New Town, New Apartment

 Well, here we are at our fifth home in nine months!  Four moves down, one to go!!!  Whew!  

We're back to the customary two bedroom, 1000 sq. ft. apartment.  The window above the garage is the kids' bedroom.  It's nice that there is nobody below them. 

 

 It rained pretty steady when we were unloading the moving truck and these are the tree branches that dripped huge drops of water on our cardboard boxes.  

This is what you'd see as you enter the front door. 

Our front room.  We're back to using our own furniture. ;) 

Keep walking through the front room and you'll see the dining room, to the left.  

Then keep on walking through the dining room and you'll come to the kitchen.  

Back to the entry way, look left and you'll see the kitchen from the other side.  

Standing in the front room, looking up the stairs, where Taylor is waiting for us.  The white door on the right is our front door and the brown door to the left is the...

laundry room.  A real, actual laundry room, not a washer and dryer shoved in a closet or a kitchen.  

 Now, back to Taylor at the top of the stairs.  She's standing in front of her bedroom.  

She and Logan have to share one more time.  It's taking some adjusting.  Taylor loves to talk herself to sleep, 

much to the annoyance of Logan, who actually wants to go to sleep.  Plus, it's just a tight squeeze.  

Standing in the kids' doorway.  From here you can see the upstairs hallway. 

Down the hallway is the upstairs bathroom.  There's a half bathroom downstairs as well.

Continuing down the hallway.  There's a half wall.  

Looking down over the half wall, you'll see our front room.  This is quite an exciting feature of the apartment, especially when someone is standing below and you can drop something down to them.  It's also the quickest way to get clothes to the laundry room, at least near the laundry room.  

The part of the hallway, the kids call "the bridge."   It leads to our bedroom.

We chose this bedroom because it has another half wall and the kids couldn't be trusted to have this room to themselves.  It also has two closets.  

Looking over the half wall in our room, you'll see the dining room.  Cool huh?  What's not cool is that the kitchen is right below us and if anyone does anything in the kitchen and you're trying to, let's say, sleep, it sounds like the person in the kitchen is right next to you.   Sound travels very well in this apartment.  

Leaving our room.  Oh, there's Taylor, she's still waiting for us.  Wait, is she the one giving this tour?  She wants us to go back downstairs.  That's everything upstairs anyway. 

Going back downstairs.  

Walking back through the living room toward my new chair.  

Our landlord at our last place let me have this awesome (and very comfortable, I might add) chair from the house.  He has to sell all the furniture anyway and put the house up for sale.  I love this chair.  It makes me so happy to have it.  James calls it my "Grandma Chair."  I don't know what he's talking about.  

As I sit back in my chair and get all cozy, I look up and this is what I see, practically the entire apartment.  

We like our apartment.  It's fun.  All of our places have been so different this past year.  

The amazing thing is, we've always been able to find a place to live when we needed to.  I know our Heavenly Father has looked out for us and guided us.  I know He has helped us find the places to live where we needed to be.  I'm so grateful for that.  It's increased my faith and trust in the Lord this past year.  I know He'll help us find a job and a place to live where we're meant to be, when James graduates. 

Roseburg Rotation Wrap-up

We've made it to our 4th and final rotation location.  We're getting settled and taking pictures of each room as it gets finished.  In the meantime I thought I'd just share a few final pictures from our last place, Roseburg.

 

We checked Logan's rain gauge on the day we moved.  It was right at 4 inches.  So between Feb. 1st & Feb. 20th it rained 4 inches here.  Pretty cool. 

I don't think I told you about the bird we found on our front porch during our December snow.  I saw it through the front door window and hurried Logan over to see it.  Logan likes birds.  I was surprised it stayed there so long.  Usually they flutter away as soon as the kids get a short glimpse of them, if not before.  

We've seen and heard many different kinds of birds at this house.  They even had a bird bath.  From the kitchen window we could watch all kinds of birds use it.  We saw robins, blue birds, finches, sparrows and others that we don't know.  

Anyway, back to the bird on the porch.  It didn't fly away.  I opened the front door.  It still didn't fly away.  I walked up to it.  It didn't fly away.  I knew something was wrong with it then.  

We guessed that it was just extremely cold.  So we decided to gather up some pine cones and placed them around the bird, to get it up off the cold snow.  We put them right up to it's feet and it still didn't fly away.  I was sure we were going to have a dead bird on our porch the next day.  

We left the bird alone and hoped for the best.  The next morning was the big test, to see if our pine cones cured the bird.  It seems to have worked.  The bird was gone and there were little bird footprints in the snow.  We were all much relieved for the bird.

Another time I went out onto the balcony of the master bedroom to take pictures.  I happened to look up as I was heading back in and saw this....

 

a fake owl, to keep the smaller birds away... or was it.  I quickly went back inside.  I closed the door behind me.  I peeked back outside.  I opened the door a crack.  I stuck my head out a little bit.  

Everytime I looked at it, it was looking back at me, but I never saw it move its head.  I screwed up my courage and took a few steps out onto the balcony.  It looked so real. 

Finally, I saw it move it's head just a little bit.  It was real!  Owls are fine in books and movies, but a real live, wild one is scary!  And intimidating. 

I hurried back in and shut the door behind me again, and went to tell the rest of the family.  They were all fascinated as well, and I think, at least a little bit scared too.  

This is another library that the kids & I went to once.  It was only about a 10-15 minute drive from our house.  

We went there to find a Magic Tree House book for Taylor,

 

but Logan also found this cute, little dragon.  

We miss our huge house, but we like our new little apartment too.  The apartment sure seems more manageable.  It has about 2,500 sq. ft. less to keep clean. 

Less than 3 months until graduation.  We can't wait.  I'm sure this rotation is going to fly by as well.  James has already had his first day on the "job" here.  He says it's going to be a good one.  He said that everyone he's met is really nice. 

So here we go again.  Another new town to explore. 

 

Moving Again

Well, we are moving again, but that's no surprise.  It's been 3 months already!  We've successfully completed another rotation.  James passed with honors, again.  We are all so proud of him and so excited to be getting closer to graduation.  

We're just too tired to act excited.  We've been busy packing and cleaning.  

So I thought I'd just post one last blog before we shut down the internet.  Here's some pictures of what we've been up to during this rotation. 

 Finding fish. 

Of all colors.  Actually we only found these two.

We also found some mechanical junk that Logan insists was a piece of the Apollo 13 spacecraft.  "It looks just like it!"

We also found where James worked during this rotation, the VA.

We strolled the grounds one beautiful, chilly day. 

I love these old colonial-style, brick houses they have on the VA property. 

I would love a home like this.  It just screams, "History!" and "Drafty," but I'm going to focus on the history part.

Speaking of dream houses, mine is just down the hill from where we're living.  I've driven past it and sighed, about a million times now. 

This would be the view from my dream house.  It just keeps getting better and better.  And I'm pretty sure the house is vacant.  I've never seen any cars there or coming and going from there.  There are never any lights on and I've never seen any people around there either.  

Let's see, what else have we seen around here?

This cute, old Porsche,  parked at a tiny, little post office that we frequented.  

 A view of a portion of the town, while we were out for a drive, "just to see what there was to see." 

But mostly we tried to focus on school, between all the holidays, that is. 

 And I made bread about every other day while we were here.  (We ate sandwiches a lot).

The kids are already for church and looking so cute, I just had to get a picture. 

 Finding a comfortable place to read around here was easy and fun.

 There was always cleaning to do in this big ol' house. 

Taylor loves helping and is always eager to pitch in.  Logan will help when he is asked.  I don't have a picture of him doing any chores, but he took out the trash, vacuumed, dusted and helped bring in wood.  

 But this is what he really wants to do, all the time, play on electronic devices.  He generally doesn't have much time for that, but the weeks that we move, every three months, he ends up playing more than usual. 

The kids also love playing together.  I have no idea what they are doing here, other than playing well together and having fun.  

This is the view as we come down the stairs everyday.  Logan set up a weather vane and rain gauge on Feb. 1st.  So every morning we'd look out this window for our first glimpse at the weather and Logan's weather vane and rain gauge.  I think it's rained around 4 inches this month.  We didn't check it today.

  

 That's about all I've got for now.  We've certainly had a great time during this rotation and will take a ton of memories with us.  

I can't believe we're moving again.  And I can't believe Taylor let me take a picture of her like this.  She's adorable no matter what she's doing though.  

Well, I'll share pictures of our next place soon, I hope.