More About Me

(Circa Early 2010) A Constantly Changing and Evolving 100 Things About Me:

1. I’m a follower of Jesus.
2. I need grace every day.
3. Everything I do is related to point #1.
4. I don’t have everything figured out, and my life is a journey of faith and learning.
5. Sometimes I don’t like that I don’t have everything figured out.
6. I’m Jason’s wife.
7. We met in college.
8. This year is our 10th anniversary!
9. I love him like crazy and am so grateful that we’re together.
10. He has amazing green eyes, a beautiful brain, and wicked skillz on the bass guitar.
11. We are both big nerds.
12. And completely okay with it.
13. We have four beautiful children.
14. We homeschool.
15. I don’t know how long we’ll homeschool. We’re taking it a year at a time.
16. I’d be happy to be homeschooling through high school.
17. I’d be equally as happy to have them go to school at any time, if it was the right choice for that specific situation.
18. I never thought I’d homeschool, though I always wanted that for my children.
19. I didn’t think I had enough patience.
20. I still don’t think I have enough patience.
21. I am a work in progress.
22. Maya is seven, loves to read more novels than her mama can bring home from the library each week, looks gorgeous in her new glasses, loves horses, and is always coming up with a new idea/project/book to write.
23. She likes to be in charge, and often does a great job of it.
24. She’s so much like her mama.
25. Ellery is four-almost-five, learning to read, loves to organize things, draws lots of family portraits, and has a tender heart.
26. She has curly red hair  that surprises me every day, even now.
27. She’s getting freckles, and I could just die of happiness every time I see them.
28. Asher is two, big, tall, reckless, sweet, soulful, loves to play with trucks and jigsaw puzzles (up to 60 pieces all by himself!), and likes to be read to.
29. He has the biggest brown eyes you ever saw, with those curly, dark, lashes.
30. Those eyes + that one sweet dimple = sweet, sweet trouble.
31. Callan is our new little guy.
32. He is our second child born at home.
33. (The first was Ellery.)
34. Callan has blond hair (!) and blue eyes (!!).
35. His smiles melt our hearts. We love getting to know him better every day.
36. I like to take pictures.
37. I’m not super good at it yet, but I enjoy the process of figuring it out.
38. I’d like to take more classes.
39. I took one photography class when Maya was 14 months old.
40. But that was with my film SLR.
41. I’d like to learn more with my digital SLR.
42. It’s a Canon XTi.
43. I only have two lenses.
44. I won’t have money for more in the budget for a long, long time.
45. But you can buy me more lenses, if you want.
46. I also enjoy crafting.
47. Sewing, dollmaking, quilting, knitting, crocheting, even mending.
48. I also love to thrift.
49. But I don’t currently have time or energy for that.
50. Would you take four kids, including one toddler and one infant, to the thrift store every week?
51. If so, please tell me how you manage it.
52. In the meanwhile, I can go thrifting in my very own house.
53. Because I am a packrat, and my biggest goal for 2010 is to declutter and simplify (see blog title).
54. After that, I will allow myself to thrift and decorate.
55. But gotta get rid of stuff first.
56. Please come shopping at my house.
57. Speaking of my house, it’s a 1975 split entry.
58. The seventies are not my favorite architectural era.
59. But the property sold the house. Just check out that pic in my banner.
60. Now we make the house work for us.
61. It’s not easy.
62. We ripped out stinky (stinky stinky stinky) carpet and installed cheap-o pine floors in the entire main level.
63. Our children will naturally age/antique the floors over time.
64. Some folks pay upwards of $12/sq. ft. for that sort of thing.
65. I will gladly hire them out, if you’d like to pay me $12/sq. ft. They are awesome at those authentic dents and dings in your floor.
66. Seriously, I love how warn and comfy our floors are starting to look.
67. We also painted most surfaces on the main level, to cover out years of neglect, dog smells, and dog scratches.
68. We still need to paint the doors.
69. They’re icky.
70. We heat the main level with an efficient fireplace insert.
71. We like it a lot.
72. The bathroom is our next remodel project. We’ll be doing a budget re-do, keeping the blue tub, but replacing the sink (new one bought on sale) and the toilet (had a nice one given to us) and the floors (the tiles jump up at you when you walk on them).
73. Blue tubs = very 70s = groovy.
74. Sometimes, I wish my home wasn’t quite so groovy.
75. Our pink laminate counters in the  kitchen also jump at us.
76. Our three big kids share one room, and our baby shares the other with us.
77. We only have two bedrooms on the main level.
78. It works for us, for now.
79. I desperately want to finish the lower level as a huge family/mud room combo.
80. See #55. The big room downstairs is currently storage, as is the garage, because we don’t have a basement.
81. It’s a walkout; the front is 3′ below grade.
82. The lower level floors are concrete with little bits of carpet pad stuck to it.
83. Because we ripped out the stinky carpet and have no budget for replacement floors yet, and because glued-down carpet pad is wicked hard to clean up.
84. There is a bathroom and laundry room down there.
85. Both need work.
86. There’s a small bedroom that’s currently Jason’s office.
87. We may throw some kids down there, someday, when they’re bigger.
88. It seems so far away right now.
89. I am having no trouble finishing this list.
90. I could probably ramble for a hundred more.
91. I love to garden.
92. Last year was my first year with a big garden, and we did pretty well.
93. Even though we lost all the tomatoes to blight after only a month of bearing fruit.
94. But for that month – oh, man, the fresh salsa we ate! I drool at the memory.
95. I will find out this year if gardening with an infant is easier or more difficult that gardening while pregnant.
96. I’m hoping for easier, but suspecting the opposite.
97. We home to produce most of our food off of our land someday.
98. We started with chickens last year.
99. We had 26 Buff Orpingtons, but 12 boys in the freezer at 15 weeks, and how have 13 girls (plus one lucky roo, Hot Cocoa) giving us fresh eggs every day.
100. I really hope that goats will be our next farm project.

I seriously had no trouble finishing that list, and could do at least a hundred more. Surprised? If so, you don’t know me very well. Stick around and enjoy my rambling!