Sand In My Toes

Father's day was bright and sunny and rumored to be quite hot.  We were enjoying a relaxing day, the kids playing with their Aunt & Uncle.  I snuck outside and filled up 68 (4 broke) water balloons to surprise L with.

When we finally got out there, Granny, Grandpa, Papa, Mama and L ran around, gleefully throwing water balloons.  The last balloon was beautifully broken above L's head, drenching him.  He loved it, until he realized it was the last one, and then the tears came.  F also started to cry, in empathy.

Next time, more balloons.

Ok, totally hating the rental market here. OVER-priced. Too many negatives. We won't save any money to if we rent something we'd be happy with. So... new plan. Save up a down payment and start house hunting.

We had an awesome park day this week, meeting some people in the homeschool group. The kids got plenty of playground time, and hung out by and on the pedal boats on a dock by the lake. We saw a number of fish and a cool snake swimming among the lily pads.

We've been blowing lots of bubbles around here, in fact F is now saying bubble. We started off small and worked our way up to a couple of big wands. Now we're looking at recipes for bubble solution and a way to make really BIG bubbles.

Biking - I think L is really close to taking those training wheels off. We also picked up a trailer for my bike today. We spent the evening riding with two boys in the back and it was great. Now I wonder, why did I ever stop riding a bike. It's great - so much fun that you forget it's even good for you.

Last week we attended an outing to a farm with the local homeschooling group.  It was pretty exciting when the farmer gathered all the kids around him talk to them about how the day would go.  When he asked the group if they were homeschoolers and all the different ages yelling "Yes!", I had a huge smile on my face.

It was fun!  Hayrides and horserides.  Feeding the baby animals, climbing into their pens, playing with the barn animals.  Milking a cow and seeing butter made.  Feeding the pig their lunch leftovers.  Chasing my littlest, because he sure didn't want to be held, or do what we did.

That little one is exhausting!  We were at the playground today and after some swinging, climbing, and their own personal front loader & dump truck show, he decided to fun off.  Further and further until I saw him go down, just to emerge dripping and covered in mud and water.  Poor kid found a huge mud puddle.  Note to self: Extra change of clothes in the car.

Oh my, who thought it would be this hard to find a rental?  Here?!?

The economy here is much worse than the rest of the US.  There are lots of houses on the market, many in foreclosure, and a relatively large amount of rental properties.  We were expecting to find a glut of options that suited our needs, in a fair price.  Now we're wondering if we were wrong.

We think we've narrowed down the county we want to be in.  We've found a homeschooling group and an unschooling group that I have a good feeling about.  This county has remarkably less rentals that the alternate county we were considering.  Now we've also found that the pricing for what is on the market in our range, is really high.  What is in our range, that we've looked at, have some real issues.
Today's viewing was the worst.  It looked great on the outside, great landscaping and yard, lake access too.  The inside... reeked of cigarettes.  It was dirty.  Really dirty and needed lots of repair work.

Dirty will not get your house rented.  I'll spare the details of the other properties we looked at.

This morning we had high hopes about a cute place we found in a really cool neighborhood.  Alas, an application was already put in on it.  Back to the search.