7 Quick Takes! A Recap of Life in the Tiny House This Week! Tears Over Ice Cream, The Couch Ate It, And The Surprise Gift Reveal!

 Hi! How was your week?

Ours was good, interesting and different. How's that for an answer?
 

1. Happy January!

 Most of us rang in the New Year sick.(Dustin and I have avoided it thus far.)

 Alex was healthy and took an invitation to stay with friends and ran for his life to get away from us. Can't say I blame him. No one wants this bug that is going around. Jokes on him though,  he came down with is a few days later.

I don't have a lot of pictures from this week. Except for this...

 
Poor Addison. She got my hair. Addison, Anna and myself included are doomed to have their hair look like this from now until March. 


2. Girls Night

I have one cousin by marriage and an ex co-worker that I am close with. LOL It sounds funny when I describe them that way.

 They are a couple of my longest friends and we have been through a lot together. Kara, Julie and I have spent a lot of years, laughter and tears together. Prayed each other through trials, help with a couple of each others weddings, held and gushed over our babies together.

 We try to get together a few times a year. It has gotten so hard to get together with life, family and literal miles. So we started doing sleep overs a few years ago. It gives us more time to truly share and chat after the kids all fall asleep.

 It is extra special when we get together this year. We have a new member to our group. Remember that little baby I asked everyone to pray for a while back. Well here he is... Kara and I fought over him, because he is the last addition to our group. We have ten kiddos between us (4 boys and 6 girls) and baby Owen seems like the perfect one to round things out. 

 



P.S. Kara, he obviously, still loves me more. ;)


 

It also snowed while we were there. It was beautiful..the drive home was not.


3. Forget the dog, the COUCH ate it!

 As much as I have loved our furniture. It was our first matching set and we paid cash for it, brand new. Plus it was made in the U.S.A. It has been through a lot in the last few years, and is slowly starting to show the affects of 4 kids.

We have a Roku and got rid of our cable a while ago. The only issue with the Roku is the remote. It is small and sleek. Something I am sure the designers found appealing. Not so much to a large family with a toddler that likes to hide things. It gets lost ALL THE TIME!

 It went missing Christmas night. I did a major organize and purge on the house the two days following Christmas. It was gone. I searched everywhere short of the trash, because it had already been picked up. We even looked into buying a replacement remote. They aren't cheap people!

 Finally, I did something I had been threatening to do for a year. I flipped the couches over and slit the bottom! I have to say, they weren't as scary inside there as I had feared. Just some napkins and random trash and toys....and this stuff!



 The cable remote that we had to order a replacement for, the TV remote that had been missing for I don't know how long, part of one of our spelling curriculums, a rather expensive flashlight that Dustin had replaced months ago, scissors, and the Roku remote.
 I now wish I had cut the bottoms out of the couches sooner. The plan is to hopefully replace the furniture in there this year. We have one small couch from Home Reserve. We love it for all it is and also what the company stands for. Seriously, go over there and check it out.


4.  Let's move!
  
  Some friends of ours moved back to the area over the weekend. This was their third move in four years and they always seem to move over Christmas week, when it is freezing and usually right after a snow storm. It was cold people...freeze the balls off a brass monkey, kind of cold. (It's a historical term, look it up!) Also known as perfect major construction weather! It is nice to have our friends within a 20 minutes drive now. Compared to an hour before.

 The cool part is the fact that they are renovating a really old house like we did here with our little old house. Her husband has been kind enough to post pictures of the progress. Dustin and I have loved watching the work progress, from the comfort of our almost finished house. I wouldn't take back all the work we put into this place, but I wouldn't want to do it again anytime soon. So we shall live vicariously through them. 

I took a peek around while I was there. They have a lot of work to do on it, but it is one amazing old house! There are fireplaces, and original built ins in all of the downstairs. I can't wait to see what they do with this house! There is something about an old house that's about to be brought back to life that makes me so excited and happy.
 
*I have to say that my friend looked around while I was there the other day and I saw the same look on her face that I had a few times. It was the "What have we gotten ourselves into?!" look. Ah, yes. I know that look well!* It will all be ok though. These old houses are always worth it!
 
5. The broken cat.
 Have you ever seen the videos of the cat that freak our over the cucumbers? They are quite entertaining! While as the girls night mentioned above we were discussing these videos. Kara has a cat now. It took thirty seconds of video and two seconds of us looking around between the three of us and we sprang into action to find the cat and a cucumber. 
After about forty-five minutes(off and on) of us trying to surprise the cat with the cucumber we decided she must be a defective kitty cat, or the fact that she lives in a house with a lot of kids has desensitized her to basically everything. 
Since our cat cucumber video didn't pan out, here is a generic one from youtube..from people with cats that are not broken.

  


6. Ice cream and tears

I think we all can collectively agree that toddlers are confusing. Especially when they are sick. 
On the third day of Anna being sick, her fever spiked up(after being down for most of the day), she was lethargic, her breathing was super heavy, she hadn't been eating or drinking and I was afraid she was getting dehydrated. The doctor squeezed her in for a check.
She was not dehydrated, at least not enough to be too concerned. She tested negative for flu and strep. It was just a really nasty virus. They ended up giving her an oral dose of prednisone in the office. Then sent her home with breathing treatments and instructions to get any and all foods and fluid in here that she would take. 

She went out to play in the snow

 for five minutes.

Later that evening she asked for ice cream. We get her a scoop, present it to her and she fell into a puddle in tears. Because apparently it was all wrong. This is how all of Anna's meals went for the next few days. She would beg for a food item. I would give it to her. She would cry or throw it on the floor and stomp on it..and ask for it again. 

Where I spent most of my week.

This was all likely due to the side effects of the pred and the fact that she had a sore throat. But it still made life rather different...as I have been typing this she keeps coming to the computer, grabbing my face in her hands and asking for a pickle.

 The younger two both ended up with ear infections before the week was out. Thankfully they are both on the mend. The older two caught it a little after the younger two. Emma is holding her own and heading out the other side of it now. Alex is 12 and part fully grown man now..so I am working on his funeral arrangements as we speak. The man flu is strong with that one. 
 
7. The gift reveal!

Remember last week when I told you about the surprise gift that Dustin said was coming? Well, it got stuck in transit due to a snow storm. It finally arrived almost a week late. 
He kept giving me hints and even told me the price and weight of it. I really had no clue what it was. He even told the kids.
Then the package arrived. He told me not to get the mail that day. Well, they delivered it to the house, instead of the box and I saw the box. it was from one of my favorite stores. Christian Book Distributors.
He made me wait all day to open it. He came home, took a shower, ate dinner and then opened it. He hid in our room with it forever. 
When he finally came downstairs, he presented me with a Henry Morris study bible! He got us both matching bibles with our names printed on the fronts. He even wrote a message to me in the front. 
I cried a tiny bit. It is amazing! He might just be a keeper. <3
We have been reading through our bibles together for the last year...we like to sip coffee, read and then share what we learned together. It is one of my favorite parts of the week.
 

 Well, that pretty much sums up our week in a nutshell. I told you it was good, interesting and different. :) That tends to be how we do life around here.
Well, I need to go and make a menu, and grocery list. I found a way to order most of our household and grocery items online. (If it goes well, I will share it in a video or post for you.) I am picking up one of the orders and making a run into Aldi tonight. If I plan it right, I will be going all by myself! Yay!

Happy Friday!

  ~Lyndsay

7 Quick Takes! A Recap of Life in the Tiny House This Week! Our First Debt Free Christmas, Santa's Elves Argue Sometimes, and Deep Fry ALL THE MEATS!

This is the last 7 quick takes of 2017! 

This year went fast. It has been one heck of a good year for us all here in our tiny corner of the world. 
As we round out the year I will be making a post to recap our year. 

For today, let's talk about Christmas and a few things going on around here.

 

1. Our first debt free Christmas!!

 No, that does not mean this is the first year we didn't pay for Christmas with credit cards.

It is our first Christmas being 100% debt free! Yes, the house too. 

Let me tell you, for those of you in the thick of your baby steps...keep going! It gets better!

I have had more joy and excitement this Christmas than I can remember in a decade of years past. I know it is in part because I am better, but the major factor was the debt. The Christmas ham tastes a little different on this side of the baby steps. Seriously.
2018 is about to begin. If you haven't made a budget and climbed on the Dave Ramsey wagon yet, this is the perfect time. Start your year right!



2. Santa Came! (I heard the elves arguing)



  I have been wanting to kill the Santa thing for a few years now. We have been cutting back on what Santa brings and we only currently have one 'believer', but it is so hard to do that to this kid. She is very passionate about her love of Santa. So, Santa can stay, a little longer. Especially since he seriously delivered this year. We had told the girls that there was no way we could fit a barbie doll house, in this house. Especially the last few years because, it was under construction. I didn't think it would ever fit either. However, I scoured the internet and found two that would fit! Success! 


  I had totally prepared the kids for it not to happen. Let the air out of their balloon multiple times about it. All while sitting in the hallway for ten minutes at a time measuring and remeasuring to make sure it would fit! I did some serious praying for this darn doll house. (When you live small, every item you own is a commitment!) I also had to convince the husband. I showed him pictures, discussed the dimensions and talked at length to him about it. He agreed.


  Fast forward to Christmas Eve, after he had already put the house together. We bring it into the living room and set everything up. This is when Dustin decides to start questioning the decision to have a doll house. We might have had a mini argument about the house. He swore up and down that it wasn't going to fit in the spot I had chosen. I explained to him that I had spent over an hour in the hallway making sure it would fit. He still told me there was no way. I was starting to doubt it as well at this point. 

 This all resulted in both of us crouched outside the girls room, with a tape measure, at midnight, on Christmas Eve, hissing under our breath at each other, measuring the wall...for the fifty thousandth time!

Until he finally agreed that it would 'Just barely' fit.

It definitely fit, with 1.5 inches to spare. Our tiny house has a barbie house in it! 
**Addison said Mrs Claus must have built the house, because it was so pretty!**


3. Deep fry all the meats!!

I'm pretty sure I mentioned Dustin's new hobby, his outdoor cooker. This guy takes deep frying meats very seriously. 
On Christmas Eve he deep fried a rib-eye roast. I really wasn't so sure about that, but it turned out amazing!
On Christmas he deep fried a spiral honey ham. People, this is probably heaven sent. It tasted like ham wrapped in bacon and melted into one. Perfection. 

 

 
4. Christmas randoms
 Now you get a bunch of random pics of us on Christmas. Because you know you want to see it. :)






 

Christmas with our friend MA.

5. Spend all the money! Wait, maybe not...


 A certain Grandma went BIG this year and gave each of the kids $50 cash, instead of their usual $25. The kids were blown away. So, SO excited! We went to town to blow their cash this week. Apparently some of the 'Spend, Save, Gift' that we have been pouring into them has been sticking. Each of them ended up putting some away, spending some and then they pulled together and purchased some clothes for a little girl in need.

So proud of these kiddos!

6. Ok, Christmas is over. Time to purge all the stuff!

 I am a minimalist at heart. 

 Our small house may not always look minimal. There are a lot of people in here! However, we tend to own much less than the average american family. Especially a larger than 'normal' american family. Our house is very small. Every item has to have a home, a purpose and it needs to be chosen to get to stay.

As much as I love Christmas, I am more than ready for the clutter and decorations to be gone by the eve of the 25th! I was nice and left it up until the 26th this year. Then as usual, I started my entire house clean/purge. I do it every year after the holidays. 

The major items that needed sorted this year were the book shelves. I tend to struggle with this.  I am a book lover, and a homeschool Mom. We need books to function. It is very hard for me to minimize these items. However, I was good and went through every shelf, in the house. We got rid of a lot. 5 boxes of books, two large trash bags of toys and one large bag of trash.

That is all books to donate.

The school shelf can finally breathe, and so can I. Now I can prepare for the next half of the school year. My house has to be clean for me to think.

I went full geek this time and sorted the books by subject, and grade. Then I labeled each shelf. I am also going to be getting some color coded stickers to label all of the books to their corresponding shelf. Yes, I know how over board that sounds. I can't help it. Order makes me happy.  

 

 We also went through the Barbies, baby dolls and Anna's toys. Almost all of her toys fit in these drawers. I got rid of a few more items after taking this picture. We even got super organized and labeled the drawers.

 

7. He won't tell me what it is...

  Dustin was being all sneaky on Christmas Eve. He had his face in his phone for a little while and was very distracted. Which is weird for him. He is usually very present with us.

  A little while later he informs me that he ordered something for us. I will supposedly be super surprised and excited. It is a custom order item and is would be here by Friday(today). Well, turns out it shipped late, and won't be here until Wednesday!

He is giving me the weirdest hints and it is driving me crazy.

It does not have a screen, or need wifi. It does not have to be plugged in, but it would help. I can use it in any room but probably won't want to keep it in the kitchen. The shipping weight is exactly 10.8 lbs. It is small. He also claims it is going to make our lives easier, I'm going to love it and we both will get daily use out of it.

I'm really starting to wonder what this could possibly be.

Anyone care to take a guess? 

I'll reveal what it is next week. :)

Blessings!
~Lyndsay

7 Quick Takes! A Recap of Life in the Tiny House This Week! House-iversary, Christmas Break and The Great Countdown Debate!

Happy Friday and Merry Christmas!

Is your shopping done?
Are you ready for family and friends?
Have you decorated the tree and baked the cookies?

If those questions stress you out. That's ok. 
Let's change it to questions that really matter.

 Did you tell your loved ones how much you love them?
Ask yourself what was truly important this time of year?
Have you sat a little one on your lap and told them about baby Jesus?
Have you read your Bible or praised God today?

That's better! I've been doing my best to unplug for the worldy things this year, and plug into more Jesus and family. Quiet time reading with the littlest ones, reading our bibles, family dinners, lunches with Dad at work, discussing what really matters. 
I'm doing my best to focus less on the things that distract us from the most important things. 
That's why I have been here a little less. I would like to be here more, but this is a season of preteens, toddlers and ages in between. I should be watching them, because they are watching me!


1. Christmas Eve or Christmas Day?

Christmas is quickly approaching. The excitement is mounting and the debate has begun once again. Do you count down to Christmas Eve OR Christmas Day??
I personally have always counted down to Christmas Eve, because our holiday festivities start on Christmas Eve.
We have a slightly split household on this. So the countdown calendar is a source of daily discussion.
It has now become a thing. If you say how many days it is until Christmas you have to specify if it is Eve or Day.

So, I ask the readers. What do you count down to?

Let me know in the comments!

So we can settle this debate once and for all. Or start the discussion at your house for years to come!


2. Just a little bit of coffee...

 This was our last week of school before our break. Actually if I am being 100% honest, we were supposed to work through next week. However, we were all starting to show sign of burn-out. It was time to call a break.
Want to know a couple signs of burn-out.

People eyes start to glaze over and stay that way for most of the day
People get antsy...kids and Moms
School gets "too hard" (Insert whiny voices)
My afternoon cup of coffee starts to look like this

  



And the kids start to leave my subtle hints, like this.

 









Yep, definitely time for a break. 

 3. Green Tree Restaurant

Dustin and I went on a date over the weekend. We visited a local place we had been talking about for a while. We have been living in our town for about 3 years now, and we have started to explore the little parts of town that not everyone knows about.(We also like to support local businesses like our own. :) ) The little restaurants and small town shops. This town is filled with so much history, and they have gone to great lengths to maintain the structures, feel and the stories.
We finally visited the Green Tree Restaurant, mainly because I friend of ours shared an article about them sourcing locally grown grass-fed beef. We had been having a steak craving, and figured it was a good place to fix it.

The food was good! We got the last two NY strip steaks of the night. The service was friendly and competent. Plus the restaurant was very clean. The best part, was the history! You can read about it here. The short story is that the restaurant was opened in that exact same building as the Green Tree Tavern is the year 1800, three years before our state was actually a state! They reopened it in 2015 as the Green Tree Restaurant.
I love history and I'm a sucker for a story like that. Pretty sure it is one of my top three favorite old places to eat in our new town. One of the other ones is The Madison, it is housed in the original Post Office building!
If you live local, or ever happen to find yourself traveling through our little piece of the world, you should make sure you try these places!

4. Holiday Bloopers

We finally took real family pictures..with coordinating clothes and both parents(Not each of us taking turns and photo shopping it in later)...for the first time since we had 2 kids!
We had already scheduled the day and then it snowed and was 20 some degrees. We were not to be deterred. At least I wasn't going to be. We planned for this, showered and everyone had recent hair cuts. THIS WAS HAPPENING!
Thankfully we have an amazing and caring neighbor and I have a kind and loving husband who tends to go along with my crazy whims.
We managed to get some good shots, but most of them are on lock down until after Christmas. Grandparent presents and what not. ;)
I am willing to share a picture with you that has made me smile and giggle every time I look at it. It is our family in a true moment of life. I'm pretty sure the blooper pics are the best.

 
 
5. Christmas Program!

Our homeschool co-op put together an absolutely wonderful Christmas Program. There was an expressive signing performance, bell choir and the older kids have put together a show choir. Have I mentioned how amazing the women at co-op are? I'm forever amazed at the talents and organized skills that come together. You put these women in a room together and things get done. I'm pretty sure they could solve world hunger and create world peace, if our Moms meeting lasted longer than half an hour each week!
My MIL even pulled me aside and asked if this was all 'just' homeschool families and 'Wow, they get a lot done!" Yep, they sure do. They take their job as education facilitators very seriously.
The program was amazing and entertaining and Anna only screamed, cried and threw herself in the floor four times. Two year olds are such a fun filled crowd. I'm calling it a win!

 


6. Addison

Someone had a birthday at the beginning of the month. Can't believe she is 7.  She picked a gold and hot pink themed cake and decorated it herself. (With a little help from Emma and myself.)

She received this shirt for her birthday. It pretty much sums up our Addison. She whirls, twirls and always glitters. She is such a blessing to our lives and our world wouldn't be the same without her in it. She told me she wants to be an "Animal Dr at the zoo" when she grows up, but also...a mom and to adopt.
Sounds like a good plan to me!

7. 4 Years!

We purchased our 'tiny' cottage in the woods on December 10th 2013. It was one of our first big huge steps toward the debt free life we live now. It was scary and I'm pretty sure we were not entirely prepared for all the level of repairs that the house would require. I knew Dustin could totally handle anything this house threw at us, but I am definitely positive that we didn't see some of it coming. 

You can read more about how we found this house here.

This house has changed a lot over the last four years. We have changed as well. The kids are growing, our lives and views on things have changed so much. I struggle to even remember where we came from or even who we were before starting this journey. The old life seems so foreign to us now. We try to sit and recall a time when credit was a part of our lives, before the tiny house project, before we learned to downsize and live small, before we really truly asked God what he wanted for our lives. 

We can't do it. 

Will we always call this house our home? I'm not sure. Forever and always are very solid and sustaining words. We are here because God placed us here. No one can say He won't move us again. 

It is funny how life can seem so mess, scary and disorganized when you are in the thick of it, but when you come out the other side of situations...you see how His divining grace was leading you through it the whole time. We were the ones not fully trusting in His will and grace. 

2013

2016 after porch completion

Blessings!
~Lyndsay

7 Quick Takes! A Recap of Life in the Tiny House This Week! Tiny House Before and Afters, Minimalism Meltdown and A Little Math Humor!

1. Three years

Last month officially marked three years of us living in our tiny cottage in the woods. The kitchen is almost finished. Waiting on hubby to finish up a few minor details. Then post for it will be going up. This time of year always makes me curious to go back and look at what it used to look like around here. Are you ready to be blown away?

Here is a before and after and a couple of during photos.

This is now our dining/living

This is now the kitchen/bath

Before we started to rebuild

Before and after

After the front porch was finished

 I'm planning a room by room tour with before and after pics for everyone. There will also be videos, because some of the rooms are hard to take pictures of. A typical issue with really small houses. :)

 Looking back I can't believe we lived here through most of the renovation...or that we did almost all of it ourselves. Many prayers went up during this process. This house was a God given blessing that required a lot of elbow grease and lots of literal blood, sweat and tears. 

2. Oh the Anxiety!

 Nothing strikes more fear in a homeschooling mom/bloggers heart than a computer technology fail! Our computer has been stricken with viruses twice this year. This is the second total wipe and start over. Praise the Lord for the invention of expansion storage to save all of the school stuff and blogging/vlogging media.



The patient seems to have survived. This post is being typed on it.


3. Pumpkin carving and the great pumpkin walk!

 We went to a local pumpkin walk. They let kids come and carve pumpkins during the day, and then in the evening you get to walk through all the lighted pumpkins that are lined out through a field. The cool part to this is the fact that you get to walk through some Native American mounds that you typically have to walk around the perimeter. They had over 250 pumpkins carved and all aglow along the path. It was really neat to see. (I forgot my phone at home. No pictures.)
The funny part was hearing Anna shout "Pumpkins!!!" every 5 feet! That didn't get old after about 50 pumpkins. Nope, not at all.

We also carved pumpkins over the weekend. I did get to take pictures of that!




 4. Cinnamon sweet potato bites

 A new kid friendly post went up on the blog this week. Cinnamon sweet potato bites.
My kids love them. However, a friend told me she tried it but swapped out the sweet potato for butter nut squash. (Something I had also considered trying) Apparently it didn't going over too well. She said one of her children ran to spit it out. Guess I will be crossing that off of the 'recipes to try' list. Thanks for saving me the time S. :)

5. The season of excess has begun!

We all went out to run some errands over the weekend. We went into Menard's to pick up some items for the house and the office. Menard's is already all decked out for Christmas. Not that I am against getting a jump start on holiday shopping. (Some years I try to be finished by Thanksgiving.) I do have to say though that I will never stop being shocked by the excess and even the sheer size of the items that they sell for Christmas. What benefit will anyone ever have from a caterpillar that is over 6 feet long?

*Sigh* **Deep breaths**

My minimalism is showing.

They also had a HUGE gorilla that we thought for sure Anna would love. She is crazy for Curious George. Nope! She CRIED and wouldn't take her suspicious glare off of it until we left the aisle!



6. Odd but delicious

 Last winter our friend Sarah fed us lunch. Sarah has this knack for taking a few simple ingredients and turning it into something absolutely amazing! We decided that we are never quite sure if it is the food or the company that makes the meal so great. Probably both!
 She served us this delicious chicken noodle soup, but it had Ramen noodles(not the seasoning packet) in it. (Hers were the gluten free kind).  She said she had them and just tossed them in.

 Alex has mentioned this soup off and on since January. He has even asked for it to be on the monthly meal plan. I kind of put it off, just because it is simple and we basically always have the ingredients on hand. I think we had it once in the spring.
This week our co-op  was cancelled due to so many people being sick. Well, it turned out to be a blessing. The oldest three came down with something. Cough and cold symptoms with a low grade temp. Nothing major.

It was the perfect day for a pot of soup! I tossed our typical chicken and noodle basics in the pot, but stopped just short of putting the typical egg noddles in. I grabbed some Ramen noodles and tossed those in instead.
It can seem like an odd combination, but it goes over big with the kids. Sarah probably has no idea what she started last winter.

I made 4Qrts of soup and there wasn't a drop left by mid afternoon! Alex is already asking me to make more.

7. Say Perpendicular!

  The weather was so beautiful the last part of this week. It was really hard for some of us all of us to stay focused. We tried to power through and this is where we ended up... In fits of giggles over math terminology. We closed the books and went out to play shortly after I filmed this video. Obviously their brains were done for the day.

Hope you have a beautiful and blessed weekend!

~Lyndsay