Labor Day Weekend

 We labored especially hard this weekend. It was the last weekend that my sister and her room-mate were in their house. JD and the boys went and helped her load up furniture on Saturday. While she is not moving in with us full-time, the stuff that she is keeping is. She sold or gave away most of her items, but still had to divide into things to stay with her now, items to store at our house, things that will ship overseas initially and things that will ship on a second round. We spent this morning moving her furniture and rubbermaids out of the "vacation" trailer and into the barn. While she still has piles and piles in the house to sort, I took advantage of the situation and had JD move extra furniture, that we plan to use when the children shuffle bed-rooms again, up to the barn as well. As soon as Deb is done packing her corner, we will cover it with tarps to prevent a layer of dirt over the next few years.

The barn loft

There are several items we are storing in the house that would risk being damaged in the loft. Her books seem to fit on my empty bookshelf down-stairs and we are incorporating several household items and dishes into ours. The house she was renting seemed to develop a mold issue lately, so she is scrubbing and washing everything before it is used or stored, which is a lot of work!

JD and I attempted to sneak down into the woods to see how the clearing is going; they worked all day today in spite of it being Labor Day. Within minutes, we had five little people on our trail.

I had to do all four girl's hair this weekend, which is a record for me (and not a fun one!) It took about 3-4 hours each to take out Tori and Julia's and another 3-4 to put it back in. Thankfully, I can have the older kids take it out and I only have to do the long session to put back in. They have new back to school braids that will stay until I return from Ethiopia in four weeks. Selah and Bella's hair is much faster to do, but will only make it a week.

This is taken on our walk back - see the back of the house up the hill? JD has a lot of cleaning up to do before we can fence or plant grass.

After moving furniture all morning, JD spent most of the rest of the day cutting grass. Alyssa and James resumed fence painting, that she didn't finish before her mission trip this summer, and Ben and I clipped chicken wings and re-arranged teen-aged guinea hens. 

While those little people running across the field are cute, I really took this to show how well the grass ended up growing this summer, thanks to the rainiest summer I ever remember in Virginia. After 7-8 years of laying grass seed, I'm just so thankful to finally have real grass!

I can't even remember the last time Elijah wore a shirt at home - he is doing his part to minimize my laundry!