At Our Place: January 2019

I need to play major catch up on my blog.

So here is an excerpt from a letter to Kelli with some updates. Yes, I know some are repeats, but you get what you get... :D

We had an ok Christmas. We also got sick. Stomach bug. We came down on the 22nd and must have caught something at Barry's parents house because we were all sick over Christmas. We thought maybe food poisoning because Barry and I couldn't stand the sight of lettuce for weeks afterwards and that is his MAIN food staple. Who knows what it was really.

For Christmas, we promised the kids we would get them Zelda Breath of the Wild IF they read the Book of Mormon by Christmas. They seemed to realize that Christmas was getting very near and we started December 2nd.(I started over) The kid's and I read and read, and finished Christmas Eve. It was a very special time for our family. It brought such an incredible spirit into our home during that time. We truly immersed ourselves in the Book of Mormon... sometimes reading 20 chapters a DAY! I really think it was the best thing we did all year. When we finished James brought me the Book of Mormon and asked if we could start over again. :D He didn't want to stop and he honestly had forgotten about the reward. 😄

I have decided to do it again this year, but we will start on the day after Thanksgiving to give us a bit more time. We have continued reading since Christmas but only a chapter a day and then our home study lessons for church. How's that going with you guys?

We ordered a Nintendo Switch off of EBay used for the kids, so they could have their Zelda game and still have a few other games to play without breaking the bank. James LOVES Mario Kart 8. 😄 and they have so much fun playing Super Smash Brothers together. I can hear them squealing and laughing from the other room when they play it together. That is ALL we gave them for Christmas and nobody cared of complained. Barry bought a big new HD TV and gave himself the Planet Earth blue rays... because he just loves though. HE was a little sad to find out Blue Ray isn't HD. OH well.

As for our room, it is much the same as it has been for the last month. Sorry, I can't remember what I told you. Barry ripped our closet... it was a his and hers closet at the back of our room and had sliding doors. He decided he wanted a walk-in closet. We don't have a particularly large room, so i was a bitnervous about his grand idea. So i asked him to make me a temporary wall, so I could see if I could handle having a much smaller room. He nailed up some 2/4's and hung up a sheet and I had my pretend wall. That lasted about a week ...and I decided I could live with a smaller room. It's not IDEAL, but Barry likes to have a project. We would have to get rid of any furniture in our room except our bed and a small nightstand. That was fine by me. I don't like STUFF and I am totally with you for de-cluttering. Makes me soo happy to throw out stuff, it's so liberating. 😄 So I gave Barry the go ahead and he built a REAL wall and even wired it with plug and lights for the inside of the closet. Then he decided he wanted to re-texture our whole room, it has orange peel texture that he hates. So he re-muded the whole room and installed sliding pocket doors into the new wall that he built up. We purchased Cedar planks to line the ceiling of our new walk-in closet because it was poorly constructed and the ceiling sheet rock is sagging and there is nothing above to attach it too. ......Not wanting to get construction dust all over my bedding, I moved our bed into our family room and all our clothes into various children's closets, and all Barry's closet stuff into other closets. So we are crazy displaced, it's a little nuts trying to get dressed in the morning and find the clothes I want to wear.

So in the midst of our remodel all heck broke loose in our house. Our nice new washing machine broke and flooded our laundry room, not once... but 5 times!!! in Barry's attempts to fix it. To make a long story short. It is still not fixed, but Barry bought me a replacement washer from an old laundry mat. It is an old coin operated washing machine... and yes i do have to insert a $1.25 every time I want to use it, but it WORKS! :D and it is soo old and soo simple, that there are only two parts on it that could possibly break, and both are easy fixes. The money just falls through the coin box, so I just use the same quarters over and over again. IT's actually quite fun. 😄 and I am content until we can get the other monster washer fixed. The same week our washer died, one of our goats got into a grain bag and ate pounds of it. Their stomachs are unable to handle that and it passed away. We tried everything to save it, Barry even went to the vet. It was not to be, she was a very expensive pure-blood goat and expecting babies in February. We were very sad. That left us with just one goat, which is not ok. They are very social animals and will just bawl all day and die if you leave them alone. So we made the trek out to the desert and invested in another goat. She's a cutie. I don't think the two goats are very good friends, the other's were sisters, but at least they keep each other company.

The day after our goat died, our Explorer died. I was not happy. We had a dead goat we couldn't even haul away because our Explorer pulls our trailer and the goat had to go in that. We paid a mechanic 900$ and he was able to resurrect our Explorer. I really don't think it's going to last long though, but we kind of were in a bind. Anyway.. we had a crazy December and beginning of the year, just one things after another, it was just like BAM BAM BAM BAM. Everything that you could think, like a dozen more things, kept going wrong. ....Well KEEPS going wrong. In fact, Barry just called me from work, our new van's steering pump is failing, guess what? They want 900$ to fix it.

BUT I'm not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me .... well maybe a little. ;D

We are totally OK! We have NEVER been picked-on in trials, and so I am very curious to find out what all this is leading up to. I think Satan could tell our family was headed in a good direction with our temple attendance and scripture reading and decided to throw us a few hurdles. The awesome thing is that we're OK. More than okay, we're good! That is the peace the gospel brings. I mean, I have no idea what major trials feel like, but I feel ''almost" invincible because I know God has our backs and is watching out for us. We pay our tithing and have reaped enormous blessing from it. One example is we got a $20,000 hospital bill for Natalie in the mail a couple weeks ago and our insurance and her insurance covered the ENTIRE thing 100%!!!!! We paid nothing! Everything had been denied previously, was out of Network, and they were supposed to cover like 60% after we paid her 4000$ deductible! I know that was a HUGE blessing! We try and do what's right and good and God doesn't take every trial away but gives us His Peace and THAT blessing is priceless! 😄

To make a long story short---er. ;D We are STILL sleeping in our family room and will be for some time ;D. We bought paint and there was some mix up and we were given the wrong kind ...and then it was the wrong color... hahah Oh my! Barry did finally get the front part of our room painted on Saturday. It is butter yellow. Purdy, but will take some getting used to.

((update) Since I wrote this letter, all our pigeons died, but one, and our pure blood goat had her babies, both of which were born dead. I was pretty confident she was going to die too, but so far she is still living. Phew! Our whole family caught the flu and ended up with bronchitis. We have been sick sick. Yet still so very blessed. I feel the Lord blessing up in small ways every single days. I love my family, I love my life, I love the gospel and the peace it brings. )

So on to more interesting things. On Saturday, (drumroll please) we got two miniature horses! They are soooooooooooo cute. One is pure black, and one is pure white with blue eyes.

(I just got up and looked out the window to make sure they hadn't fallen over dead or anything. Phew! they're good!)

Emma named the white one Luna, and I named the Black one Noira. (Noir means black in french) We rescued them because they were being neglected by their previous owner. My good friend also got two minis, and we are (eventually) going to train them to pull a cart around the neighborhood. You can ride them if you weigh less than 70 lbs. So the kids are excited. They are only 34 inches tall. I am hoping to go outside and take some pictures to send you today. I am seriously afraid of the cold though and haven't put so much as a toe outside lately. We will see. Hahah. Maybe I can get Ellie to take some pictures for me, she seems impervious to the cold.

Owen finally feeling better after two whole weeks of being super sick.

smaller goat is the NEW goat. She is also bred. Hopefully all will be well with her and we'll have some baby goats within a couple of weeks.

Noira. My beautiful miniature horse. I actually already love her. ;D

Meet Luna. We were told she was a bully horse and MEAN. Hasn't been mean at all since we got her. She was obviously mistreated, so she has a few trust issues, but we're working on that.

Owen helping me with the laundry with our replacement coin washer. He loves to put the coins in for me. We finally got the new part we ordered for the washing machine. Barry installed it. The durn thing still doesn't work. I'm personally ready to scrap it. Besides I have this sweet commercial washer who needs a washing machine with more than 3 different cycles? ;D

New Wall color. Barry installed the pocket doors last weekend. Whoa do they make the room seem smaller, but the optional privacy will be nice.

Emma's portrait of Luna. Her personal favorite horse.

THe boys took me out to eat at the Blaze for Barry's birthday. We love the pizza there.

Barry's coworker gave him a giftcard for his birthday, so we were nice enough to send her this picture of us enjoying her gift.

Owen likes to put on Barry's deoderant. I really don't know how he can handle it. It is STRONG!
but he put on like three different kinds and then he smells soo nice all day. :P

Tired of being sick Momma.

This pulled pork recipe is DELICIOUS! Just so you know.

Ellie almost got all her teeth in a row. Hurray!

James wrote the sweetest note the other morning while I was still sleeping. He also completed a good chunk of his school work all by himself.

Feeding his dragon pizza.

I sliced my thumb good in January. I have never cut myself that deep except for the window incident in college. It was kindof funny I was trying to unclog our vacuum and my hand slipped and I sliced my finger on something sharp. I immediately grabbed my thumb and dropped the vacuum. James who was helping me, demanded to know what I did. I told him nothing and to go away. He refused and stood his ground. So I unclamped my hand and showed him. He immediately started dry heaving and ran out of the room yelling at me. "Don't you EVER show me ANYTHING like that EVER AGAIN! When he got his heaving under control, he started raiding the house for first aid supplies and tossing them in the room from the doorway. I was pretty sure I needed stitches, but miraculously even after pouring a half a bottle of rubbing alcohol on the wound (thanks Jeana ;) ) the wound closed up and stopped bleeding. phew!

We borrowed this awesome blanket from my friend. Barry kept using it ....even though it wasn't ours. So we decided it would be a great birthday present for him. I asked Lauren to measure the blanket so I could look it up online and see if I could order it. She came and told me it was 56 TURTLES long. Oh my goodness that girl! Grandma Stuart ended up ordering the blanket for Barry and he loves it! Uses it every night.

We had a stuffed animal clinic at school one day. The kids could earn "medical services" for their toys by doing their work. Gee wiz! I sewed up a lot of holes.