Money troubles

How is it that I can plan everything down on paper so well? But in reality I also end up making a mess. Richard got his first real paycheck last week, I knew what had to be paid, knew how much overage there was.

I had already planned on taking the children to Birmingham for some fun time. Which included Build A Bear, Godiva for me, Chick fil-A for lunch, and that at another location Barnes and Nobel, Franklin Covey-for me, and looking around Pottery Barn Kids and The Apple store. So I took out the set amount and spent all of it and a little over not to bad, I wasn't concerned.

The next day I went about paying the bills that needed to be paid, yes I know I should have paid them first. Anyway we went to town to Walmart, to get some things for school, paint for the dining room and groceries. Here again lies a problem, I spent too much on school stuff that could have waited till the end of the month, and I have since learned that Alabama will be having tax free school days this year, so school stuff really could have and probably should have been put back. I had been in the store for over 2 hours, I know everything in my Walmart-there is no reason to spend that much time in there unless I am getting two carts full of food.

Then we wake to Wed, and finally catch Richard on line, guess what, he let's me know that he took out money a lot more money then I remember ever talking about, so much money in fact that I shouldn't have gone to Birmingham. Ugggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg how many g's can I put there?

So now I sit here with no money for the next 10 days, had to borrow Matthew's birthday money to put gas in the van and I feel like a fool. I love my husband very much, but why does it always seem that when ever I try to treat myself to something nice, anything nice it blows up in my face and I feel guilty for doing it?

I was going to go to a spa that is in a really nice hotel at the end of the month, get a message, a facial and just have a dat to myself, let grandma and papa have the children. But I can see now that I won't be doing that this month or any month.

I am just going to pay the bills, get groceries, and what school stuff I need, and make sure that there is always money there for Richard should he need it.

Our school year and what we are doing/using.

I can't wait to start. Our box can't get here fast enough.

So for this school year we are going to be doing:
Sonlight Core 5-which is a study of the Eastern Hemisphere,
Saxon math on four different levels,
Singapore EarlyBird,
HWT,
Sequential Spelling,
Sonlight LA 5,
Sonlight LA K,
Sonlight Science K,
Apologia Astronomy,
Rosetta Stone French,
Piano-using books that I already have here at home,
P.E. they will do Soccer, Basketball, 4H Archery and possibly Baseball in the Spring. This is the last year that Thomas can do any sports with our community as they only allow them to particapate until age 12 . Because most of the schools are so small that is around 7th grade so they let them play on the high school teams. We can do 4H Archery until they are all 19 I believe.
Bible will be memory verses and AWANA activities.
Art is about the only thing that I don't have, but we might add that in later in the year.
Typing
I also have Sonlight 3/4, and Before Five in a Row for Caleb & Rachel. They will also do Fantastic Frogs for Math, and lots of fun activities to keep them both busy and out of trouble.

We are going to start tomorrow with our Math, HWT, French, Typing, Piano and Spelling. Then next week we will add in most of the rest, I have to wait for the Science book as Mary has it and I still need to order the LA, but I will have all the books.

Core 5 is a very full Core and there is a lot of work to be done, I am already looking at taking at least 10-15 extra weeks to complete this one. We will work until the last Friday in July, I already have most of our holidays marked on the calendar, which of course are always subject to change.

This year with Richard leaving we did take a summer break and it has been chaos. They need to know what is going to happen everyday or they all get into trouble. So we are getting back into our full year schedule.

Praying for a wonderfully productive year.

Been kind of quiet here.

The children have been sick since we came back from our trip, Rachel had a double ear infection that required two rounds of antibiotics. Aric & Matthew had this sinus thing in their eyes so bad that their eyes would literally run like your nose, it was the strangest thing I think I've ever seen. Thomas, Noah, Matthew and Caleb all also had to take a round of antibiotics. Every time I think that they are better, Rachel seems to get a low grade fever for a day or two, she did this on Wed & Thur but seems totally fine today.

We've gotten the couch moved finally, boy was that an adventure. I had to move the refrigerator in order to make the doorway of this bedroom. I still have to finish painting this room, I am not looking forward to using the oil based primer again but it is needed since there is wall paper glue everywhere and it is very hard to get off, and latex primer will end up with ugly results and have to be repainted.

Thomas helped me pick out the color for the dining room, it is called antique peach and I think it is a Dutch Boy paint, which is a brand that I have not used before so I am hoping for good results.

Thomas & Aric are going to be moving into my old bedroom with Rachel. I am going to give our queen set to Mary and her girls, the bed is only 3 years old and really nothing wrong with it other than Richard and I don't like it. So for a little while the boys will use it, then I will set up the last set of bunk beds in there for the them, and Rachel will use her crib/toddler bed.

I am going to decorate the room for her, but not in a way that the boys won't mind sharing the room. I found some really cute drapes at Pottery Barn Kids, they are a green with white dots and match the back of her quilts, which are also PBK. I love PBK stuff I just wish that is wasn't so expensive, but we do live 2 hours from an outlet so that helps, A LOT!! We did see a really cool rug at Target that I might get, but might not with these drapes we shall see.

I finally have almost everything out of the storage stall in town, still need to sort through all of it. A tiny part of me says to just toss it all on the burn pile and call it a day, but then I feel that I need to go through all of it to see what is there. Stuff that takes up space, that I probably don't need, can't use or wouldn't now anyway.

So this week we are going to finish with the the new living room, I still have a ton of stuff in here but we are going to take it all out to the barn building. Speaking of barns, this fall I plan on going through all the stuff that is up in the barn loft-which should be fun as our barn is old and sometimes when you are up there I really feel like the building is moving ever so slightly. But it needs to be done as I truly have no idea what we have out there. Which is so sad, that we have so much stuff that I don't know what I have.

Finally have an address for Richard, yeah!!! Now we can start sending him boxes, letters and fun stuff. I also found out that I can mail a footlocker to him with a pad lock, it can't weigh more than 70lbs, which I think that right now it might, so we will probably have to unpack it again to lighten it up some.

So that is what I've been up to, trying to get everyone on the mend. Have a great day.

I've begun some of the remodeling.

I am slowly working on getting our house fixed up, it was supposed to be just for us, but now it might be so that we can sell.

I am working on moving the living room into our smallest bedroom and making this my bedroom too. The two oldest boys & Rachel will stay in my old room, and the others will stay in the room that they've been in.

We took the side rail off of Rachel's crib so that she'd have a big girl bed yesterday and she thought that was just the coolest thing. She did wake up during the night a couple of times, got in bed with me at one point and then I found her on the floor this morning.

So today we go into our new living room, where we've already moved the TV to, but the boys have decided that they still need watch movies on the little TV. But I guess I don't mind too much since Rachel loves to watch Toy Story 2 every day.

My house I'm sure that I've mentioned it before has wood walls, not over anything either. Just tongue and groove pine. Why the couple that we bought the house from felt they needed to wall paper everything, the ceilings included, I will just never understand.
While we were in the new living room yesterday, moving stuff around so that we can get the couch in there and get it all set up I decided that I was going to take the wallpaper down and just go ahead and paint this room. The other thing this gentleman did was take drywall mud and filled in the grooves in all of the other rooms except this one, so once the paper was done it didn't really look that bad. But I really want a room in my house that looks fresh and clean, well now it does or at least the one corner from window to window does.

Now all we need to do is actually figure out how we are going to move this sofa sleeper couch. I have a very tight space in the entry of the kitchen, because my fridge and upright deep freezer make a cube, so we are going to try taking the couch and standing it up on end and sliding it that way into the room. Praying that this works. I will say that this new couch, is lighter than the other one that Mom & Dad gave us.

The fun things yet to do are:
trying the mattress that is in this couch and how comfortable it is
deciding if I'm going to take my comforter and pillows back & forth every night
getting a small area rug for the living room for the children to be able to lay on
putting up mini blinds and curtains to help keep the room cooler
adding more shelving that runs the length of the room to make better use of storage-I've seen this many times at IKEA
the biggest thing I think will be how well Rachel does with me not being in the room with her, she won't be alone yet but it's not Mama.

Tomorrow we are finally going into town to get a new roller, paint thinner, some different paint chips to look at and see what I like and don't. As much as we need the rain I am hoping that the sun will be out at least for a little while, while it is on that side of the house so that I can see what the room looks like, because as much as it does look nice I am not really sure that I like it. But is temporary until I get in there tear out the walls.

a brain storm

So I am sitting here trying to gain as much information about the great state of Texas.

Yes, while we were out there we really liked it, a lot. Liked it to the point that we are now talking about moving out there once Richard gets home next year. I do have my work cut out for me as the Dallas/Ft Worth area is huge.

The weather was wonderful, yes it was hot but for this Floridian it was a different hot, I personally enjoyed it, but not the hot in OK it was terrible. The heat here in AL is bearable but somewhat like FL hot, I guess there is a lot more humidity here. I am thinking that maybe we weren't really outside in the heat and that is why it didn't seem all that bad. Maybe I need to run out there in the next couple of weeks to see what it's like now or next month.

So my point here is today I thought about the idea of buying a pop up camper, I think that it would be a good size for us to start with. It would probably be cheaper to buy a camper, live in camp grounds while looking for a new home.

I began my search on line for pop ups and what they cost and sleeping space and well they aren't as expensive as I thought they'd be. I might even go down to the dealer ship I called and look at one or two. My biggest concern is towing weight-and how much stuff we'd be able to take with us.

I have already found one camp ground that is right in one of the areas where we were, not necessarily where I'd want to live but it would make I think a good base camp.

it is time to really downsize and only keep the really important stuff. I am talking down to the prairie schooner full and that is it. Prairie schooners were only like 4X12 and that was all the space that they had to take everything that they needed and that mattered out West. I have always said that as a high school project the boys would build one that works, and hey if we really get into reenacting then we could take it with us and set it up or something, I am sure that there we wagons with the troops just wouldn't use the hoops/rings to put the top on. But anyway I am totally getting ahead of myself.

I really need to get back out to TX so that we can figure out which areas would be the best for us, the biggest being what Richard does for work. If he's going back to OTR and is able to get back on the account he was on, the we have a certain distance that he can be from he place of work so that he's able to come home on his weekends. Not sure how it would work if he's on a different account and all but we will figure all of that out as time goes by.

The best part of this whole thing is that along with schooling the children, trying to keep a tidy home, and the homestead which at this point is a bust-I am down to one lonely chicken which I still need to run over to Mom's, plus church and anything else extra that I decide to add in. I now have a project that will take a lot of time and gives me a goal to look forward too. Which God willing will help to make the days go by that much faster.