Our "House of Dreams"

Remember this?

Ready to find out what Stuart was digging?...............................

A front path!!! Yay!!! Woohoo!!!!

Every little home deserves a front path to welcome people in. And now we have one! Stu worked hard over a couple of days last week to create this lovely path. In these photos it's not quite finished but already you can see what a great job he's done! Here is Saraya trying it out.

Also, our home finally has a name. :) If you're an Anne of Green Gables fan, you will appreciate the name.......................

That's right, it is inspired by the novel Anne's House of Dreams........... which happens to be my favourite Anne book (I LOVE the Anne of Green Gables books!). Just after we moved here, we had a long conversations about what we would name our home. We plan to live here for a long time while we raise our family, and wanted to give it a name and a sign! We came up with lots of ideas, but both settled on this one.

We both desire our home to be a happy, peaceful place filled with love and laughter and beauty. We want our children to feel settled and safe to live and learn and dream and be. We hope to welcome in friends and family and create a lovely atmosphere in which to live.

So, our "House of Dreams" now has a sign for all to see..........

It hangs just above the "ship bell" we purchased a few years ago as a doorbell. A passion of Stuart's is nautical history, tall ships etc. so this was a special addition to our home also.

The children are always keen to help their Papa! So nice to have him around all the time over the holidays.

So what else has been happening in the House of Dreams this week?

Well, yesterday was one of those crazy days where we managed to fit in a surreal amount of work, and feel very satisfied with our efforts at the end of it. Saraya has had a few symptoms of having worms, so I decided to treat all of us just in case and also do a major clean! Thankfully William had a happy day and allowed me to do all I needed to do. I dusted the entire house, cleaned the bathroom and toilet, vacuumed and mopped all the floors, changed the sheets on all the beds, washed 4 loads of laundry, dried and folded it all............ AND managed to bake a batch of muffins for afternoon tea!! How?? I have no idea. Consider it a miracle! A great post-birth fitness regime considering much of my work was done with a baby in the sling. :) Today was a much quieter day, thankfully, with the children and I indoors with the fire warming us for most of it. Lots of book-reading ("Alice In Wonderland" at the moment) and board games ("Guess Who?" is the favourite!).

And Stuart has been incredibly busy planning for work for Term 3, building a front path :), and also doing a stack of work on the property next door. A long-winded story that, but just let me say that by default the house next door has wound up as an investment home of sorts - one that we don't actually want, we can't keep and we are desperately trying to sell. The last 2 days Stu has spent following the advice of our Real Estate agent, re turfing the entire backyard to make it more sell-able. On his own, in the rain. This follows after we re-did the gardens etc. 2 weeks ago with the help of some beautiful friends. We have also been cleaning the whole interior, shampooing the carpets etc. Needless to say, it's not the ideal way to be spending the holidays............. but we're keeping our spirits up, it's almost there and is looking great. Stuart has worked so hard and he really is my hero. We're praying the house will sell soon and all the hard work will pay off. Feel free to pray for this along with us.

The rest of the holidays we will spend as much time together as we can. We have a few fun things in mind to do with the children, weather permitting. Will post pictures as they come! Happy Tuesday everyone. :)