We moved to our new house on the 8th and there have been many days since then that I haven't even turned my computer on, let alone blogged or sent email. I think of it often and often want to . . . just haven't been able to. But we are beginning to settle in. I overheard my husband on a skype call with a friend back in Wichita. He was trying to explain why life had been so full lately; that we were settling in. I felt the disconnect and of course had a communicators need to capture what settling in is looking like for us in our new home!
We've had to figure out how we will store our medicines (mostly things we can't buy here so have brought with us) in a way that is safe (out of the reach of children) and a location that will not freeze come winter. I finally opted for labeled boxes on top of our closet. It makes quite the tower.
Our shower room is directly catty-corner across the yard and has an outdoor entrance. We've had to figure out where the outside shoes get taken off; what is clean space; what is dry space; what shoes we wear in the concrete shower room; etc. 2 weeks in an we have a great little routine down. But you can imagine it was stressful trying to figure it out and continue re-enforcing it with my 3 year old.
This is our outside bathroom/laundry room. The question has been how do we go about brushing our teeth and keeping our toothbrushes and contacts clean from the mice, spiders, frogs, flys and dust that have all been seen since moving in.
This is the solution we came up with. Now we just have to find a new filing cabinet!
Austin says he walks in our squatty potty and feels like he's in the local version of Ace Hardware. Our landlord recently remodeled the home and all the extra everything (tile, wood, window frames, glass, concrete) is packed into our squatty. I'm somewhat hesitant, especially at night, as we've had multiple sightings of a very large rat right outside our squatty. The settling element, however, is how to help my 3 year old go to the bathroom. She has caught on to squatty really well, within the first week. But we do have a little squatty port-a-potty accessible for when she doesn't want to use the other option. For the first week she struggled with fear over falling in.
This little guy lost his closet. It doesn't fit in the room that now holds all 3 of my children only a door away. (You can see Austin in the background sitting at his desk on the far wall of our bedroom.) So the 3 section hamper we brought from Wal-Mart has now become his dresser. The green tub holds his cloth diapers and the tub (also brought with us) under his bed is for all his clean sheets/blankets)
Again with the hygiene products. We're not high maintenance people, it has just required some creativity to know where to keep our stuff and how to keep it. Thanks Mom for the shoe organizers. One holds our deodorant, etc. on the inside of our closet door and the other holds our underwear and socks. Thinking outside the box . . . all part of settling in.
What to do with our puchock is one of the first things we had to figure out. All the vegetable peels, left over bread, grape vine clippings have to be disposed of in a proper way. In our old neighborhood, one of Ethan's friends would push a wheelbarrow through the neighborhood and collect everyones puchock for his cow. We have a neighbor 2 doors down with 2 cows and chickens. Every afternoon, Ethan and Elli deliver our red bucket and any extra yard clippings!
So we are settling in. We really do like our new place. Minus the rat, of course!
