Work Camp, Dishes, and Bugs

When it comes to my husband's work, summer is the best.  The engineering work slows down, farming picks up and he's able to be around more and available to get some work done on the house.  Now that most of the haying is done, at least first cut, he's finally been able to get to the basement. 

We had to do some exploratory surgery down there to see how bad it was and we got bad news.  We have "foundation cancer".  But the prognosis is good!  We can do a temporary fix now and go at the serious fix perhaps in the fall or even next summer.  So that's what we did.  Last week we rented the jack hammer, dug a very serious hole, put in a sump pump (thus the flooding, no pump prior to this, all done manually this whole spring and summer....), laid down some more plumbing, dealt with a pile of rubble that was HUGE, re-cemented the whole thing, cleaned it all up and voilà!  It looks like there was never a problem!

My role in the process was getting every single bin out and relocated that I had been storing down there, which included everything from Christmas stuff to children's clothes.  It was a very long and arduous process and required me going through every single bin as many had been damaged in the flooding.  But it was so good to purge and get rid of stuff that we didn't need anymore.  Now it is in the basement of the barn until the basement is in good enough shape to put it all back!

We figure this whole process would have cost us $10,000 if we had hired it out.  We know because another friend of ours did a very similar fix on his basement and that's what he paid, so we are grateful that we could do it on our own, though it was very hard on RM physically and even the boys, but everyone just gets more muscles out of it, so it can't hurt that bad!  I think it was also great for our children to once again observe what their Dad does, how he fixes things, how he problem solves.  The irony is he learned about sump pumps in our first house nearly 20 years ago.  We never knew that knowledge would one day come in handy!  It was also a great opportunity for our boys to work alongside their Dad.  He's trying very hard to make sure that he doesn't make them do anything that he wouldn't do himself and by being near them during the awful, hard work, I think it makes it more bearable for them.

Meanwhile my kitchen is in much better shape today thanks to a visit from Jen this week and a generous donation of a working dishwasher from my folks!  I understand that people have dishwashing philosophies and that some are against dishwashers as it keeps families from working together, etc., but that is not our philosophy....WE LOVE DISHWASHERS!!!!  It's all about being practical.  It saves me HOURS of standing in front of my sink as I go through a lot of dishes every day.  I had been without one for months.  I tried to thank the Lord for the time to look out my window and watch my children in the sandbox, but inside all I could think of was, "I wish my dishwasher worked....."  We installed it right away and it took us  minutes to clean up the kitchen.  Time is precious around here, so I am SO grateful!!!!!

My children aren't so sure they like Dad being available more around the house, however.  When he's around more, he notices more things to do and he makes sure they get done.  It has been awesome as far as I'm concerned.  He has enforced a "No child sits still and does nothing" policy, ok, not officially, but he's been cracking the whip around here and I love it!  I'm noticing they listen to him a lot quicker than they listen to me....hmmmmmm....

The TV is out of bounds, even music, to some degree, as they spend so much time figuring out which song to listen to and it ends up becoming a dance party!  I'm serious.  My husband means business.  It's like our war on debt, we have declared war on spare time, yet again.  When he gets in this mode, I take advantage of it and show him all kinds of things that need to get done around the house that I've been waiting and waiting for him to look at.  I'm hoping this means he'll get those things done.

So, it's a little bit like a work camp over here, my poor kids, but oh well!  They'll have character at the end of it all, right?

Ending on a "why I love where I live" note, yesterday was fantastic.  While we were out for a bit in the afternoon, we left my big boys in charge of my littler boys.  The challenge, "Go find all the bugs you can."  How fun!  When we lived in town, there was no tall grass to look in, we always had to take a long walk to find good bugs.  Here on the farm, around the old dilapidated buildings, there is tall, tall grass everywhere - a bug's paradise.  I never knew certain bugs existed outside of a museum until my oldest son came along.  He introduced me to praying mantises and zipper spiders and many more.

Yesterday, while we were gone, they spent hours in the fields looking for bugs, finding them, then relocating them to a huge empty fish tank in their room.  More fun!  They fed grasshoppers to the praying mantises and watched them get ripped apart.  Ewww, but great for the boys.  They threw flies to the zipper spider and watched it roll it up in it's webbing just like in a nature movie.  They were telling us all about this last night after we got home.  I pulled out a "Charlotte Mason" move and for family worship last night, we read from one of the "living books" we have on insects about the praying mantis.  It was so amazing to read all about it, but more than that, to see how God was in the design and how incredible He designed it.  That was what Charlotte Mason wanted her students to see, the relationship between God and Nature.  After reading a short segment, I had the kids "narrarate" back what they had heard, another Mason move, to help them learn to listen and to see what they know and understood.  It was fantastic how much they heard and grasped.  Then we prayed and thanked God for the praying mantis, for nature, for living on the farm.... what a good day.