House Report: Being at Home

Chaos!

Good chaos, at least. Happy chaos.

We've been about a week living in our new house--well, on Sunday night we slept on bare mattresses back at our old house after the toilets in our new house backed up into the bathtubs (turns out that houses that are vacant for two years get things like roots growing into their main sewer lines), but plumbers fixed that for us on Monday and we've been here ever since.

Most of our belongings are still in boxes lining the walls, because our new house doesn't have any SHELVES!!!!!, and poor Matt is still spending most of his time at the old house getting it ready to be sold, but the kids and I, at least, are happily puttering about and finding new corners to read in and watching the chickens learning how to free-range and exploring our new property, which is wonderful and beautiful and poorly-maintained and bounteous. Already, as we drove the other day through town to redeem Will's reading program prize of an ice cream voucher from a local ice cream stand, I looked at the houses that we passed in town and thought, "GAH! Their yards are all so SMALL!"

I have a to-do list so long that I've actually imported it into Microsoft Word so that I can organize it according to priority (lots of painting ratty found-on-the-side-of-the-road furniture to make it look less ratty, lots of shelf building, lots of transplanting perennials from old house to new, etc.), and Matt has a totally different to-do list that's even longer, but we are SO happy. And loving our house. And walking across our yard to the drive-in to watch movies. And last night, coming home after 10:00 pm from a swimming date with friends, we stopped at the yard in astonishment, then sat together on the roof of our root cellar and watched hundreds of fireflies sparkling like twinkle lights in the woods behind the field behind our house--all over the woods, from the tops of the trees to the bottoms, incomparable to anything we'd ever seen before.

To conclude, two photos, the only two, other than cell phone shots of chickens cutely wandering where they shouldn't, that I've found time to take this week:

Yes, I've been permitting the kids to ride their scooter indoors.

And yes, Will's found a spot to read. That's all she needs in a home.

Really, though. We definitely need some shelves.