We’re so excited. We finally got a patio set - a round table with 4 chairs (and an umbrella! Yay umbrellas!) as well as a high table with 2 barstool-height chairs. We put the patio set on the patio and the high table in the courtyard which is blossoming into quite the little sanctuary, complete with rosebushes and strawberry plants starting to bloom. And as moving sale season starts, we’re going to start buying more flower pots to mount on the walls of the courtyard. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get a little water fountain and some fairies to come and throw fairy dust at us.

Speaking of fairies, B put on his tutu and frilly apron and grabbed his pink elephant watering can and put all of our new flowerpots on the front of our house and it’s starting to look like home. You think I’m kidding about the watering can, don’t you? I’m not.

A few pictures from the outside of the house…the only thing missing is the kids’ area of the backyard, and that’s just one of those things where we just don’t want to go, do we? No. No, we don’t.

The courtyard, which is what you see looking out of the kitchen. We’re planning a lot of work; we’re going to move the wire contraption to the middle (that’s where we’re growing our strawberries. The ugly green stuff is protecting it from the frutarian bugs that will feast on the plants) and we’re going to fill the empty spaces with gardeny stuff, plants, more flowers, fairies in cages, that kind of stuff. This is where we’re going to hang lots and lots of flowerpots on the walls.

The backyard, complete with the Grilling Husband, the 1972 model, sans the tutu and frilly apron (I had to wrestle them off of him for the picture). You can also see our semi-finished garden which we’re going to border off and add a few more flowers to. There’s an aloe plant and a rosemary bush growing. If you look closely, you can see Isak handcuffed to his bed in his room. That green thing hanging above the umbrella is a roll-out shade, because the umbrella for the table and the shade for the swing just aren’t enough.

The little table that matches the patio furniture:

The front of the house…I’d like to add something to it still but I can’t figure out what. We don’t want to dig up the grass in the front, but I feel like the walkway needs some sort of plant along it. I just don’t know what.

So that’s the grand tour of the outside now that our house is becoming more of a home, nearly halfway through our tour here. Look! It’s almost time to start spackling!

Not only has the outside of our house gotten a lot of attention, the inside has gotten some attention from a different direction these last few days. I was thinking these days that while uprooting every couple of years is hard because you can never really get “roots” anywhere, at the same time, man it has eliminated the ability to retain clutter! Granted, when you’re someone like me, you’ll get clutter no matter what, but I can only imagine how bad it would be if we lived in a house with a black hole for clutter. Over the years, a large amount of paperwork has accumulated - lots and lots and lots of papers from the military (multiple copies of each), old receipts (from 1998!), pay statements (from 1997!), etc. Well, after enough years have passed, we can throw things away. I don’t need receipts from child care from 2001 or credit card statements from Hlollabatar, no matter how good Hlollabatar sandwiches are.

This recent push to organize all our papers was for a good reason: It’s time to get my package ready for the Chief’s board. Board results came out today and I. MADE. IT. The significance of the test is debatable; once you’ve made board, the test results are pretty much irrelevant. But - if you don’t make board, that’s it. There’s the end of the road for that year. So while my test results don’t matter much, what matters is that they got me to the board. One step closer.