New house tour

So, I know it has been two weeks since my last post but it is better than years:)  In the last two weeks...we have gotten more cleaned up outside and the chickens got their yard so they can go outside now.  Always something going on around here.
Last time I got you all caught up and told you we got a new house and promised a tour so here I am to show you around.

Just a remimder of what my new house looks like from the front.

It is so cute I just love to look at it:)  Sometime it still feels like a dream that I live here.

So we will start this tour at the back door...what is the saying...Backdoor guests are always best...the way the driveway comes around it brings you right to the backdoor so if you come to visit this would be the way you come in.

When you walk in you come right into the dining room.  I love all of my chicken decor on my blue walls.  When we moved in all the walls and ceilings were the same color and this is one of two rooms I have decided paint color on.  I am very happy with my choice (I better be right?)

To get a visual of the lay out I will fill you in on where ecactly you are standing in all the pictures...so around the corner on the left of the picture you can see our door way, the back door is on your right and the kitchen is behind you.

You have now turned around and here is the kitchen.  One of the things I really liked about this house was the cabinets.  I was really excited when we (when I say we I mean my mom and her fitting of everything) unpacked and ALL of my dishes fit in these cabinets (in our old house I had dishes in 3 hutches).  I love all of my Milk Glass and other old dishes!!

Here is a better view of the kitchen.  The center piece is the bottom of one of the hutches I was using.  I like it as a little island.  I am going to paint it red and wax it and put a chalkboard on the back (I will write about that when I start that project)

This is a close up of the rugs I have in front of the stove and the sink.  Speaking of stoves...I LOVE my gas stove.  I am so happy to have gas back!!

Here is a good picture of my "island". 

As you leave the dining room you pass this little spot in the halway right outside my door.  The table is handpainted by my mom.

And now we are in the master bedroom.  Here is my vanity and Mike's "office".  I love all the space we have in our room.

Turn around and here is our bed.  The headboard is a design of mine out of an old door that my dad made for me.  I painted it and Mike put lights up under the top.  I love it!!  We have old pieces up on top from Mike's grandparents house (one is a stagecoach being held up by a gunman and the other was made by his dad)  The hope chest was his grandparents and the end tables are both old sewing machines (I love antiques and things with history).

Here is the other room in the house I have painted...our bathroom.  I went VERY bold in here and I am so happy I did.  The sink was from the previous owner but I have always wanted a vanity like this.  Our only complaint is the sink is TINY to fit in that spot.  We are thinking of getting a bigger bowl that would sit up higher to allow for a bigger one.  Anyways, the tub is huge and it is a jacuzzi corner tub.  It is very relaxing (and I am not a big bath person).

As you round the corner in the bathroom you get to the toilet and shower.  The full shower (no bathtub bottom) is so nice.  Mike found our towel racks and toilet paper man at a western store going out of business.  I like the fact that I have never seen them before at someone elses house and you can't just go pick them up at Lowe's.

Out of our room now and around the bottom of the stairs you come to the living room.  I have not decided on paint color in here yet.  We are going to make a walk through from the dining room to here (will show you that wall in a minute) so I am going to wait until that is open to pick a color.

Here is the right side of the living room.  I am so happy that we bought a house that already had hardwood floors and features I wanted in my forever home.  It made it seem like it was almost made for us (there are definitely things I would change but some of the features are wonderful).

Here is the left side of the living room and the wall we are going to open up.  To get to the kitchen from here you have to go around the bottom of the stairs, down the hall and around the corner.  When I am in the kitchen cooking I am completely cut off from the living room so we will have a more open floor plan with the opening.  The table you see in the left of this picture is where the TV is.  There is a little inset there and our TV and stand fit perfect.

Here are the stairs (and Jessie's favorite place to sleep).  The left side of this picture is the front door and behind the stairs is the hall that takes you back to our room and the dining room.

For today I will end the tour here.  This is looking out my bedroom door (stairs going up at the top of the picture and the dining room and kitchen in the background).  I still need to give you a tour of the upstairs (the kids floor) and the front porch (a very relaxing place to be).  Right now we are working on a headboard for Lauren's room so I will wait until that is in to show you around up there.

I hope you enjoyed the tour and if you get a chance come out for a visit yourself:)
Gotta go check on those chickens....

Catch up

WOW!!!  It has been A LONG time since I have written.  So many things have happened since September 2010 when I last wrote.  I will do a quick catch up in this post and then really get going from today.  In the past year and a half the kids have grown like weeds, we bought a boat, we sold our house and we bought a NEW house and land!! More about that later...back to the kids.

Isn't it SO CUTE!!!

So Lauren is now 10 and Austin is 4.

Lauren is finishing up her second year in the online charter school and Austin loves to work in workbooks and have his own school.  We have had two great years with Texas Virtual Academy but next year Lauren is going back to public school.  She will be in 5th grade and I think she is ready and I know she is VERY excited about starting in a new school.  Austin will hopefully start pre-k in the fall and is so happy to go to school like Lauren.  They are absolutely loving the new house.

About the new house..we first started this last summer.  We put our house on the market but in 6 weeks we only had 1 showing.  We were very discouraged so we took it off the market and decided we would stay a couple more years (HA!).  After much discussion we decided it really was the time to sell if we wanted to get out and still get close to what we wanted for our house.  So we once again got the house ready and put it back on the market the first of January.  We were expecting to hopefully get and offer and move around summer time.  Everyone told us to be patient and that it was really a hard time to sell.  Fortunately for us, by the beginning of February we had an offer.  They wanted us out by the 6th of March!  Talk about moving quickly.  Luckily, I had been looking at houses and we had one we really liked but it was a short sale.  The issue with that was with as quick as we had to be out of our house, buying a short sale can take months which could leave us without a house if they rejected our offer.  We accepted the offer on our old house and put in a bid on the new house.  This began the beginning of a LONG 6 weeks. We boxed everything up and put it in storage.   My parents were gracious enough to allow us to invade their house for the wait to see if we got the new house and then to go through the paperwork process.  There were many days when it looked like we were not going to get the house.  It was frustrating and exhausting but in the end it all worked out and now we have this beautiful new house on 10.5 acres!!! 

This is an arial view of our land

We moved in April 6 (Good Friday) and have now been here two months.  It is so nice and peaceful out here and we have so much we want to do.  In our first two months we have rented a tractor to mow and clear out some land, put up a windmill, built a chicken coop and started a flower garden. 

Austin liked riding the tractor

Every farm needs a windmill

My chicken coop!!  (Will write about this build later)

So, I hope you feel caught up as to what's been going on.  I am going to start writing about happenings around the farm and life in the country.  I will let you in on a tour of our new house, building the coop, starting the chickens and all the other adventures we have going.

It seems funny to me now...I named this blog Paper Cowgurl years ago when I was doing crafts with paper.  It now seems fitting to have this as my blog name seeing as I have always been a "Paper Cowgirl".  What I mean by this is I have ALWAYS wanted to live in the country and be a farm girl but have always lived in a neighborhood in a city.  I would wear my boots and when I was younger would go to Uncle Nelson's farm and help him and be a "Cowgirl" for a week or so but I would always go back home to the city.  Now here I am on 10.5 acres starting the real life of a farm girl.  Up until now I have only been a cowgirl in my dreams (a paper cowgirl).  We are starting out with chickens (21 to be exact) and eventually want goats, a pig and hopefully down the road maybe a couple of horses and cows.  So I hope you will join me on our new adventure of this "Paper Cowgurl" becoming a real true country cowgirl:)

Until next time...I have chickens to check on...

A boy and a Train

Being a mom to two children is always an adventure. The fact that they are six years apart and in completely different stages of their lives and that one is a boy and the other a girl only adds to the fun. For the most part they get along pretty well with each other but they can also rub each other the wrong way. With that being said it is good for them to have their own time and be able to do what they want. This weekend Lauren spent the night with my parents (where she has all her "girls" and gets to learn many new life lessons from my Mom) and had some new experiences.
While she was gone Austin and I hung out most of the day and then Mike and I took him over to see some train cars that Van Alstyne is trying to restore for a park. I love how such simple things excite my children! Austin was so excited to go see trains and that Daddy was going. When Lauren was in school Austin and I hung out all the time but he hasn't had a lot of time with Mike and I without Lauren. So yesterday was really fun for him.

He was so excited to stand by a train

He was more excited to get in!!

I'll let you walk through this little picture journey of him roaming around the trains and sitting different places on the second train...

Austin wanted to take a picture of us :)

As you can see he enjoyed his time running around a train and being a boy.  I love the little things that make a child so happy.
 
Until our next adventure...

End of Summer

Can you believe how fast the summer went this year?  Did you have a good summer?  Any vacations or big activities?  We had a great summer, lots of work on our house to get ready for our big party we had.  August 12 was Mike & I's 10 year anniversary so on the 14th we had friends and family over and celebrated our first 10 years.  We had a really good time.  Thank you to all who came and celebrated with us.

Once we got the party behind us it was time to shift focus to Lauren and school.  As I mentioned in my last post we made a huge decision for Lauren's schooling and she is attending an online charter school (Texas Virtual Academy at Southwest).  Since this was our first week I decided to tell you how it has been.  The few weeks before school started I went through all the books that were sent to us and tried to get prepared.  We couldn't see the lessons before this week so I couldn't fully prepare and I felt it.  We had to do an "Introduction to online learning" video for each subject before it would give us our lessons.  I felt a little lost a times and pretty disorganized but it got better each day and I feel really good about the school. 
Lauren has done really good this week with staying on task and dealing with my craziness of not knowing which book we need and what I need to do.  I have been so proud of her.

First day of school in our "classroom"

When Lauren was young I did not think I would be teaching my child at home.  When I say that most people think I am homeschooling but we are officially enrolled in a Texas school and have to meet all the state guidelines.  Yes, I am her "learning coach" but we have a teacher for all assignments and to answer to.  (We just found out our first set of assignments are due September 10.)  I am excited to take this journey with her and even though it is only the first week I have really seen how much the last two years in public school have effected her learning and focus.  We knew the lack of being pushed and harder lessons ware having an effect but, with little concern from the school because she was a "good" student and made straight A's we didn't know the true effect.  It has been interesting to see the areas she is getting frustrated and needs work.  With having to be held up to wait for slower students she doesn't know some of the review things.  Great schooling when somethings haven't even been taught.  With all of that said I am positive we made the right decision in pulling her from the public schools.

It has been interesting this week to see how much we have to complete each week and how much we will be dealing with our teacher and our "class".  Our teacher lives in Duncanville and is basically a one room school teacher, she has more than one grade in her "class".  There is a lot of contact with your teacher with class meetings and teacher conferences.  I am excited to have a chance to really help Lauren excel this year.  We have our first class meeting online next week and will get to meet others in our class.  We have an actual meet the teacher at the beginning of September where we will have a face to face with our teacher and other leaders in our area and parents and students.  We are excited to meet the people we will be dealing with this year and going on field trips with.

Lauren is excited because we already have our first science project.  She said if we get to do fun stuff like this the first week this is probably going to be a REALLY fun year.  We had to get Mealworms and we have to observe them for our lesson on metamorphosis.  Did you know mealworms turn into beetles.  We will be observing them everyday and waiting for the change.

The life-cycle of a mealworm

One of our concerns with Lauren schooling at home was Austin.  Having a 2 year old running around while trying to teach a 3rd grader, could be bad news.  I must say though he has done great this week.  I have gathered some things here and there to work with him on ABC's, numbers, colors and other basics.  The beginning of the week since I felt so lost I didn't have much time to do anything with him but today we got to sit and work with some of the flashcards I got for him.  He really enjoyed doing it and it made me feel like we will be able to do this.  I can work with Lauren and Austin and we will all learn.  I know it is only week one (and our teacher told us it will probably take 4 weeks to settle in) but I am very confident in our decision and I know next week will feel more normal (with a little prep from me).

So how was your first week of school (if you have kids or are a teacher)?  Do you attend public, private or something different and how do you like it?

Until next time...enjoy the end of summer weather (even though summer is over for our children).

Catch Up

I know, I know...it has been WAY too long since I have blogged. There has been so much going on. I will give a quick catch up and write more on some of the big things later.

My last post was just before Halloween so since then.....my youngest sister and her husband bought a house in the same city I live in, we had Thanksgiving, Christmas, started a new year, had two birthdays, my middle sister bought a house and we have redone the inside for her to move in (you can go to http://cowgurlsblessing.blogspot.com/ and see that project) , and we have made a big decision for our daughters schooling for next year.

So I will start with the most recent, our school decision. We have had a hard time with the school Lauren has gone to the past two years. She came into the school ahead so we knew there would be an adjustment period but we are at the end of our second year and still waiting for the lessons to challenge her. We have also had issues with the teachers she has had and the lack of structure in the classrooms. After much research, prayer and discussion we have decided to enroll her in the Texas Virtual Academy. It is an online charter school. I will be taking over her teaching at home with the guidance of the school and a local teacher we will be assigned. Unlike typical homeschooling we will have lesson plans and assignments sent to us for everyday. We will have to answer to the teacher and follow all Texas guidelines. We know this will be a challenge for all of us but we are very excited to start this in the fall. We are already looking at ways to schedule my days (cleaning, laundry, etc.) into school days. Lauren was a little worried about not seeing her friends but when I told her she can still talk to them and see them and we will have fieldtrips with other students from this school in the area she was excited. We will take it one day at a time and for now we are only looking at this for one year. We will see as we go how we all adjust to this and we will decide later what we will do for 4th grade and foward.

Austin is growing growing and talking up a storm. He loves to talk and be outside. Next year will be very interesting with him as I will find things for him to be learning during the school day also.

We really think this will be the best thing for Lauren in the long run and I think she will really enjoy learning with more challenges. I will let you know in the future how this goes.

Time to begin a new adventure!!! If anyone has done this or has helpful suggestions please send them my way.

Since it has been so long, here are the most recent pictures of the kids. We took these this weekend while driving around.

Until next time...

Ashley

Pumpkin Fun

Wow!! It has been forever since I have posted anything!!

We have been busy, busy working at Ms. Janice's house and finishing projects for her big open house. If you would like to catch any projects we have worked on or the finished project you can read all about them on my Mom's blog http://cowgurlsblessing.blogspot.com/.

We are getting ready for Halloween around our house. Weekend before we took the kids to the Pumpkin Patch (I will blog on this tomorrow) and this weekend we worked on our pumpkin. Austin is having SO much fun with all the decorations and holiday stuff he is starting to see. He likes to kiss the scarecrows I have up for decoration. As crazy and into everything he is I figured he would have a great time helping clean out the pumpkin. I knew Lauren would not be really excited about getting her hands all yucky but I knew she would help.

So we cut the top off and I dug in and showed them how to get the slimy stuff out...they were both pretty grossed out.

Austin thought the scoop looked fun.

Then he thought he'd try the spoon.

Lauren dug in and had stuff on her hands...EEEWWW!!

They did stop for a really cute picture.....(both of them have their hands out with sticky on them.)

Austin was not about putting his hand in the pumpkin at all...you can see his face looking at the stuff on the floor.

After a lot of convincing he finally put his hand in, we missed a picture of him pulling stuff out but with his first finger and his thumb he had one little string of stuff and said gross...it was so funny.

Lauren was pretty grossed out the whole time.


She finally got in there and got a big hand full of stuff...both of them just crack me up!!!

BLAH!!!! - that's what Austin is saying, he was really grossed out Lauren touched it.

I was so surprised at his reaction, he is a play in the dirt pick up everything kind of boy but apparently he draws the line at pumpkin guts.

After much discussion as to how we were going to decorate we decided that since both the kids LOVE Spongebob we would make a Spongebob pumpkin. So I looked up a template online and drew him on. Then the question was how well would this really work.

He looks good drawn on....

I finally got time to carve the pumpkin today....SUCCESS!!!

I am so happy with how it turned out!!

The kids think it is SO cool to have a Spongebob pumpkin. We did decide to keep him inside so we can enjoy it though so if you drive by you would have to knock and come in to see him. I do believe this is the first pumpkin I have ever had that has a name.

So now Austin stands and oh's and ah's at the Spongebob and then he goes over and kisses the scarecrow. Crazy Boy!!!

Christmas is going to be so much fun with him this year, Lauren has already taught him what Santa says and is telling him he can't cry when they go see him.

Tomorrow I will try to post on our Pumpkin Patch trip...until tomorrow...

Ms. Janice's backporch bed

I have recently been doing some projects for my Mom's friend Mrs. Janice for her backyard and I thought I would share some of my work. She has a wonderful back deck with lots of shade and she decided to give her furniture a face lift. So I have been working hard sanding and painting patio furniture. This one though is one of my favorites from her backyard though.
It is an old metal baby bed with the front removed to make it like a couch. I forgot to take a picture before I began sanding but this is in process. As you can see it was blue when I started (and whatever blue it was it was on there GOOD!!!)

You can kind of see how the paint is rough from weather and age....some of the roughness was actually the metal dented and banged up over the years.

After much work and LOTS of elbow grease you can see the paint is coming off and I am happy with the result.

My helper keeps touching my work and getting sanding guck on him.....Boo he says as he pokes his head through the bars.....

As I got to working lower on the bed I decided it would work much better if I could work on it as two pieces so I removed the spring part.

Once I removed the springs I could move the sides around to get to some hard to reach spots.

All done sanding I began the fun part...painting....Mrs. Janice decided to do all the furniture in a rusty brown color (the same as a fan she already has hanging out there)

Here you can see the color better....looks good...

In my excitement to begin painting I didn't think everything through and the feet are sitting in the grass...I will have to move it in the morning to finish but otherwise the base coat is done.

Once I finish painting this color I will spray Hammered metal paint on it for a texture and it will have some really cute red, white and blue pillows and a mattress that my Mom covered. I will post more pictures of the finished project next week.