A friend of mine just happens to be a professional artist who teaches classes to homeschoolers.  I asked her if I could take the class too and she said yes. We just finished eight weeks of so-much-fun! So, it was five little girls rangin between five and ten years old . . . and me. I loved it! Each week we learned about an artist (both about their life and also about their style – or their preferred medium). Then we chose a piece to try to emulate.

Here are a few things I have drawn or painted lately.

Georgia O’Keefe and watercolors (mine’s on the right)

My first time working with charcoal and learning about shadow. I do NOT see the appeal of working with charcoal – it is soooooo messy!!!!

Henri Matisse and cut-outs/collage (mine’s on top)

This is just a random Painted Bunting that I drew from our Bird Field guide – my contribution to Adele’s gallery wall.

Here it is in it’s habitat =)

Adele drew this Junco at the bird feeder a few days ago – I love it!

There are a few more pieces I’d like to show you, but they are packed – because we are moving – TOMORROW.

Believe it or not, we went to look at a house on February 28th, and we both just felt like it was perfect (even though it is at the tippy top of our budget), so we put in a rental application that same day. We both felt like we couldn’t buy right now because we don’t know how long we’ll be in the area and we’ve lost so much (and are still losing so much) money on our house in Mystic, we don’t want to be out-of-state landlords again if we can help it. FYI our renters are exercising their military clause and getting out of the one year lease after only six months because they are being transferred to WA (oh, and one of those rent payments went to the realtors, so with the vacancy during the winter, that’s five months of rent coming in out of NINE!). And, the rental price for many of the houses here is significantly less than the projected mortgage payment would be if we were to buy the house. i.e. we couldn’t afford to buy the houses we were looking at renting! And for the ones we could barely afford, it would max us out and we wouldn’t have any money left to fix them up (which the ones we could afford definitely needed!) because real estate here is just so expensive – and the weather here is awful, so it’s not even like paying a lot to live in San Diego or Hawaii or something glamorous with a beach and mild weather. And even if we could swing buying a fixer, then we’d have about a MILLION dollars in debt between the two mortgages – which freaks us both out. Thankfully, we have zero consumer debt, but still. Debt is debt, which the bible says is slavery, which is less than desirable. And we are still paying my law school student loans . . .  So, yeah, we are still renting. All that to say, it took a few nerve-wracking days to find out if our application was accepted (someone else had also put in an application a few days before we saw the house) and we had a super-tiny window of time during which we could give notice to our landlord and still be out of this house by April 1st (my cut-off to move before my due date). SO, when we finally found out that we got the house, it was an immediate rush to notify our landlord and get packing. P.S. Our landlord had originally wanted to put our house on the market during the month of April, so we aren’t leaving him in a lurch. He just didn’t want us to move out in the middle of winter, which April isn’t supposed to be the middle of winter but here it is the middle of March and it’s forecasted to snow on Monday!!

Anywho, now I am completely surrounded by boxes, and we are moving TOMORROW! So, this is by way of an excuse for not posting lately. But, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be overloading you with pictures as soon as I get over there and get my camera out. Basically, the house is AMAAAAZING! It is light and bright! Everything is freshly painted white (whereas this house wasn’t painted since at least the last two tenants have lived here) and it’s all hardwood floors (dirty carpets in a rental creep me out especially with a new baby coming and with Everett on the floor). And, maybe best of all, the kitchen is open to the family room/living room/couch room/fireplace room (we haven’t decided what to call that one yet). Technically there are two column things and a half wall separating the two rooms, but it’s the most open of any house I’ve ever lived in. And, the cream on top of my ice cream Sundae is the fact that there is a master bathroom at all and that it has an enormous soaking jacuzzi tub!! To say nothing of the laundry on the main floor and the laundry chute – I don’t have to go down to a disgusting unfinished basement 100 times a day to do laundry!!! I think this house will be quite close to heaven-on-earth. OK, not even close, but a vast improvement on this one for sure! Oh, did I mention the location? It’s less than three miles to Derm Dad’s work, so he can easily ride his bike or hop on a bus (that goes directly to the hospital and comes every 15 minutes all day long). He never dreamed we’d find a place with an even shorter commute than he has now! Did you know that it’s not unusual for people in this area to have commutes of one or even two hours (both ways)?!?!? The new house is close to church, too. And yet, it’s just two houses from a dead end (whereas we are on an extremely busy street now – there is literally a bus stop right in front of our house and people are walking in front of our house all times of day and night because of the metro station) and at the end of our new dead-end street there is a really nice park! So, I am super-excited to be moving to the new house, but I am also completely overwhelmed with the actual work of packing and moving. =) Ha! I’m not afraid to work hard, and packing and organizing is truly something I enjoy doing, but I have been really surprised with how my bursts of energy seem to get shorter and shorter, followed by extreme fatigue (think elephant-tranquilizer-tired), then contractions and cramping. And I still have seven weeks until my due date! So, I am listening to my body and taking a rest when I get tired. Which means that we will be making a few trips over here during the next two weeks to get all the stuff that didn’t get packed. Also, we are out of boxes. =)

The walk-through is today, so we packed the car (well, as packed as it can be with two car seats in it) with our kitchen essentials and some fragile stuff. That way we can at least eat right away. Because food for a pregnant lady is an around the clock concern. What, you don’t wake up in the middle of the night starving? OK, maybe that’s just me. Pray for us, kay?

P.S. I’ve been awake for over an hour (Everett is an extremely early riser!!) and it’s still pitch black dark outside! crazy!

Give me a few days to get a bit settled and then I’ll be back to show you everything. I have some really exciting plans for the new house. And, while I’ve been taking my rest breaks, I’ve been reading some really amazing books – I can’t wait to tell you all about it!

All’s grace!

Nicole