Simple Home and Happiness

ROUS is a familiar term around our home. For those of you who do not know sweet Westley, Princess Buttercup and the nasty creatures from the Fire Swamp, I highly recommended renting The Princess Bride immediately! ROUS or Rodents Of Unusual Size, have from time to time popped into my home to say hello. In case you've forgotten, this lovely place I call home is a seventies modular home that has seen better days. Let me give you a little glimpse into what I'm dealing with here. When the wind blows, which being from South Dakota is an everyday occurrence, my indoor curtains honest to goodness blow too. The majority of the windows are cracked and or gapping around the frames, so many of the windows are covered in plastic to keep out the cold and the bugs. The cracks in the siding on the outside of our house tend to let in little and not so little creatures of all kinds. As a result the outside of the house will soon be held together more by the sealant I spray into the crack...

Things have been a little crazy around here the last week or so. Ok, who am I kidding, things are ALWAYS crazy around here. But house things have been buzzing this week, or should I say 'church' things? On Halloween night my father-in-law showed me an awesome find in a farm newspaper. It is an amaaaazing church for sale; dirt cheap. The only catch is that it is nearly two hundred miles from where we live. It didn't deter me, seriously it takes a lot to deter me! With the help of my sister, we found the church's pictures online bright and early on Thursday morning and so the phone calls began... I left voicemails on each of the phone numbers listed and even e-mailed the address that I scrounged up on the Internet. A looooong day proceeded waiting to hear a reply. When the phone rang, I nearly threw the baby 'Hail Mary' style to my husband. A short conversation later with the owner and I had learned that the church was built in 1889 and had been empty for ten year...

We worked cattle earlier this week. Here's the truth about that. I like to imagine waking up before dawn to work cattle looking like this. But in reality it felt like this... For those without first hand experience of working cattle, it is nothing like the romanticized ideal that we see in movies or read in heaving bosom books. At least not in my twenty seven years of experience. For me it always involves swearing, a lot of it. Somebody almost always ends up crying. Me. There is yelling and dust and dirt and tension. You can cut the tension with a knife. There are moments where you hold your breath, and you pray to God very sincerely that the cattle just do as they are suppose to the. first. time. Then they do! And you inwardly do a happy dance, thank you Lord Jesus dance. Then the next moment comes and again you hold your breath and pray fervently. This continues for the rest of the day until the last calf is loaded and the gates to the pasture closed tight. This is how wo...

I was outside with the kiddos the other day, following a huge wind storm. We were picking up fallen branches, and I got to thinking some of them would work really well for a project I had in mind. The twig got pushed aside for a couple of days and then I'm watching the Today show and lo and behold, Ms. Martha Stewart had the same stinkin' idea. Ok, it wasn't like it was rocket science, but just for the record I had it first! It's pretty simple and straightforward but I like it. I took a hurricane lamp and filled it with rock filler. I placed a battery operated candle inside and placed the twig behind it. Now, Ms. Martha spray painted her twig black, which would be a nice touch. I'm just not patient enough, plus I kind of like the natural look, so in the twig went. Next I cut out various shapes from construction paper. Bats, stars, moon, cats, you get the idea. Then my daughter got in on the action and we too black thread and threaded it through holes we made in t...

I made a really fun, fairly simple finger paint recipe from Trish Kuffner's toddler book recently. My three year old was driving me crazy and was underfoot. She had seen a commercial for finger paints and decided we should have some too. I opened up Kuffner's book, and tada... She had several recipes for finger paints. So here's how it looked going through the process. Overall it was pretty straight forward. It takes about ten minutes of stirring for the cornstarch and water mixture to come together. Just stick with it, it will come together! I was a bit nervous that because I was using food dye, it would stain little fingers, but it doesn't. I don't know if its the drop of dish soap that makes the difference, but it washed right off the skin. I just stripped my little one down and let her have at it, so I can't say if it comes out of clothes or not. :) I did as the book suggested and put little dollops of the uncolored mix in mini muffin tins and t...

This time of year, when the weather starts to cool and I feel the need to snuggle in, I start getting all crazy with crafting ideas. I picked these crates up the other day outside the dumpster at our local John Deere store. I told politely asked my husband to grab them after checking to make sure I could take them. I am not sure yet what I'm going to do with them, but I've got a couple ideas. Maybe paint them and hang them for shelves, or use them as toy bins, maybe even laundry hampers for the girls. Really there's a million uses for a nice crates like these, so I'll come up with something. They're around 2 1/2 x 1 1/2 feet. Nice solid wood! I'm super excited about these! If you have any ideas or have done something similar, let me know how it turned out. And now I have a confession to make. I am as bad as the retail stores, as one season comes in, I am already moving onto the next one. Fall weather has finally arrived here in the Midwest and as much as I l...

I've been busy following several blogs. They have such beautiful homes and are great inspirations. Sometimes I get carried away thinking that blog homes and magazine homes look that perfect every minute of every day. It's hard to remember that often the photos shown are there for inspiration and are only slices of a moment caught on camera. Pictures do not necessarily tell the story of true everyday life. Rachel Martin's blog, Finding Joy ,has got me thinking about taking the time to look for the spaces in my home that make me happy and inspire me. I need to focus on those places more, and less on the toys all over the living room floor or the messes on the counter that need to be put away. Instead of getting so wrapped up in what is unfinished, I need to focus on what is finished. This is the sign I just put up for Fall, it makes me smile to see it every time I come home!   This Scarecrow came from Lakeside Collections and the pumpkin from Walmart. The chair was my ...