One week and counting......

We close one week from today! I talked to the realtor today and everything seems to be one track. We are just so overly excited (well, at least I am---sure Sage is too---I just seem to be leaking excitement! LOL!) Our rental is still not ready for occupancy due to some cleaning issues that no one knew would be an issue--aka mushrooms growing in the nasty bathroom downstairs that was new just a few years ago. It's not the house's fault just the previous occupants. NASTY but once it is all cleaned up, replaced, etc. all will be good!

The Words I Never Thought I'd Hear

"Hi Sage and Kimberly. This is Mary. I showed the house today and have an offer. Give me a call!"

I couldn't dial fast enough.

There is an older gentleman who had made an offer on a smaller house in the town our house is. It was close to the nursing home where his wife was being cared for. He wanted to live close to her and planned that after she was discharged, they would get a bigger home. She ended up passing away. So he was ready for a bigger house sooner than he expected. So through total miracles....he decided to put an offer on ours. The good things in this whole situation (can't think of too much bad actually):

1)financing should not be a problem for him since he will pay mostly with cash

2)he made a very decent offer and although we will still owe money at closing (about $2-3000) we are okay with that

3)he wants to close on Oct. 8th

4)the rental we want is supposed to be ready Oct. 1

5)I am on top of the world today!

6)this is an amazing day especially after waiting (and sometimes not too patiently) for 18 months for our house to sell

7)the path to this point has been guided even though I have often been blind!

Of course nothing is final yet but this is the best news we have gotten in a LONG time!

The Little (actually Big) Garden that Could (and DID)!

If you've been keeping up with my blog (not all that hard to do you might notice), you will have gone through this journey our precious garden has traveled this growing season.

First it started out with early threat of frost when the plants were just babies:





Then a ravaging hail storm was determined to squish everything in it's path:


This picture doesn't even do justice to the pelting the garden took. The corn was literally shredded, the beans were minus leaves and blossoms and the onions were flat to the ground. I should've taken a picture a few days ago because this garden has done AMAZINGLY well! It has been very well prayed over and our prayers have been answered. We have canned and canned beans (the most important part to us this year). And are now enjoying the corn and potatoes and carrots. We ate many sweet garden peas. It truly has been a miraculous recovery and yield!

Last night the garden faced yet another challenge when the temperature dipped to 28 degrees!







We are SO not ready for the garden to be done yet. And really it fared quite well considering. The leaves on the beans look a bit toasted but the water from the sprinklers did the best job it could and it appears we will have more garden goodies yet! Incredibly, there are still blossoms blooming and beans growing! Thank you Heavenly Father for this wonderful blessing!

Crazy Cousins!

We were lucky to have Debbie and Tyler spend a week with us. Kyle, Aubrey and Olivia love Baby Tyler (Tywer) and Aunt Debbie (Dibbie) (Aubrey's pronunciations).

Kyle and Tyler



Aubrey, Olivia, and Kyle EXTRA happy to be with Tyler



All eight cousins together



I feel so blessed that my children are able to be part of their cousins' lives. They are all such good examples to them and they love their cousins dearly!

Oh Sleep Where Art Thou?

I have been taking "a mild sleeping pill" (name that movie =p) for the past month or so because it was taking me an hour or more to fall asleep every night and when I was awakened in the middle of the night it took me that long to fall asleep again resulting in one TIRED, EXHAUSTED saggy-eyed mommy! This pill has to be a new wonder of the world--at least for me! It really has brought *some* sanity back into my life.

Last night, I popped my pill about 10:45 and went to bed hoping for a good night's sleep. Around 11:30, Olivia woke up crying. I decided (since Sage is working nights) to put her in bed with me. She fell back to sleep but only momentarily and was awake banging her head on the wall and dropping her bottle behind the bed, etc. Well at 1:30 (mind you Olivia has not gone back to sleep yet), Kyle starts to cry. He usually only does this if he is sick. So in order to keep him from waking up Aubrey, I put Olivia (still awake) back in her bed and put Kyle in bed with me. He was complaining of his foot hurting on the bottom and I suspected a sliver but there was NO way I was going to squint my eyes at 1:30 IN THE MORNING to retrieve a piece of wood. He fell asleep not long after that. Olivia, however, did not go back to sleep until 3:30! =0 =0 =0 =0 I am sure there had to have been some dozing on my part but not sleep. I changed her diaper three times in the four hour "happy hour" she was having because I just kept hoping if I gave her a bottle, she would go back to sleep---which obviously didn't work until bottle # "who knows".

The past couple of days I have been filling in at the doc's office so I had to get up early (for me) and tried to carefully get out of bed so as to not wake Kyle. Well, that didn't work and he started crying from exhaustion I am sure and I tried hard to get him to be quiet because I didn't want him waking up Aubrey. Too late. So now I have both of them up and I am trying to get into the shower. Not too long after I get in the shower, Aubrey has to go potty. Seeing as she sleeps in blanket sleepers, I had to hang myself out of the shower to undo her. I asked Kyle to please help her but he could get her on the toilet so I again had to hang out to get her on. Well, what comes off must go back on and of course she couldn't get the sleeper back up and that really upset her. I hurried out of the shower, got her dressed, and proceeded to get myself ready for the day. As I walked past Olivia's room on my way upstairs, I heard the light switch going off and on, off and on. I thought Olivia had awakened and started playing with this so I opened the door only to find that it was Aubrey doing the switching and as you might've guessed Olivia was NOT sleeping!

So can I tell you how happy I was to "have" to leave to go to "work!" My dear mother had these sleep-deprived kiddos until I got home. So I am right now going to attempt to pop my pill and have a VERY good night's sleep! Did you hear that kids? S-L-E-E-P! (please)

You can never know the good, if you never know the bad....

I am sure only a handful of you might recognize these words as lyrics from a well-beloved "musical" but it really has become a theme song in my life and I find myself singing it more and more lately(especially in the shower--in my head). I know there would be many things I would not appreciate or even know about, if I didn't experience the exact opposite.

Some of the most intense "feelings" have been going on lately and some very hard things to deal with. Some days have been like thick concrete that is setting and I just can't seem to get to the side and get out of it. Other days are just plain chaotic and days that make good stories for motherhood.

And today brought on such sweet, overwhelming emotions as to how much we are loved and watched over and how because of the hard times, we appreciate the well-termed "tender mercies." Sage and I have been trying to figure out exactly what to do about our living situation. Our house has NOT sold nor will it most likely for awhile still and we don't have money to get our own place until it does sell. Unless, we rent it out. I have been looking for the past 18 months faithfully in the paper every week (yes, we only have a weekly paper in our small town) for rentals hoping that just maybe we could inhabit one of them. There have been some nice ones that we've just had to let go on by because there has just been no way we can do it.

Yesterday, I noticed a rental advertised and recognized the number as a good friend of mine. I called her about it and she told me the details. It is a very nice, big house that was remodeled in the past few years and has a huge yard and is out of town, etc. I was excited about it and knew that it was at the top of our range for renting (if we rented ours out). Today she called me and said that when she told her husband we were interested, he wants to rent it to us for $100 LESS than what they normally would. AND we talked to the realtor today and it sounds like there may be a couple of interested renters for our house. The other good thing is that this rental will not be available until October 1st so that gives us time to get ours rented out. Of course, nothing has happened yet but it has just given me some hope that through all this really, really hard stuff.....the best is yet to come!

Too Young for Makeup?

I was doing one of a bajillion things yesterday when Aubrey comes up looking like this with her underwear and pajamas at her ankles:

My first thought was "OH NO! She painted herself in her poo!" Maybe the shock factor was good in her defense because once I found out it wasn't, I was SO relieved.

Downstairs this is what I found:


And this is what took the brunt of the beauty session:


I don't wear eye shadow all that often anyway but I was counting on this lasting years and years (I think it already has!).

She really didn't do too bad of a job if she was a makeup artist on a show and needed to fabricate a black eye! ;)