Photos from Maine

It's been just a week since we returned home from Maine. The trip feels like a dream now. Being in Maine is as different from South Carolina as a foreign country would be. Life is slow there, but maybe we're just going too fast here. I'm so thankful we were able to take this trip and for my children to explore a beautiful, faraway corner of God's beautiful world.

A side note... my Dad grew up in Massachusetts and I was actually born there. When his grandmother died, his parents moved to Tenants Harbor, ME to live in her house. They lived there for 20 years until moving into a nursing home a year or so ago. Now my cousin Jeff and his family live in their house. All growing up, we would visit Maine but just stay around my grandparents' house or walk to the harbor of Tenants Harbor. This time, we stayed at the Thomaston/Rockland Hampton Inn about 20 minutes away and saw lots of local "attractions" I never knew about. The boat you'll see "sails" (it doesn't have a sail?) to Monhegan Island several times a week. That is about 10 miles off the coast of Maine. We excitedly hitched a ride, free of charge thanks to Jeff who works for the boat company, which took an hour. It was one of the highlights of the trip. The others on the boat saw it as we would in taking the bus across town. Very interesting. I asked a woman if there was a school on the island (there was a sign reading, "No medical staff on island. Enter at your own risk."). She said there is a school for Kindergarten thru 8th grade. This year there are five students enrolled!

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Is third time the charm for us?

Tonight we had our third house showing. The second showing this past Saturday appears to have gone very well as our realtor called me around 1:00pm that day saying the people were definitely interested but just wanted to find out who owns the woods behind us in chance they could buy that too. That makes us interested to know if tonight's showing was them again or a new prospect. Either way, we have ANOTHER showing tomorrow night from 6:00-7:00pm. Perfect timing as we'll be at church anyway! Thanks, God. This afternoon I cleaned the house like a mad woman so it'll just need tidying tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.

Back from Maine and House Showings

These last few weeks have been busy with keeping the house tidy as every time I leave the house I want it to be "show ready". It could take four months or just four weeks to sell our house, but I'm viewing this time as a season to be found faithful before the Lord in trusting His timing. The first week we were on the market I began to get a little frustrated that no one was calling to see it (now realizing that I was being overly ambitious and that this process is more often a slow one). Now that wait is over in that we had a showing last week. A woman looked at it and the realtor's comments afterwards were "Home shows great!" but that the woman worked some distrance from here and was looking for more square footage. It at least broke the ice from my thinking that "No one is ever coming to look at our house!" Now it's just six days later and we need to be gone from our house from 10am until noon as someone else is coming to see it today! Philip was invited to a birthday party at that exact time. God has good timing.

Secondly, we got packed and flew to Maine last Thursday, April 16, spent five wonderful days visiting family and sightseeing in a very beautiful corner of God's world and then flew back on Tuesday, April 21. I'll post all about it including photos and videos this week. The kids had a ball as Philip loved climbing on the big rocks which make up the Maine coastline and Braewyn loved having her Papa around and walking miles and miles on those little legs. Matthew, the kids, my Dad, and I very much enjoyed the trip.

We're on the market!

Our realtor Rappy came back on Monday. Before he even came in the house, he was putting the "For Sale" sign in the yard. Matthew and I were ecstatic! All the hard work of the last month was finally paying off. I still want to post all of my before and after (and then more after pictures after we completed the "Rappy list"), but here is the virtual tour from Rappy's website. He has an awesome wide-angle lens camera with cool stitch photo software. Therefore what was just still photographs become a panoramic tour of our house and yard. Very cool!!

What I Learned Today

A few weeks ago, Matthew and I were in Academy Sports and I came upon the most amazing items. Did you know you can buy a blood tracking light? Or a videocamera which you mount on your rifle to "capture the hunt and share it with friends!" I was amazed. No one in my family hunts so I've never really browsed the hunting section of a store before, but Matthew was looking for a new pocket knife and this stuff was right beside them.

Anyhow, that's the way I am, always curious about things, wondering how things work, etc. Yes, "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood" was my favorite show as a child because of the videos of him going into the different factories. So after seeing the blood tracking light (somehow it intensifies red pigment so it sort of glows in the dark under this light) and wanting to run home right then to post about it, I thought I could probably post something nearly everyday of what I had learned that day. Either I'm really clueless or I just happen to stumble upon interesting things due to the curiousity (no comments please).

After all the build-up, here's today's new thing I learned...

Swim diapers cannot be substituted for normal diapers. We ran completely out of diapers for Braewyn today. I had planned to go to Sam's last night to buy a box, but we all went to Matthew's softball game last night and Sam's today. We didn't get to Sam's until 6:30pm so the real diapers were all used up and off we went to dinner with Braewyn in a swim diaper. We ate at a great new place called Wing Stop and I actually learned two things. Yes, her pants were soaking wet at the end of dinner due to the faulty swim diaper and she loves dipping carrots in ketchup. Braewyn ate only 2 or 3 bites of chicken, but she ate a lot of french fries and carrot sticks both dipped in ketchup!