Hello?!? Anybody There???

How embarrassing....I completely disappeared off the side of the Earth, or at least blog land that is.

I had no plans for this summer really, I was just hoping to enjoy lots of time with my kids before my oldest goes off to all day school this fall for the first time. So I wasn't exactly prepared for what this summer had in store.

In June we decided to fix up our deck. We thought this would be a good year to fork over the dough and give our deck a nice treatment that would last for years. So what we thought would be a 2 day job turned into a 2 week job that had us pulling our hair out with stress. (Oh wait, Scott doesn't have hair ;) 

Before we could finish that project up our pool liner ripped and needed to be replaced....extra unexpected expense, okay we can handle this. 

We still hadn't finished the deck project yet when something else happened. The people renting our old house decided to move. We were left with a messy, dirty house to quickly clean up and rent out asap. After cleaning and painting from tippy top to the very bottom we knew something had to be done about the bathroom. The shower tiles had moisture behind them and the floor was just grody. So after talking to a realtor the decision was made to gut and re-do the bathroom and put the house up for sale.

We, of course, thought this would take no time at all. We thought wrong.

It's been almost a month of spending every single day there. 

There was plumbing to change and lots of behind the wall sorts of things to be done. The floor got tiled. The floor got grouted. The shower got tiled, and tiled, and tiled. And after a week was finally grouted. And that's where we're at now. 

Tonight was the first night in over a month we didn't go there to work. We're exhausted, we're stressed, we're broke!! Okay not broke, but after the summer we've had let's just say we're feelin' it.

And there's so much more to do. I posted lists in each room of the house with what needs to get done. Not to mention the outside.

Our summer is slipping away and there's nothing we can do about it :( Paying two mortgages is not something we'd like to do any longer than possible. And to rent it out again would be like saying, "I want to do this all over again after the next people destroy what used to be our family home!" 

Okay, okay I feel like I'm being overly dramatic about it lately. I may or may not have cried today when my paint brushes were still wet from getting washed last night...

But if you spent every day for a month working your butt off while trying to explain to your poor children why they have to sit in a room watching videos on the computer you'd start crying about wet paint brushes too.

I've still been able to sneak fun into our mornings with the kids, my play date group has been a BIG part of that!! :) But poor Scott goes to work at 4am drives straight to the rental afterwards and gets home in time to go right back to bed :( I see families taking walks and friends writing about their fun family activities on Facebook and I get pretty down in the dumps. But I know this will pass and the fact that Scott and I are still lovingly reassuring each other when we get really down makes me remember how great we have it no matter what.

Our bodies are hurting and our minds are exhausted but God will get us through this and we'll have learned a whole lot through it all!