April update

April showers bring May flowers, in theory. Well, we have the warm weather, the chia lawn, and lots of flowers, but little rain in comparison. Still, plenty of lawn mowing to do!

April started out with H1's Spring Break and a visit from his brother, sister-in-law, and their 3 boys from NY. It was so good to see them...it has been over a year! They stayed in Virginia Beach, so we spent our time down there, enjoying the ocean, the pool, and the Va Beach Aquarium. Their youngest got sick, so the poor little guy wasn't feeling so well the last couple days of the trip. It's always a bummer to get sick on vacation.

At the end of the break, we painted H3's new room and got her moved in! It's a light green with purple curtains, and various accents in pink and purple. She loves her new room. It's more central to the rest of the house, and she doesn't have to go through our bedrooom to access it. It's also 3x the size of her other room, so there's space to play--which helps out big time since I'm babysitting a few times a week now (one 6 month old and one 2 year old, not related).

This past week brought H1's dad and a foreign exchange student from Denmark, Mathias. He just turned 17 recently and has been staying with Dad Homer since August. When he arrived his English was ok, and you could certainly understand him, but now it's almost like he was born here, minus the accent. Since I was still babysitting during the week and H1 had to work, we all hung around the house for the most part, except for Friday. H1 was able to take a day off of work and we headed to Busche Gardens! It was a perfect day to go. The park had relatively few visitors and we were able to take Mathias on all the rides. Even H3 got to enjoy her first roller coaster and water ride. We'll be able to go on more later, since Va residents only have to pay for one ticket in order to go all season. One of the few perks to living in this state!

While they were visiting, I got a call from my landlord, letting me know that a company was ready to work on the flooring at our convenience. I called and set up a time for Monday morning (yesterday) and that was when they were planning to begin. The goal was to have all the flooring in the kitchen/den, laundry room, bathroom, and both bedrooms replaced by Wednesday evening. The bedrooms were getting carpet and everything else a laminate tile. They started pulling up the floor yesterday morning, and this is what they found.





At least that's part of what they found. There's more on the other side of the kitchen. Needless to say, it halted the project. The subfloor is rotted in multiple places and will have to be replaced. The dilemma now is, there is a specific person my landlord wants to have fix it, and since he's currently tied up with another project, it will be a couple days before he gets here. So in the meantime, I'm stuck with that floor, and all the furniture from the kitchen/den and laundry room in my bedroom and the small room that used to be Shannan's. Oh, and there's an extra futon and desk in the living room too, for lack of space! It's nuts in here! I'm not quite losing my mind yet, but thinking about it. I did spray bleach over that floor 7 time yesterday, and once already this morning. On the one plus note, at least I'm not paying for any of this and it will look better when it's done....

Taking each day one step at a time right now and just focusing on breathing and trusting God on the frustrating details of the rest of life right now...it would take waaaaay too long to blog about those now!

I'll post more pics of the fun parts of our month later. Those pics are on our other computer, which is not hooked up and being stored in the little room for the moment. Ugh! I'll be happy to have my house back in order!

~H2