House and Family

So, here I go.  I have thought about starting up a blog for some time, but this will be my first.

Today was a good day.  I got a late start, but hey, it is Sunday and who gets up early on Sunday?  Not me.
The kids were up early, but they seemed to be doing fine without me for a little while, it is not like they are babies any more (8, 12 and 14).  My husband left for some training on the West Coast for 3 weeks today, so it will just be me and the kiddos for a little while.  I am hoping to take this time to get the house in better order and get some projects out of the way before Christmas, but moreso before the return of my better half.

The house.  It is 103-years old, an old 4-square farmhouse out on the prairie of Minnesota.  When we moved here 11-years ago, there was the house, a large grainery, a large chicken house, a dairy barn, a single corn crib and a double corn crib.  Of those, all that now stands is the house, the grainery and the double corn crib.  We would have saved the chicken house, but it had a couple of holes in the roof for a few years and some insects had eaten away all of the studs in the walls.  How that silly thing was still standing was beyond our imaginations.  So, hubby burned the remains down after removing the shingles and windows.  Then, one morning our old barn decided the rain had gotten too heavy on its back, and the back 2/3 of it collapsed straight down.  Now, if a barn is going to fall, I would say that is the way for it to do so.  My DH salvaged quite a few barn boards and some other usable wood and stored it away in the grainery.  The small corn crib was in sad shape, so that came down in flames one day a couple of years ago.  The old place looks way different now than it did 11-years ago.  That is a good thing though.   We have cleared and planted trees and shrubs.  We started a garden, that just happened to expand a few times over.  Now, we have chickens and rabbits and dogs too.

But I was talking about the house... Well, it is getting close for the time that the old house be retired.  When winter rolls around, the mice roll on in.  They are getting quite bold too, they stop in the middle of the room, wave or take a bow and then scamper off to wherever.  Last winter, we started finding shrews, in fact, in my son's shoe.  I think I am going to work on a children's book on that one "The Shrew in the Shoe".  None of us had ever seen a shrew before, but we have watched the movie "The Secret of Nimh", and it did look like Auntie Shrew.  So, I checked it out and I was right.  See, kids' movies do teach you things!  But mice aren't always so bad.  Last week, this little mouse kept coming out from behind the stove and ducking back down again.  I had set a trap, but he kept getting around it.  It was one of our crazy days of running here and there, and so we went to DQ for lunch and brought back some chicken strips.  When we were done, and there were a couple of fries left in a box that sat on a shelf, little mousie came looking around and hopped up in the box.  I heard him rustling around and went over and closed him in.  Yes, I left it there until I was ready to gather all that garbage up and take it out to the dumpster.  Before I got the chance, he comes my oldest son, looking to see if there were any more chicken strips and before I knew what he was doing, he opened the box with the mouse and got the ba-geebers scared out of him.  I laughed so hard it hurt!  Trust me, I needed a laugh like that and it turned my day around.  So, maybe little mousies are all bad to have around.

We have had a lot of fun living here.  Our children have been able to enjoy the freedom of going outside and having adventures without the constant worry of being in the road or who was living next door.  When we first moved here, my husband started taking down some of the old Silver Maple trees that were planted here about 90-years ago.  They are old, hollow and pretty beat up, and they are falling apart or falling down whenever the winds kick up here.  So, for safety's sake several have been removed.  There was one on the front lawn that got cut, but laid there for a few days before my husband could get it all cleaned up.  That was the beginning of the Cheetah Coalition.  My two sons had been watching this wonderful kids' wildlife show called Kratt's Creatures, or maybe it was Zaboomafoo, either way they are both from PBS and are created by Chris and Martin Kratt.  Wonderful shows about animals that my kids and I loved watching.  One episode was about cheetahs.  A family of cheetahs is called a coalition.  So, here are my kids, ages 2 and 4, climbing on the log and barking like cheetahs.  It was simply joyful to watch and hear them.  Did you know that cheetahs actually bark?  You wouldn't think so, since they are cats.  They do make more of a barking sound though.

I do long for those days when they kids played and giggled and really loved each other.  Now, it is the teen years and they fight more than anything else.  It is typical, I know, but it doesn't make it any easier knowing that.  I grew up in a family of 11 children.  Yes, we fought like cats and dogs sometimes.  And don't be fooled, big families aren't always like the Waltons.  I had a sister say one time we were like a group of strangers that were thrown together and told to be friends.  It just isn't that simple.  Some of us are so alike that we get on each other's nerves, while some are just polar opposites.  But the fact is, we are all individuals and not everyone gets along.  So, like normal brothers and sister, we would fight.  Now, we are quite mature in age and most of us have children and some have grandchildren.  We don't all get along, nor do we all keep in touch, but that is just the way it is.  We lost one sister in the summer of 2005.  That was the saddest day in our family.  She was in a car accident, hit by a young man who failed to stop.  Sadly, she left behind two young children of 9 and 3 years old.  I hadn't talked to her in about a year.  I loved her, and still do, but our lives had grown apart and both of us were busy a lot and we just didn't talk much on the phone like we did when we were younger.  But I have always taken comfort in knowing that we DID love each other very much, and that the last words that we said to each other the last time we did speak were "I love you."  It meant even more because those were not words that were said out loud in our family, until she started saying it to the rest of us.  We weren't a huggy, touchy family, but Diane helped us to start saying "I love you" and she started the hugs hello and good bye.  Besides her smile, I will remember that about her always.

Okay, enough sad stuff.

This has probably been enough for tonight.
I will return, though I am not sure how often to share stories and maybe a joke or two, and some pictures too along the way.

In the meantime, always keep a little spice of life in yours.

Crazychick