So, once upon a time, I wrote a blog. Well, I wrote a lot of things, and then I wrote this blog. And then almost a year ago we moved into a brand-new house (hooray!). We finally finished all those years and years and years of school and job-hunting and found where we're going to live for (we hope) the next 20 or 30 years. (That deserves another hooray!). It turns out that there are a lot of projects to do when you have a brand new house. Lots of settling in and unpacking. Lots of working with builders (who did a fantastic job, we think) on finalizing things, finishing things that didn't get finished before because your nice builder actually let you move in before everything was finished since you were technically homeless for a few weeks waiting for it to get done (thanks again to generous cousins Brad and Carrie for letting us stay in their basement!). Then there is lots of organizing to do. Lots of projects for furnishing and decorating a bigger house. That's what you work on during the cold months. In between birthdays, holidays, family weddings, traveling, etc. Then the thaw finally comes and you remember that there's a whole yard to put in! So blogging has kind of fallen by the wayside. And then whenever they talk about family history or journals at church, there is this double load of guilt because this used to be how I justified myself in those categories. See, posterity? I'm doing my bit. It's all here. Except I'm not doing much of any of it lately, and not writing much of anything at all elsewhere. And I've noticed I haven't taken as many pictures of the kids in the last couple months, so maybe there's a correlation between me actually blogging and me remembering to document their lives. Ellie has been talking about her birthday coming up. I am going to try to catch up a bit before the kids age another year!

Sometime I'll get some good pictures of the interior of the house up for family members who have asked to see them (or you all could just come visit!). In the meantime, here are a few pictures of some of the many projects that have kept us busy this past year.

Here is the house just a few days before we moved in. Lots of clean-up to do still.

Here's our family a few days after we moved in. The first morning after sleeping in our new house, Charlie woke up sick. Turned out to be the stomach flu, which I also caught a day or two later. Horribly. Brady and Ellie were spared. That time.

This is a garage sale dresser that I found and refinished before we moved. I painted it white and we have it in our living room now. The TV is on top and we keep DVDs and toys in the drawers.

I should have learned from this that no project is a simple, one-weekend, or one-week project. Took forever. Forever.

I had the builder add this long bench in the living room and another on the landing going upstairs. Both open for storage. I love them. My job, then, was to make the cushions to go on top. Took me forever.

This is our backyard when things started to thaw this spring. We had put grass seed down in the fall. It's hard to see in this picture, but some of it was coming up when the snow was melting. I took this picture after I went out to retrieve a red plastic sled that Ellie had buried during the winter (I didn't want it to block the grass that was coming up there). I thought there was enough snow for me to still walk on to get to the back corner of the yard without sinking ankle deep in mud. It was tricky. Barely made it. I was stranded for several minutes trying to figure my strategic route (there wasn't as much snow as it looks like). I could actually hear the snow melting around me. I'm sure it was pretty entertaining to the neighbors.

This is the image I had going through my head when I was out there. Seriously, guys, we have got to help those polar bears.

We ended up having to reseed the grass in the spring because there was more construction work to be done. A water line to put in out by the garden (we opted not to do a sprinkler system for now), cement steps on the back porch that didn't get done before it got too cold last fall to do them, hauling in a dumptruck full of dirt to level out and fill in our garden space. So we had lots of huge trucks driving through our yard that kind of wiped out the grass that was coming in. Sad.

We also built our house on the remnants of a volcanic eruption, apparently, and have the worst soil ever. So prepping for grass seed took forever. Forever. Really. Forever. Raking and raking it smooth and we'd keep hearing that sound of metal scraping against rock. We also have a slope in our yard  coming down from the garden area. So we started putting the rocks on the slope. We'd dig them out and I started arranging them into a rock wall to prevent landslides and runnoff.

Here's some of the progress of the rock wall last fall. You can see a fence post in the back. The builders were working on getting the fence up at the same time. (Oh yeah, that was another project this spring--sealing and treating the fence. Sheesh). You can also see the neighbor's beautifully perfect, manicured yard. They are amazing. And patient. The grass has grown in below the wall and I've started growing Irish moss in the gaps between the rocks. I still have a section of the wall to finish, but the part shoring up the garden area is finished and held up during our big flood last July. No landslides!

 After we got the grass seed in, I thought I could take on another project (you know, since we couldn't go out on the yard for a while). So I bought materials to make a porch swing. In May I did that. Turns out when you don't have a sprinkler system, grass seed is really high maintenance. And then when it starts coming, the garden takes up your time. And then the swing takes way longer than you thought. And then you have flooding to deal with. And then there are a million other projects. And staining/polyurethane for the thing is a beast. And I didn't finish it until the first weekend of October.

But, hey, the grass is in (along with a lot of weeds, but it's green, drought tolerant, and low maintenance). The fence is stained. The porch is cleaned off and the kids can play on it again. And now I can get back to work on this year's Halloween costumes and birthday projects!