Pumpkins

My husband’s family grew pumpkins while he was growing up. With that came an annual pumpkin carving party to “use up” any pumpkins they hadn’t sold (they grew around an acre of pumpkins).

When Ben’s parents separated and we purchased our house. We kept that tradition alive. It has always been one of our favorite “chores” to go purchase a slew of pumpkins for the event every year.

Having little ones has made it even more fun. The determinations they make for the perfect pumpkin are both hilarious and awesome.

We have made a tradition of taking a picture for each of their first times on this venture. Even though we dont have a house and will be forgoing the party this year we decided to still spend an afternoon at the pumpkin patch.

It was so fun to wonder around with them choosing their perfect pumpkin. An incredible afternoon of being together.

And we needed to get the perfect photo of Lincoln for his first time.

Which one is your favorite? I will be putting it on the wall, after we have a wall again, with the three girls.

Days Like These

Let me start by saying I love being a mom. I love being a wife. I love serving the community with a newspaper. But some days are really hard. Some days are really stressful. Somedays I dont want to do any of those things.

Today I am still fighting a cold, the kids are still fighting a cold, my husband is fighting a cold. I have phone calls to return, emails to return, new emails to send out, snail mail to send out, oh, and four children to take care of.

I dont want to do any of it. I want to crawl in to bed and sleep.

But that’s not a choice. So I am trying my best to keep the children, who by the way are not acting sick with the exception of profusely coughing, alive and get something on my list accomplished.

These children that I love are driving me crazy. They dont want to sit and watch a movie, they dont want to play nicely, they dont want to color quietly. All they want to do is fight with each other, tell at everyone and everything, and bounce of the freaking walls, literally.

At 2:00 I finally sent them outside. Maybe the fresh air will help their coughs because trying to get them to relax wasnt happening.

That’s when something amazing happened. It was the only part of the day I got to see my children completely happy, playing nicely, not yelling. The only thing that would have made it better is if I would have felt better and could have joined them.

Sometimes I get too worried about trying to look after them that I end up stressed and they end up miserable. Sometimes I just need to roll with it. They might be sick, but they are still children, who have energy and need an outlet. Go outside and quit driving me crazy while the weather is still decent!

Working Towards Building a Dream

Here is a recap of 2018, trying to build a house.
In January/February I was very pregnant with baby number 4, experiencing lost of side effects (maybe more on that later). My husband, Ben, and I had been working on custom house plans for over a year. We had two reputable small companies quote them out and decided on one. We were excited! We started the process with the bank to get preapproval for what we needed and then continued to go through the financing process for a construction loan. We were told that we wouldn’t have a problem. We were told that we just needed one more document or one more piece of information. We were told that everything was going to come together. So, in April our builder started.
We were full of giddy excitement as we watched those first couple of months as slow progress was made. A hole was dug.

Then forms were put up.

Then we had a basement.

It was a dream. Everything that we had been working so hard for was forming in front of our eyes. But behind the scenes at the bank there were problems, they needed more than documents, and everything wasn’t coming together. We were finally told that we could no longer progress until things were settled at the bank. And the bank now wanted us to sell the home our family home in order to come up with the cash they wanted to close the loan.

We were devastated to say the least. We didn’t know where we would live, whether we could get the amount of money the bank wanted, or how we were going to move forward.

So Ben and I made a plan. We decided we didn’t want to waste our money on an apartment, and every place we called wanted you to sign at least a year lease. We only needed 6 months. We decided we would buy a camper that we could call home while trying to build our forever home. It was long process since we have very specific needs with very little money and everything was selling really fast. But we finally found one.

So here we are. Now if we could just sell the house…. that will be a story for a different day.

A Beginning

Welcome! My name is Danica.
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It has been a long, hard summer to say the very least. A hard last two years really, but that is a long list of stories for another day. But over the last few weeks it has begun to hit me that we are walking a tight rope towards everything we have been working so hard for (more on that later). I am an emotional wreck. I have had several people tell me to start a blog to document everything that we are encountering.

At first I thought, “Like I have time for a blog.” But after some more thought I realized it could be the perfect opportunity to document the highs, lows, happiness, struggles, ridiculousness and contentment that we are striving and fighting for every day.

I also thought this could be a place where I can simply just be me with my love of my family, books, cooking, cleaning, writing, singing….. every facet of who I am. So I don’t know how often I am going to write yet, but I am going to write. I am going to use this as a means of therapy you might say. If you want to follow along, I welcome you on this journey.