Our House in the Middle of Our Street

view from Peace Arch park On Monday, we will be entering our 6th week of our move, outside of Lincoln and settling in Blaine, Washington, directly south of the Canadian border. Stefan and I can still hardly believe this, since it has gone so fast, and have said on more than one occasion, to more than one person who asks how we're doing, " It feels like we're still on vacation, with our kids here and stuff in the closets. " This, in my opinion, is a pretty great way to feel about a new town that is 1,600 miles away from one's hometown.  When we first started to look outside our apartment, to find things to do in the area, I knew I needed to be connected to a homeschool group like I was back in Lincoln. In fact, before we even moved I had emailed the head of the Whatcom County Homeschooler's Association , just to find out if I could be sent a newsletter to check it out from afar. I'm so glad I decided to (wo)man up and go to the local homeschool...

photocredit For the first time in years... years ....I'm going to be participating in a sewing week in April. I've wanted to join this very same seasonal group of sewers for a long time, but things would come up, I'd be too committed, or my kids were just too little and I was simply too tired.  This time around, I've got no excuse. I'm going to be brave and start sewing again. I'm going to spend the next month picking out patterns, choosing fabrics from my stash, and cutting them all out. If I take the time to create the scenario (cutting is my defeatist step), I will enjoy spending an hour or two sewing everything up during nap times, photographing everything, and posting it here on the blog and within the group online.  I have tons of ideas already from my pinterest boards , and I even bought a few patterns months ago in anticipation of when I'd start sewing again. Now...to make sure that darned machine is up to snuff... * Will...

This top picture is a view from Semiahmoo strip, where, at the end of this (behind me) is a little ferry that travels during the summer months from Marine Park pier to this dock. Off to the side is a quaint little beach, another dock, and beyond that, another little beach for digging and sea-shell collecting. This was a really fun spot we found, with a beautiful drive to get there, and the perfect little spot for our Saturday lunch. We'll definitely go back in the summer, when the ferry is running everyday.  The clear days in our pictures are deceiving. It's still winter, which although that doesn't mean dumps of snow--what I'm used to-- but just gloomy day after gloomy day, morning til' night dreary gray, and rain, rain, rain. When the sun appears (especially on the weekend) you grab your shoes and get outside. You don't know when it will be back.  Living in Blaine, and in the Pacific Northwest in general, still feels a little unreal, even thou...

To even begin this post, seems overwhelming to me. I don't even know where to begin without making this a novel, and inevitably, never hitting publish. I'll try to summarize as best I can the actual moving week, and hurry along to the more exciting part of it--where we've settled. *** On February 19th, we hit the road for a long drive with a fully packed Penske truck at roughly 8:30 in the morning.  We drove through 4 hours of the hardest wind I've even driven through, and then it was flat and stark Nebraska horizons until we hit Denver, for a late dinner with my grandmother who lives there. We were able to stop and visit with her for a couple hours before going onward to Laramie, WY, where we'd hunker down and fall asleep, exhausted, within minutes of checking into our hotel.  Driving; morning, noon and night with only stops for bathroom breaks, and gas-refills, with one long hour stop allotment for dinner, until we arrived in Bellingham, Washington, l...

We are in the midst of packing up, and moving. Not just any move, but The Move we've been trying to accomplish for years now. We're heading up to (Washington) Canada. In the last couple of months Stefan had been talking to a potential employer up in Richmond, British Columbia , and after a very swift interview process they offered him the job. Small and large details aside, he accepted and plans to start on February 25th. We leave one week earlier, on the 18th. That's literally just over 2 weeks from when you will read this. We told family and close friends first, and while we haven't been keeping it a huge secret, our church, as a whole, did not know until last night because it was then we could tell everyone at our seasonal congregational meeting what our plans were in person, and with many of them all at once. I didn't want to say anything online until that happened. We've been steadily spending heaps of time with friends and family, all while slowly p...

photocredit My last post was a very long list , and this is more of the same, only with the movies I hope to watch in 2013. Stefan and I are huge flick addicts, and although we only watch roughly 1 hour of TV (movie, or a show on Netflix) a day, we go through, usually, over 40 movies in a year, with the sparse movie outing in an actual theater. Watching movies is just another avenue of my love of literature because it's a story in a visual sense, with a different perspective and rich aesthetics. I learn so much from movies, and within a church educational hour film class, have been able to understand more of film, how it affects culture and how a good story touches us on so many levels including our spiritual sense. There will (hopefully) be reviews of some of my favorites, as writing book and movie reviews is one of my favorite things--I love to share what I find honest and well done--but I know I won't get to them all. The picture above, Les Miserables , was the film...

Last year I had a good reading year. I didn't do a lot of sewing, a little bit of knitting, and almost no other creating besides the blog. I read a large majority of this list from 2012 , and added quite a few more that I finished within the twelve months as well. While I couldn't possibly add to an already bursting year in 2012, I had made, perhaps in July, a second book list for 2013. This was a fairly absurd idea, being as I was going to have an impossible list to get through at that rate, but I can't resist a good title. The books with the (*) behind it, means that was a book I wasn't able to read, but had on my list in 2012. Without further ado, my list for this year: * Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott * Some Assembly Required by Anne Lamott *  Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tripp *Total Truth by Nancy Pearcy *In The Basement of the Ivory Tower by Professor X (current read) *When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson *State of Wonder by A...