I love our little home. I fell in love with the yard before I even saw the inside. Which was probably good cause the inside needed lots of love.  And we've done so much work on the inside since we moved in. In fact the only thing that hasn't been painted is the kitchen cabinets, bathroom walls, and the exterior doors. But we haven't done much outside. About this time last year, Gary yanked out all the overgrown shrubbery that was planted way too close to the house, and the girls to took their money to make themselves a faerie garden and a butterfly garden, in their own little areas.  And they made pretty little areas even if there have been times I have had to go out and pulled foot tall weeds because they let it go for about a month.






 Gary started painting the house for me back in December. I think the blue makes the white brick look so pretty. He has got to finish the cutting in still around the faerie garden and the AC unit, but it looks great from the front. We still haven't settled on a trim color. I am thinking black shutters (we still need to replace one from the Hurricane) and black on the metalwork under the carport to cover the confederate blue. Then maybe white up around the eaves. Still no consensus on the front door. I'd like to replace it with one with a big piece of glass to let in more light, but Gary isn't going for the price tag. Anyway, he has hung some pictures and things for me this week, such as moving my flag holder to the front porch, so my next flag won't fade in the sun so fast, or get beat to death in the constant wind. Beautiful day, with my beautiful helpers.

 Britt's room was my first project. I decided to drag his bed out from against the wall for him to clean all the trash, toys, and clothes from that bottomless pit, when he asked if we could move the bed so that he could get to stuff without asking me to move it. So after thinking about it. I told him we could try moving it to the other wall to see if it fit. So we swapped his Chester drawers and bed, then, cleaned out his closet. Short couple hour project back on Feb. 28th.










 On Tuesday all I did for Rebecca was reassemble the bunk bed with alot of help from Ruth. All day Wednesday and the part of Thursday that I was home I worked on Rebecca and Kate's room. I even put up the wall clings that came with Kate's bedding that I had never decided what to do with them. Oddly enough Rebecca's favorite part is the closet. She has all her breakable stuff from her bookcase on the dresser in there. She is also using it as her "changing room."  She has been most excited about taking baths with Kate and getting to keep all their bathstuff in there, and not get it out for Ruth. She also likes picking out Kate's clothes when she gets hers out. I have to really insist if I want to do it. Rebecca also got some baby doll stuff from our T-ball mom which she has played with almost constantly and has been trying to teach Kate how to play with them. Rebecca decided the twin babies are for Kate and she's given her the kissy doll that she doesn't play with anymore.

All in all everyone seems happy with the new arrangements.

By popular request I thought I'd share some of our decorating photos.  Decorations went up here about a month ago now.  Since Rebecca got to stay over in Alabama, her conditions were that she got to help put up the Christmas tree here first, and that her elf would meet her in Alabama.  So, for once I decorated way ahead of Thanksgiving.  Something I never do.  I moved things around a bit this year.  Last year I set up our dining room table differently than I normally do, but this year I went back to my old standby.  Everything else I changed up.












Adding a new stocking to the fireplace this year.  I'm out of hooks for my sign.  I ended up taking some old shower curtain hooks and hanging them with that.  Gary keeps meaning to check at the shop on the farm and see if they have some scrap metal to bend me some hooks to match the dark metal that I have, but he's not gotten around to it yet.  I don't have the tree up by the fireplace this year, it's in the window.  Which of course meant I moved all the living room furniture around.  I miss actually looking out the window from my chair during the day, but I do like how it looks walking around the room, and it allowed me to keep our thankful tree up a while longer.














Instead of having the Christmas tree plug in to the outlet that the light switch works, I plugged in the Christmas lights that wrap around the fireplace.  Turned out nice.  Last year the elves brought the kids an elf door, and me they brought this cute little sign, so it's a new addition.


My manager isn't by the tv this year, but on the ledge between my window and living room.  I thought about getting a little creche from Walmart for it, but waited too long, because they are already out.  I'm still trying to decide if I'm brave enough to paint them.  I think they'd be so much prettier painted up.


If you are on facebook, you'll already know that the elves decorated the side door in our bedroom earlier in the week.  I think it turned out really nicely.  The kids have their trees up in there room, and we put the spinning light on the back porch, which they have been flipping on in the evenings when they play out there.  We've been out front a bit this week, so I'll share some outside pictures in another post some other time.  Merry Christmas!

Here in our neck of the woods, we went from forecast of little impact as we would be on the west side of the storm, to mandatory evacuations in case of storm surge since the eye would pass directly over us, to ultimately having the storm pass so far east, that sustained winds here only reached 90 mph (of course there were gust here and there that registered higher).















We had portions of 5 trees down in our yard, plus a whole host of branches.  Our two massive banyan trees in the front yard, had the tops break out of them.  We have two palm trees completely down in the back. And the top of our nearly dead mulberry tree broke out, but it's not in the yard, so we don't know where it went.  We also have 5 Norfolk Pines next to the house, some of which are missing half their branches or more.  Gary warned me that they resembled telephone poles, but it's not quite that drastic.  Our neighbor to the east also has small trees and bushes planted down his property line, and several of those either broke off or completely came down along our yard.  It's strange now we can actually see neighbors on both side of us, that we couldn't before.  And, there are so many leaves down we can't see mulch stone, or even some of the low plants in the kids' garden spaces.  We also had two small leaks, one in our bedroom over my desk, and another in the back porch.

Before

After

It's straight up miraculous though that none of the trees fell on the house.  I'm not sure that there is 2 yards between the Norfolk Pines which are apparently very brittle trees and Britt's bedroom wall.  Those massive Banyan trees could have EASILY ended up on the girls' bedroom, and gone through the roof.  After the initial reports we expected to lose our shed and the carport, but everything was fine.  It was shocking to see all the trees down though.  The yard's going to look really different.  I suppose it might speed up when we get the tree work down that we've been talking about doing since January.



This year has been one of those weather cycles, for big Hurricanes.  They expect to have 19 named storms this year that would put us up to the letter S.  Harvey, Irma, and now Maria have been strong storms, one a rain maker, the other a wind maker, and Maria and strong fast developing storm.  We have friends who have been affected by all three.  I especially feel for those on the Caribbean islands.  Many of the houses aren't built to the requirements that homes in Florida are built for, and being barely above sea level they have trouble with storm surge, that we don't have inland here.  But most of all they are on the path for storm after storm.