Our Essentials for the Nomadic Life Style

Evening walk.

My attempt at interior decorating.

We still do not have a permanent location to live.  Right now we are in our new temporary housing.  We spent two months at our old temporary housing, before that two weeks in two different hotels.  Our first real temporary "home" was a sizable (1200 square foot), but really dingy townhouse.  My proof of dinginess was the full canister of dirt in our vacuum every other day.  Yuck.   Our bedroom and living room boosted the only normal sized windows which faced a wonderful view of a couple office buildings and our tiny "backyard" (aka dog bathroom) was over grown with weeds and creepy crawlers.  The part I will always remember are the large, squish resilient spiders I killed daily.  Still get spider-mares at night! 

Luckily our dog loves to eat spiders, our cats are essentially worthless.  The only living creature in my house that helps out is our dog.  She eats food that spills on the floor, licks my sons face clean, licks the high chair clean and eats the bugs I miss, plus alerts me to people at the door. 

This being stated we made the best out of our home.  I decorated with pillows, and a rug from Costco (the idea being to keep my little man off the gross floor as much as possible).  Plus, my daughters and I found Halloween items to decorate with, as Halloween is one of our favorite holidays.  We had evening walks to the local park, very cute park, full of nice people walking their dogs or playing with their kids, plus neighborhood young adults playing
basketball or frisbee.  My favorite part of the park, and really so far of the entirety of Colorado, are the mountains and trees.  Every where we go we can see the mountains in the background, and they are beautiful!  Plus, right now all the trees are turning bright yellows and reds.  Gorgeous autumn colors. 

At our new location we are closer to the community we want to live in and we have beautiful large windows that flood our tiny apartment with light (and heat). Very appealing to my California roots.  At night we take walks around the lake, view the mountains at sunset and get bitten by evil mosquitoes.

The most difficult part of temporary living is that everything we own is in storage.  I found that within the first few weeks I was purchasing things I cannot live with out.  Everyone in our family has learned what our essentials for a happy life are for each of us as individuals.  For me that has been a kitchen aid, effective vacuum and cupcake tins.  All used frequently.  I brought with me my coffeemaker and Romba.  Of course my camera.  :-)

Ramona's most recent dragon drawing

For Ramona art supplies are imperatives; thus, we now have fabric paint, water colors, markers, colored pencils, crayons and paper.  On top of that we replaced scissors, a dreaded addition to our belongings since kid with scissors essentially means little bits of cut up paper all over the floor.  Glue and glitter are similarly dreaded belongings, that we have replaced, and I have spent late hours cleaning off the floor and furniture.  At least Ramona feels at home, and lets face it, when I am hunched over scrubbing glue and glitter off the floor I am pretty sure I feel at home too.

Ramona's Class Flag Design!

Ramona has been flexing her art skills in class too!  She is getting a reputation as an artist.  She takes this very seriously.  Her teacher asked her what she is good at for an in-class interview and Ramona said, "Art".  No real surprise; however, she followed that statement up with, "It was what I was born to do."  This took my breath away.  How many people feel they are born to do anything!  I had a huge mommy pride moment, plus a bit of an anxiety attack about her future... art is not an easy field to make a dent in.   Ramona also won the class competition to create the class flag.  So, she had been diligently designing and painting the flag that will hang outside her classroom for the entire school year.

 

For Beezus we have slowly been building a home library (and of course got a library card).  Currently she into the Warriors series.  Her new reading obsession.  The drawback to Beezus's love of books, she stays up very late reading.  I have to take all the books out of her room, which usually involves looking under her pillow, under bed, under her blankets and in her dresser.  I end up leaving the room with piles of books, which I do not bother to put in our bookcase, but instead dump on the floor.  If I do put them "away" they are all gone anyway by bedtime the next day, hidden all over the room again.  I am proud of Beezus and her love of reading; however, she is the only kid I have which the punishment is no books past 8pm. 
 

Our book collection so far...

Of course, when Beezus is not reading, she is composing a book.  She has her writer's binder full of pages with hand written plots, characters and chapters.  This is harder to take out of the room, because often her loose leaf pages mix with Ramona's loose leaf pages of art.  Ramona hides her sketch pads all over the room and draws late at night and together they make their room a mess of papers and creations- but thankfully the scissors and glue are still in the dining room.  Too bad dogs don't eat paper - that would make my dog the best vacuum ever!







Hope my family enjoys my update.  Things are, as my mom would say, chugging along.

 

Happy Almost Halloween!