Rutabaga Dreams

Well, they counter-offered and we accepted their counter-offer, so we now have a contract. It all seems rather hard to believe. Now we need to get copies of the well report and perc & mantle reports to take a look at those… although I’m sure they’ll be fine. At this point we don’t know when escrow will close, as the seller has to wait for PG&E to run power up the road before we close. The seller also has to do some work on the road, but that shouldn’t be nearly the sticking point as the power issue. Like any good monopoly, PG&E gives no time estimates and makes no promises. *sigh* But at least waiting in escrow doesn’t cost us anything (other than mental stress, I suppose), and it still locks up the property for us. It also gives us more time to figure what exactly we’re going to do with the land once it is ours. (Although closing on land is rather anti-climatic - it isn’t like you get keys and can start moving in or anything! Maybe we’ll go pitch a tent there and spend the night after it closes. Then again, it may not close until sometime this winter, in which case I think I’ll pass on that idea!)

I think we need to plan another trip back up there before too long so we can go out and stare at the property for awhile. When we were looking at it before I was thinking of it far more in terms of “ok, this will work” rather than, “this will be ours!” and I think I’d like to spend some time thinking about it in this new light. But then again, it could still fall through for some reason, so maybe this should wait…

Our realtor presented our offer to the listing agent yesterday afternoon, and the listing agent is presenting it to the seller this morning. There is another offer though, so I’m not sure how this is going to play out. If we don’t get this particular property I won’t be heartbroken - I feel like it is far more important to get a property that will work for us for what we’d like to do (and that we can afford!!) rather than get a particular piece of land. We’ll get something at some point I’m sure, it is only a matter of time and looking. Granted, looking is a pain, but it certainly is an interesting learning experience!

We went back up and found yet another property that we liked and we felt would work well for us… so we’ve decided to place an offer. We signed the paperwork this evening, and Matt’s faxing it to our (new) agent right now. It doesn’t quite seem real - in fact it doesn’t seem real at all. I’m not sure what else to say at this point - this property is also quite close to Matt’s Aunt & Uncle, and is approximately 10 acres. There doesn’t seem to be any road issues here or anything else that would be a big show stopper, but who knows. We’ll just have to see what the seller thinks of our offer and then see what comes out during escrow.

Wow, it is already 11:30, no wonder I’m finding coherent thought rather difficult. I know that isn’t anything for some of you out there (*ahem* Dy *ahem*) but for me this is pretty doggone late - especially after all the events of the day and this past weekend. I am so ready to hit the sack once that fax goes through! At least I don’t have to report for jury duty at 8:30 in Hayward (1 hr+ away because of traffic) like my husband does though… poor guy!

I am pleased to report that things are going very well, education-wise, in this household. It has been awhile since I’ve done a state of things post, and since it feels like practically every blog I read has been writing a “what we’re doing in the upcoming year” or some such post I thought I would do a quick one too.

(I just finished this and I have to laugh at myself - um, yeah right, quick, I just don’t think that’s possible for me! Oh well, I hope this will at least be a useful reference for me)

We’re now doing a four day a week schedule, and either taking one day off in the course of the week because of whatever, or we are taking Friday off. I really like this, because it takes some of the pressure off and makes me feel not so guilty when we skip a day.

So, without further ado -
Bible/Religion:
- Continue with Egermeier’s Bible Story Book. We’re about to meet Elijah, so obviously we still have a ways to go. I’m toying with the idea of reading an Old Testament and New Testament story each day, and progressing through it that way. Emma is doing very well with her narrations though - she’s definitely requiring less prompting and remembering more of the story and names. We really like this book, and Emma almost always asks for a second story.

- Continue with Amy Wellborn’s Book of Saints. We’ve been reading this since the beginning of the summer or so, and for the most part I like it. The stories are a good length and they read well out loud. It is a little above her level, so I don’t ask her to narrate the stories, rather I just ask her a couple questions and we discuss. My biggest gripe with the book are the introductions to each story - I thought they were a little forced and trite to begin with, and now I’m finding them really irritating. They are extremely school oriented, and I feel that they can be a little too focused on negative behaviors and off the point. I know she’s trying to make the stories relevant to the 8-12 yr old set, but it just seems rather much. I’ve started just skipping the intros and I’ve been happier with the book. We’re probably about 2/3 the way through this book, and I’m not sure what we’ll do next. Perhaps I won’t do anything to replace the spot this book has occupied, and instead just do a longer Bible reading like I mentioned above.

Reading/Literature:
Continue with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. We’re really liking this book and I’m glad we went back to it. Emma just did lesson 28 today, and she’s doing very well with the material. I really like how the book breaks the lessons down into very manageable chunks and how it does continues to review and introduce sounds as well as incorporating word practice and a silly little story with a picture. We’ll just keep chugging along with this until we finish.

We’ve been doing a family story-time in the evening and that’s been really enjoyable for all of us. We’ve read Understood Betsy, and now we’re going to work our way through the Laura Ingalls Wilder books by Emma’s request. Matt’s already read all of them to her, but she’d really like to read them as a family. We’re only about four chapters into Little House in the Big Woods so we’ll be reading these for quite awhile! Emma’s also asked if we can have a daytime story-time in the afternoon, so we’ve been doing that on the afternoons when we aren’t doing something out of the house. Right now I’m reading The Hobbit to her, because just listening to it in the car is apparently not enough. We’re now going there and back again with Bilbo Baggins for the fifth or sixth time… If I let her, we would just keep listening to this book over and over and over again. Is it strange that my four year old’s favorite book is The Hobbit?

Math:
We started in on Math-U-See towards the beginning of the summer and we are really enjoying it. We were just doing math stuff by counting things, playing with cards, and by playing little math games, but we’re enjoying this a lot more. I like how it is more finite - we generally do two pages and that takes us about fifteen minutes. With what we were doing before, we tended to drag on a little longer than we should have and Emma would sometimes get frustrated. I also like that it requires less creativity from me. Emma is definitely mastering the concepts a lot faster now that we’re using this and I’ve been very pleased with how the material is presented. The Primer level that we’re doing will also cover things like telling time so that’s a nice bonus.

Writing:
I want to do something so that Emma can practice her penmanship skills, but I haven’t decided what to do yet. I’m leaning towards just some basic copywork, using the writing practice in 100 Easy Lessons as a rough guide. She is already writing her numbers reasonably well thanks to Math-U-See, so I’m not too concerned about that aspect. I know there are a lot of workbooks and such out there for this, but I’m not really convinced that they are that useful, at least at this point.

Other Subjects:
At this point I don’t think we’ll do much with other subjects - history, music, art, science, etc. After all, she’s only four. That being said, I do have on request at the library the two science books Susan Wise Bauer recommends in The Well-Trained Mind for this age group, and I’ll take a look at them in the next couple weeks. I’m thinking that it might be nice to have one of these and do a basic experiment every week. I also bought Child-size Masterpieces a couple months ago after seeing it at the park playday… it is really neat, but I haven’t put the time in yet to figure out what to do with it. I’m thinking that I need to do this soon and then perhaps we can do this once a week as well. Or maybe I’ll do one in one week, and one the next.

So now that you’re either a) not even reading this at all because I’ve bored you to tears or b) laughing at me and my overeager new to homeschooling ways or c) feeling sorry for my daughter, I do want to point out that we’ve been successfully been doing most of the above for the past couple months and we’re all still enjoying it a great deal.

I do wonder how this all will play out once we get closer to actually moving somewhere and such… My loose long(er) term plan is that we’ll do the kindergarten and first grade years over a period of three years instead of two and that this should give us some wiggle-room as we move, build or whatever in the upcoming months/years. I guess, as with anything, we’ll just have to see how it goes!!

At the library yesterday we were picking out a VeggieTales DVD and I overheard a conversation between a little girl (about five or six) and a man I assume was her father. The father was holding a big stack of children’s videos and DVDs and asking her if she wanted to get this one or that one. After they picked out several more, the father said that they had enough and suggested that they go check the movies out. The girl asked her father, “Could we check out some books too?” and the man answered in complete seriousness, “Why would we do that? Let’s just go check these out”. The girl just sort of sighed and they went up to the counter and checked out their movies. Now there’s someone who deserves the parent of the year award… although I have to add - when I told this to my Mom, Emma added “But Mom, maybe they had enough books at home already!” I guess we can only hope that’s the case!

When we go to the library, we generally find a spot, plop Gregory down with a toy, and I pick out books while Emma looks through the ones I pick out. She sometimes picks out one or two (subject to approval) but she’s generally pretty content to look at the ones I stack up for her. Every week I marvel that I can find so many interesting books in the small space of two sections of half height bookshelves. This week we ended up near the Disney books because we were looking for some Tomie dePaola books and I thought how sad it was that the Disney books probably got far more traffic than all these other great (but relatively unknown) books that we were checking out week after week. Surely enough, a little later someone from my Mom’s Club came up, searching along saying “d… d… d… ah, there it is, Dumbo! Look, honey, I found Dumbo!” As I was leaving, I took a glance at her stack of books - four Clifford books, two Thomas the Train books, and good ol’ Dumbo. Such twaddle! I’m sure there are a lot of people (including that mother, I imagine) who would say, “well, at least they are being read something” but I really think that’s the wrong way to look at things. Twaddle is twaddle, and all it does it sedate children’s brains and makes it more difficult for them to read anything worth reading later. I would think that would be the hardest part of being a children’s librarian - all those wonderful books out there and so few people interested in actually reading any of them.

Just thought I should say something after that last post… so far, nothing has changed. We have some more information on the property, and I’m not sure it has firmly tilted us more one way than the other. If anything, it varies by the day and conversation. The road is definitely an issue, but how big of an issue it is still hard to discern at this point. It could be 30-40K, it could be 100-150K… and it sounds like the person who lives at the top of the road doesn’t want anything done to it. There’s also a culvert that would require input from Fish & Game before it could be altered and the fact that the road is not even in its easement. I don’t think the property is out of the running, but it appears there could be some serious headaches just getting to the point where we could even build anything. We’re all meeting up there again this weekend to meet with a different realtor and to look at some more properties on Saturday. We’ll see how it goes!

As you might have guessed, we didn’t end up camping this weekend - we looked at property and hung out with family the whole time. We had a great time - looked at property, went to the county fair, enjoyed lots of great conversation, food, and just generally had a wonderful four days.

We found a property on Thursday that looked so promising that we all asked Matt’s Dad to come up and take a look at it. It was really beautiful - gorgeous trees, lots of usable space, a good location, privacy, and the zoning that we were looking for. However, by the next afternoon, we found that the fire department can override the zoning on a parcel and appears to have final say on development in the county. Even though the parcel was twenty acres and was zoned as residential five acres (which should mean that you could put four houses on the property, or subdivide into four parcels) the fire department will not allow more than one home on the property. So, that knocked that property out of the running, but Matt’s Dad decided to still come up anyways.

We all set out to look at property on Saturday (and looked at a couple that were, um, rather interesting - anyone want 12 acres with a rock pile contaminated with arsenic? Nope, not us either!) and we ended up finding a property that we’re all quite excited about.

The property is 20 acres, with lots of usable land (more than the first one we got excited about), great trees, a great location (only three miles to Matt’s Aunt & Uncle!), and it already has a well, septic, a trailer, several outbuildings, and a meth lab. Err… I mean bunker-style workshop. The trailer is in decent condition for its age (hmm… that sounds bad) although the hall bathroom is truly atrocious. Someone has put in new flooring and paint not long ago (and the kitchen was pretty heavily upgraded not too long ago too), and it just seems like they ran out of steam. The listing agent says that the people bought it as a weekend place, but stopped coming up so they decided to sell it. And I really don’t think the workshop was a meth lab, it just looked a little suspicious at first because all the insulation and the ceiling look singed… but the rest of the structure seems fine and there doesn’t seem to be any other evidence on the property. I think the structure just has a serious case of mildew and mold, as that was the overriding reek that came out of it when we first walked in. But anyways, it is a beautiful property and there’s enough of a start on it that we could be up there and building without having to do a lot of other work first. We’re currently waiting the word from the zoning/fire department people and we’re hoping we should have an answer tomorrow.

OK, Matt is waiting patiently for me to come over and start watching Henry V with him, and as it was my Netflix pick I think I better get myself over there. I hope you all had a great weekend too!

I feel like our lives have exploded this week. We’re heading up to Nevada County tonight to ta da! look at property tomorrow with a relator we found earlier this week. Matt’s mom is also coming up because they are seriously considering moving to that area too, so we’re all going to look around and ask lots of questions. We’ll only be there for a day though, because on Friday morning we will be heading up to go camping at Lake Almanor. We had planned on going Thurs - Sun, but now we’ll take a “slight” detour and do some property looking first. I’ve been looking forward to this camping trip all summer, but now it seems almost inconvenient because of starting this property search. Oh well, I’m hoping that it will be a nice little getaway still and we’ll have a chance to relax and enjoy the children.

Besides doing lots of real estate searches online, I’ve also been working hard on some comps for this website project Matt and I are working on and I had to get the buying club order in this morning. Our usual daily routines are in complete shambles this week, and I decided early on that I was not even going to try to follow my usual schedules and such and instead just work off a todo list. I’m glad I did that, because I barely have had time to even think about cleaning or doing our homeschool block, let alone actually do any of it! As a further indication of how busy I’ve been, I haven’t even read blogs for almost a week, and I doubt I’ll be able to for practically another week! I’d like to say that I’m not addicted, but given how twitchy this made me feel (especially at first!) I think I’d be lying. But going cold turkey is supposed to be a good way to break such things, right?

I did manage to turn thirty without the world coming to an end, so that was a plus. We had a lovely day in Santa Cruz, playing at the beach, visiting the redwoods and some of our other old hangouts in the area. It was a really great birthday. I’m glad I thought about the whole turning thirty thing quite a bit beforehand because that made me able to just enjoy my birthday rather than spending the whole time thinking “ack, I’m 30!!”

OK, time to go pack some food and see what else awaits me on my todo list!

Matt and I moved into our first house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I still miss that house, although I’m glad we sold it. It was a really neat little house, with a beautiful view out the back windows of lots of trees and the sound the creek babbling down below. It had a beautiful living room, with a view to the outside, a nice fireplace, a high ceiling, and skylights to let light into this north facing room. The kitchen and bathrooms needed some help, but the bedrooms were a nice size and the layout of the house made it feel much bigger than its 1400 sq. ft.

In this house we learned the difference between lot size and usable land… that it doesn’t matter if you have almost a half an acre when accessing that space would require being roped to a tree at the top. We also learned how those redwoods and douglas firs, while absolutely beautiful, can also block the sun during the winter months. We also learned why redwood forests are considered temperate rain forests. We also learned how limiting it can be to live on a tiny cul-de-sac off two busy mountain roads, and how frustrating it can be to never be able to take a walk out the door without feeling like you were going to be run over at any moment. But it was a neat house, and I still miss it.

I hope someday (soon!!) we’ll be able to move somewhere else that will also be ours like that house was, and that we will have learned from our mistakes. I’m certain we’ll make new ones, but I hope we’ll be able to overcome them, ignore them, or otherwise deal with them and create a Forever Home for our family.

I really dislike books that claim to be historical fiction but are actually romance novels with literary pretensions. If you’re the type who prefers her historical fiction meaty, realistic and intellectually interesting (see, for example, the Baroque Cycle by Stephenson as a good example) I would strongly suggest you avoid The Other Boleyn Girl. If you’re the type who doesn’t want to admit that you like romance novels and you like to pretend you’re getting educational value with your heaving bosoms, then give this book a try - you’ll probably love it.

I was heartily recommended this book by someone who used to be in my bookgroup and I think I’ll avoid her recommendations in the future!