19 Years of Home

We quietly celebrated our 19th anniversary this week with some simple sincere cards and a nice dinner out.  It's a good but bittersweet anniversary.  We just passed the hardest year of our lives, I think.  But we are choosing to embrace the good we have worked hard to get to instead of the bitter and to just keep looking forward.  Keep looking to and hoping in the Lord, who showed us so much of Himself in that dark valley - through our church family, through His word, through dear wise friends, through books and music, through His tender and steady presence, through His moving mountains in really personal and amazing ways … He sustained us. I cannot bow low enough or praise Him enough for continuing the good work He started 19 years ago in our family. Thankful! Just for anniversary fun, I share these new images I recently got of all the homes the Family Brown has done life in these many years. I love them each!  Looking forward to printing them and getting them displayed in the house.

 

July's Stuffs

July started out with a girls' day trip with Brandy and Lori to visit Gloria in Missouri.  It was such a good and needed time.

 

While I was gone that day, Josh and the kids put the almost-finishing touches on the bunny bin/chicken coop.  We just love how it turned out.  Josh is still working on a rain catchment system on the back, an open fenced yard attached to this, and the boxes the eventual chickens will use for laying eventually.

 

 

 

 

Fourth of July from home.  We loved keeping it low-key and looked forward to seeing how many fireworks we would see from the top of our hill on the deck.  Turned out, it was SO MANY.

 

Noah and Anna took off the day after for a week at church camp - Lifeway's MFuge Camp.  It was a really fun, really growing, really bonding time for them and the group.  I am so thankful they went and they are, too!  They are already certain they wanna go back next year.  This year it was held at Union University.  Next summer it will be in NC.

 

 

 

Anna tried out for a Variety Show at camp and was selected to perform.  These were fun text and vids to get that week.

 

 

Enjoyed some more reading and so many smoothies this month.  And of course, the view.

 

Pretties from the garden. 

The week Noah and Anna were at camp left a week for just Lasa and me at home.  We made good use of our one-on-one days!

How funny is this rabbit?

Know what this means?  We have a soon to be new driver in the house.  Well, a permitted one at least.  He diligently read and studied this manual all month ... especially during his quarantine.  Oh yeah, Covid struck the house.  Noah brought it home from camp.  Life.

This girl and I eagerly got her registered at her new school down the road.  She will be going out-of-zone, but only just barely, to Benny Bills Elementary and we have high hopes for a great experience there where she will be surrounded by so many racial mirrors for a change.

 

July brought a really fun milestone to our family - a kitten at last!  We counted him an early birthday present for Lasa and she proudly named him Todd.  He delighted us all to NO END and I was stunned with how much we loved having a cat.  Sadly, it ended 10 days in, when we woke up to find another cat somehow got on our enclosed back porch and killed him. It was a whole heartbreaking stunning thing and we are still figuring out if we will try a kitten again. Josh thinks we will; two next time.  Anna and I wanna NOT risk this again at all.  We shall see.  Still, pics from the sweetest ten days with Todd, who was so smart and so sweet and so fun!

Beautiful July views around the property that I captured, the favorite being these first few storm pics we watched as it rolled in from afar ...

Josh got more chestnut trees in the ground.

Josh had a birthday - #43.  And we had an anniversary- #19!

As already posted, Lasa had a birthday too.  July is exhausting.  Ha!

Bathing beauties.

We painted rocks and added in our painted rocks from the old house.

We hit up a goat raising chat at the library.  I learned a bunch.  I learned I think goats are too much commitment. Ha!

We knocked a big new house to-do list item off the summer bucket list - finally, finally getting Anna a double bed.  She's been wanting one for a year and a half now!  I found this sweet bed for a sweet deal on GTP and painted it all up with leftover chalk paint I already had on hand.  We moved her current twin bed/trundle over to be Lasa's bed now and got our Anna upgraded.  They both love their new beds!

And Lasa's new-to-her bed.  At first she was mad that we switched out her bed frame for this one of Anna's, but after one night she was convinced that it was indeed an upgrade.  ;) That shelf on the wall was another quick paint job that same week. Was good to finally get that up after all these months too. 

Another July highlight included hearing from Angelique on Lasa's birthday!  We had texted her the week before to see if she'd like to meet up but never heard back from her.  When she ended up calling on Lasa's birthday, we realized it's because she has a new number again.  Hard to keep up with those!  SO so SO thankful she called.  So encouraged.  It was fun to play her birthday message for Lasa and text back and forth a couple times. She even sent updated pics of her and Labella and DeAngelo.  We are gonna try to meet up again when we don't have a scalding weekend.

 

This girl got her first vaccination dose.  She is not interested in another quarantine sesh.  Josh and I are already vaccinated.  And Noah is now naturally vaccinated with fresh Covid antiobodies.  Now we all just hunker down and see what the fall will be like around here with Delta variant and such.

And finally, as much as we don't wanna say it's so, it is. Summer is over.  It went SO STINKING FAST.  Here is the remains of our summer bucket list... what got done, what got axed, and what didn't quite get done... yet.