Children and mud pies - does it ever get old? For me, the answer would be no. I can't get enough of seeing all of my little ones outside playing in the earth together. Seeing Baby F join them for the first time just melted my heart. I could tell he was pretty proud of himself, too. It is not very often his siblings all let him get into what they are playing with.
While we were living in Idaho the weather was just too hot and our dirt was too dry so my children gave up on mud pies altogether. I think perhaps our home there was just too comfortable, too. They didn't get outside as much as they used to do (well the small yard played a part, too, I'm sure). This tiny house in Oregon is somewhat forcing them to be outside more, bringing back their wild and free spirits that I haven't seen in a long time. As of late, their play has been centered around Narnia (Little L makes quite the Reepicheep). However, two days of rain here brought about perfect mud and they went right back to their mud baking as if they had never stopped. Baby F spent almost the entire day outside with his siblings and as you can see by his face in the above photos he was not happy about having to come in to get cleaned up for dinner. Poor guy is currently cutting three molars all at once so he is having quite a rough time.
In other news, we found land that was very close to what we were looking for and surprisingly in our price range. It was five acres - a lot of it was forest (with never ending elderberry trees), but also a lot of it was cleared out, perfect for gardens and animals. It was in the middle of nowhere backing up to the Siletz river. Oh I wish you could have seen our children running and playing all over there. It was exactly what they have been needing. It brought us all so much joy. It had a manufactured house on it as well. It was small and not ideal but for the land we were very willing to take it (with hopes of building our own home on the land years down the road). After seeing it we told our realtor we wanted to place an offer right away. We contacted our mortgage company and well, to make a long story short, we didn't get it. We were approved for a certain amount of money before our move and we were counting on that still, not expecting anything to change. But our debt to income ratio changed too much over the past month due to Kevin not receiving his paychecks (glitch in the system) and having to use our credit cards for survival. So now we have to get that debt back down before we can even get a house. A big setback for sure, and it definitely dampened our spirits but you know what? This is just another bump in the road. We have each other, a roof over our heads, food in our bellies and smiles on our faces. Really, what more could we ask for?
