we took him to an Amish friend's farm and he was put in with quite the harem of hens.  I imagine he has not given us a second thought.

CALLISTA TURNED FIVE!  

This girl is sugar and spice and everything nice.  She is smart and sassy.  She runs HOT.  She loves playing with her dollhouse and putting on 'shows' for me where she just basically makes up a storyline with multiple characters, and songs, and debacles, and acts it out for as long as she can before I need to go do something else.  She has so much imagination.  She loves intensely - Ophelia and the chickens will never have to wonder how she feels about them.  As soon as she gets up in the morning, she is out searching for Ophelia, and she loves to smother her in kisses and doesn't like to wander far from her for the first stretch of the day.

She is a fantastic eater, a deep sleeper, and is learning quickly how to sit still and quiet at church.  (Spoiler: it's because we bribe her.)  She is heat and light and beauty and I just love her to bits and bits.  Callista Janelle, we would be lost without you!

My parents came down Saturday afternoon to celebrate her birthday with us.  She loved being the center of attention - not in an annoying or selfish way, just in a way that let you know that she felt very loved by everyone showering their affection on her the way that she so naturally showers her own affection on others every day.  I'm so glad she had such a special day.

I have about seventy million photos of her with her cupcakes, and I can't get rid of any of them because her face is SO JOYFUL in all of them.  She was so sweet and so happy!

The rest of this week was filled with playtime for the kids.  With the move, my plans to keep a modicum of school going throughout the weeks has been almost completely chucked - the big kids still have to read for an hour a day, but that is all we're doing at the moment.  The boys have been working hard on their stop motion movies, and they ordered a mixed lot of classic G.I. Joes off of ebay with their allowance money, and have been having a blast setting up scenes and planning storylines.

The girls have had a fun week too.  Callista got a tea set for her birthday, so many cookies have been baked and cups of sugar water poured.  They have started a club called "Teacups and Tiaras," where they drink tea and wear crowns.  It's basically The Finer Things Club, without having to invite Toby.

One other random, weird thing to celebrate is that all the kids seem to have caught and recovered from chicken pox!  It was extremely mild for most of them.  I thought it was poison ivy or something for like a week before I finally put two and two together.  Ophelia didn't catch it, and most of the rest of them only had a couple spots.  Callista and Penelope had bouts of feeling under the weather.  I weirdly caught it again, even though I had it as a child, but it wasn't bad.  It was itchy like chicken pox, but only showed up on one side of my body and has made a couple of my joints flare up, which seems more like shingles.  But either way, it really has been no biggie.  We're all through it now and feeling fine.  And now the kids are immune, without ever having to get them the shot.  Win/win.

This beautiful, talented girl is MINE! How did I get so lucky?

And other than that, I have been mostly spending the week packing and running back and forth to Schnucks for more empty boxes because WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!  That is cause for a huge celebration!

Shortly after I blogged last time, we had come to the decision to put in an offer on a house we'd been eyeing for a while.  It had been on the market for months because it needed a lot of important (expensive) updates, both structural and aesthetic, but the bones of the house were good and it was in a nice neighborhood.  Since nothing better had come up, we finally decided to risk it and offer really low to see if we could get it for a price that would allow us to make all the changes it needed.  It didn't feel like "The House," but it was honestly the best one out there.

And then literally the next morning, barely twelve hours after we put our offer in and while we were waiting to hear back, "The House" - the perfect-for-us house - did come on the market.  And while it's old, which we love, it doesn't need work. Which we also love.  So, long story short, the first house came back with a counteroffer that was WAY too high, so we were free to pursue the second house.  Our realtor FaceTimed me as she walked through it, and then we put in an offer.  With the way the market is right now, it wasn't going to be available long, so we just jumped on it (and by the next day, they had another offer, so we know we wouldn't have gotten it if we'd waited).

I'll show you pictures once we own it.  It feels weird posting someone else's house, you know?  But here are the details: it is pink (for now), so we call it The Pink Palace.  It is 120 years old, with a big wraparound porch and a huge attic up some stairs off of one of the bedrooms, which will be a perfect place for the kids to go wild.  It has a screen porch off the back of the kitchen.  It's on a very large lot, and even has an old carriage house where the kids will be able to keep bikes.  (Right now, they don't have bikes because we have nowhere to keep them, and the ones they had just rusted out in the yard.  They are SO excited for bikes!)  While it's not as grand as our Story City house was, it definitely has the same feel (and even much of the same floorplan), so we know we will love it.

We're headed to Leavenworth soon to be there for the inspection, so we can see the house in person and I can start planning where I want everything to go when it comes off the moving truck.

We close August 1 - exactly one month from today.  So I anticipate the next few weeks will be a crazy whirlwind, but now that we know where we will be living, I feel so much more excited.  I was feeling mostly sad before, so this has really helped me start anticipating this transition with joy.

So, WHEW!  THERE IT IS!  I am all caught up on updates!  I never thought it would happen, but it's true that you really can reach your dreams with a little bit of grit and perseverance.