Today we went on my first picnic of the season.  It was windy, but otherwise nice. We prepped ahead of time and had tomato sandwiches on whole grain bread with veganase (plant-based mayo), guac, sprouts and mixed greens.  It was delicious, and very filling.  We had some berries and jicama along with it.  It was a healthy, all raw foods lunch.  We had green smoothies for breakfast for a change from juice.  Dinner is from Chipotle.  You can eat vegan at Chipotle if you don’t have any of the meats or brown beans (they are cooked with bacon).  Tiff and Hannah went out to eat and will bring my food home for me.  I felt like they needed some sister time. 

 We went to several estate sales this morning as we are still looking for a few more things for Hannah’s house to make it “homey” and there are some things that I am looking for myself.  I want to purchase outdoor lounge chairs as I want to get some of our daily sunshine on my back and the current outdoor furniture does not allow for that.  One of our health goals is to spend 20 minutes daily in the sunshine – we may be able to lengthen it when our skin is a bit more acclimated to the strong sun here.  I would like ½ of that time to be spent with sunshine on my back to get a little color into that skin also.  The lounge chairs I found at estate sales were quite pricy.  We stopped at a Goodwill on the way home and there I found 2 lounge chairs.  They were only $10 each so I purchased them both. They need cleaned up, but otherwise are in good condition.

My husband and I are finally down to owning just one house again. Just a few weeks ago we owned 3 houses.  We recently moved to the Des Moines area and purchased a home there in a suburb called Indianola.  We moved there from Central City where we owned a house, the closing on that house was on 4/15. Greg has been remodeling “rough” homes for the last 1+ years and had a house in Vinton that he completed, the closing for that one was today. It’s nice to only have one piece of property to worry about again.  Our “new” house in Indianola is a “fixer upper”.  It was built in 1900.  It’s a fairly grand house on 2.77 acres.  We’ve never owned an acreage before so have much learning to do about how to design and use land. We have our work cut out for us in getting it ready to live in. 

I have a nice sized family.  There are 5 girls and one boy. All the girls’ names start with V, can you guess what my brother’s name is?  I have 4 brothers in law and 1 sister-in-law.  We are a diverse group of personalities.  We are compiled of a wide range of talents, education and beliefs.  We have conservative to liberal. We have democrats and republicans. We have believers in God and non-believers in God.  We all are fairly independent thinkers and all have lots of ideas.  We grew up with a father that was into music – one of my brothers-in-law is very musically talented also.  When my siblings and I get together there is A LOT of energy present and it gets quite loud.  One year, at Thanksgiving, we all got together for dinner at my sister Vicki’s house.  About an hour after dinner I noticed that all of our spouses were missing.  I found them out in the office (a separate building on her property) watching TV.  It was very quiet.  My husband explained that he couldn’t take all the noise and energy any longer so one by one the spouses ended up in the office where they could watch the football game “in peace.”  Anyway, with this diverse group comes many ideas.  We have a text strand that we use often and this blog came up and some good ideas resulted from it.  Questions to ask ourselves, weekly highlights and low spots and to add pics.  We did get a pic on one day, but it’s quite difficult to get that done so Hannah is continuing to learn all of this and teach me.  We plan to add more.  I liked the ideas and plan to implement them. One of the questions suggested was how we are feeling physically and emotionally.  I think that I will plan on addressing those questions this upcoming week.  I really appreciate my family 😊.

Day 10 is done, day 11 is on the way.  As George Burns said: “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”