   |
 Every holiday our family celebrates has a theme attached to it. Mother’s Day this year was no different. John, and the girls came up with the theme of “Cafe’ la Mere”, which means Mom’s Cafe. They decorated the room like a french coffee shop, with lights and candles. It was beautiful. I got lots of great gifts, but as usual, the best gift of all was just being their Mom!
 We had a great time this Easter hunting eggs and going to church. Our friend Kristy came over for Easter lunch and helped us hide eggs for the kids. All the kids from oldest to youngest hunted eggs. We hid eggs for the little guys in the front yard, and for the big guys in the back yard. Son #3 thought he was big enough to keep looking for eggs in the big kid area!
Here we are with our sad excuse for snow here in West Tennessee. We keep hoping for more, but haven’t seen any yet. We would rather have snow than tornadoes though!
We had a nice Easter this year. Last year we went to North Carolina to visit Deanna and Way, but this year it was just us. We recently changed churches, from a small Presbyterian church to a larger non-denominatial church. The girls and I made dresses for them, and I smocked an outfit for baby Christian. The other boys all had newish shirts and pants and all looked really nice.
The Saturday before Easter we spent a few hours coloring eggs. We didn’t have any spilled dye this year like we did last year. Stephen was so cute. He just wanted to keep dipping those eggs. We dyed 36 eggs, and John said it went too fast. John likes to leave the eggs in the dye forever so they will be nice and dark, but most of the other kids just wanted to go as fast as possible.
Easter Sunday we went to ECC and enjoyed the service. Well, John and some of the kids enjoyed the service, as I was only there for about a half an hour. Then Christian got fussy so I took Christian, Stephen and Jacob home. John and other others stayed for the entire 1.5 hour service. They said it was good, but long.
We hunted for eggs inside the house which seems wrong. It was just too cold and wet here to hide them outside. The hunt was over very quickly, and John and I decided we had bought too much candy after all!
That evening we did a Christian Seder Service that I found on the internet. We’ve done it for the past 3 or 4 years. Usually we do it during Easter week, but this year we were so wrapped up in the house disaster that we put it off. The girls got all the china and silver out and decorated the table. It was a lot of fun. We put Christian and Stephen to bed after dinner and did the seder without them. At the end of the service we all held hands and danced around the table singing our version of a Jewish song. It was a neat way to celebrate Easter and to remember all that God has done for us.
Well, in the last post we had discovered that the previous sellers had covered up a rotten wall on the front of the garage. Now, we discovered that the other wall was rotten, partially due to rot and partially due to termites. As you can see from the pictures, the supporting 2×4’s were not even touching the ground due to the combination of water and termite damage. The header beams above the garage were rotten due to water damage and completely fell apart when we had the metal removed from around the doors. Our contractor said he wasn’t sure what was holding up the wall – paint? So we had the termites treated and then purchased a termite bond on the house. Another expense.
Then, we found out that we had hail damage on the roof from the Feb. 5th tornado. So, we got a check from the insurance company and had the roof replaced. We got rid of the ugly brown roof and put a charcoal roof on. We then had to change out the brown shutters and put up black ones. It reminded me of when you buy a new dress, all of a sudden you need new shoes, purse and maybe even a new hairstyle to go with the dress. The house looks great now. We are thinking of selling the house because I’m not sure I have good feelings about it anymore. Our contractor thinks we shouldn’t sell because now we have fixed the problems! So, after all that, we are finally done. It took 2 months and we got to know the contracting crew quite well. They all said they would be sad to leave because they liked working here! They were very nice, but we were glad to see them pack up their things and go. It’s good to know that the walls are fixed. Our contractor looked at other places on the house, but said all the rest looked good.
When we bought our house we loved the inside, loved the property and thought the outside was just normal. Little did we know that the previous owners (two owners ago) had put vinyl siding over rotting masonite siding. We had only lived here a short time when the ceiling in the garage started leaking. We then found water on the floor. Once we investigated further, we found that the whole garage wall was rotten and that the windows were actually holding up the roof. Not good. So, many, many dollars later, we have now begun trying to fix yet another window in the garage area. This is what our nice house looks like today. It’s hard not to be angry with the previous owners because they certainly knew what was going on. The rot behind the wall was at least 15 years old.
I’ve always wanted to blog. I like to write, I like my family, so welcome to our family blog. I hope I can keep up with our life. John and I have been married for 21 years, have 7 great kids, a dog named Tucker and a cat we call Presh (short for Precious). The kids range in age from 17 years, to 5 months and are fabulous, funny and very occasionally frustrating. There are two girls, and five boys. We are busy and love it. John is working on his Master’s degree (MBA) and I stay at home and try to keep up with everyone. We have homeschooled for years, and that is a big part of who we are.
|
|
|
Copyright © 2010 My Family Of Nine - All Rights Reserved |
||
