Housewife, 54

But some days it feels like summer is already here.  Remember how I said that with the long, cool spring, that I thought summer would come in with full force.  Yep, pretty much!  We have had many days in the high 80*-90*F and the WIND has been pretty strong.  You know the saying... "there are only about 5 windless days in South Dakota"???  pretty true.... On the plus side: The grandkids and I are settling into a routine and we have more good days than bad.  We do a lot of baking or something fun in the kitchen... Muffins, smoothies... I try to keep it healthy and with as little sugar as possible.  We add oatmeal or whole grain to the muffins as well as dried fruits or bananas.  We have built up a repertoire of crafts: stamping, folding paper airplanes, coloring and now with the hot weather, we have added water color painting out on the deck.  I just have to keep the 2-year-old from decorating his face!  Baby girl is sleeping more reg...

I am appalled to find that when sitting down to create this post, I found my previous post unpublished!  I can understand how it happened....  I like to type up the text for my posts on my laptop, but all of my photos are on my phone.... so I have to go back and forth from laptop to phone to get everything uploaded.  Guess I dropped the ball.  I do sometimes get frustrated with this program when it comes to inserting photos.  I probably had problems, needed to cool off, and forgot all about it. Not that things have been exciting here or anything.  HA! We are deep in the throes of the Corona Virus here now.  For several weeks, we felt like it was not going to affect us here - at least not too much.  But schools closed on March 15th, and that is when I started helping take care of all 3 grandchildren - ages 5, 2, and 4 months.  Two weeks later, my rather isolated life was turned inside out as my husband arrived to stay for the duration, we ...

Just as certain as anything, winter is here. We have had winter since November, so nuts to hoping for a long, pleasant fall...  I had planted seeds in late Sept or early Oct, hoping that I could harvest some quick-growing greens for Thanksgiving and maybe Christmas?  No such luck.  It was well below freezing for a while in November already. We did have a lovely Thanksgiving Holiday with all the family in attendance... including New Baby Girl! She arrived Nov. 17, a tiny girl at 6#7oz.  But she is growing and happy!  We also took the requisite Family Holiday Photo, this is as good as we can get: DH and DS the Younger had driven out together from WI and IL, and due to the weather (snow, wind) they had to stay an extra day, into Monday.  But they did arrive back to their homes safely that night.  For Christmas, they decided to drive separately, since they had different schedules and plans. I handmade very few gifts for Christmas:I  sewed a h...

                                     Please: Excuse the spacing... I give up on it! Well, that went well albeit exhausting! After my last post, packing began in earnest... or should I say frenzied?  It was so much harder to divide things into two households - a selection of things to leave for DH in his apartment, and everything else to go with me to our new home - and downsize at the same time.  When all was said and loaded, there were still things in the house that we did not have room for in either household and had not yet sold.  Poor hubby was also left with the task of doing the final cleaning, since I had to take off the next day to race out to the new home and prepare it for the delivery of furnishings. My trip out was uneventful, which I was very grateful for.  We were still under stress that the sale of the house would go through, and there were several thin...

UGH!  I HATE this part of moving!  Packing things up and playing box tetris... Now, which item of similar use can fill up THIS box??? Living Room Bookcases, DONE!  Husband has been very little help, but I can't blame him too much.  The job he had high hopes of getting in our new town fell through, and he is now resigned to staying behind.  There have been so many uncertainties this past month or so...  We listed the house for sale at the end of June, just before the July 4th holiday, and had NO interest.  So going out that following week to close on our new home was a bit disconcerting - how long WILL it take to sell our old house??? On our return at the end of that week, we had an Open House and then things started moving!  Showing after showing all that week, then a few days of quiet, and a few more showings and BANG, an offer!  So we are now under contract (which CAN fall through, but I hope it doesn't).  We then decided to go...

This will be our new home. It checked off many of the boxes on our wish list, but it IS in a tight residential neighborhood which is not my idea of lovely.  You can see how close together the houses are.  I hope we have nice neighbors... Meanwhile, back on the home front in Illinois we are busy arranging things.  Tomorrow is our garage sale and I hope to sell a lot of furniture that will NOT fit into above house.  This is not a bad thing, we felt we needed to fill this big house, and then took pieces from both of our parents' homes when they down-sized, and then passed away.  We have much more than we will need.  So the sorting and schlepping out to the garage began a couple of weeks ago.  Thank goodness my housekeeping decluttering started well over a year ago and I have been opening drawers and cabinets thinking...I've already been through all this, so it just needs a double check! So my days are filled with more than the usual clutter and my...

I knew it was inevitable, and actually I have been looking forward to it... just a bit.    When we moved back to Illinois from South Dakota 12 years ago, it wasn't really because we wanted to, but to help take care of our parents.  Our sons were through school, so the timing was good, and DH was still at a hire-able age, so we knew it was the right thing to do.  But finding a job and a location that would put us between the parent's locations proved to be a bit tricky... we ended up having to take what we could get.  A Chicago suburb - however far out - was never a choice I would have made....  But the job paid well and the location was do-able if not ideal, so here we are.  And here we have stayed far longer than I had expected to.  As you age, jobs are harder to come by, and while our parents have all passed on a few years ago, DH has not found a job to move to, and he feels it is his age that causing him to be passed over. So he feels that stay...