Feeling Adventurous

I'd say that camping at a day shy of 37 weeks pregnant up in the mountains of the Louis and Clark Wilderness with 5 young kids counts as adventurous. Aaron has a great work schedule up here, with a day or two off during the week, so we took advantage of that and headed out right after work on Monday. 

After driving about 40 minutes into the mountains on a bumpy, windy gravel road, which road was about a 25 minute drive from our little rural town, we were feeling pretty far out into the wilderness. The area had been burned by a forest fire about 9 years ago, opening up a great long-distance view. The wildflowers and undergrowth were beautiful. We were excited to discover that we're far enough north for fireweed to grow--one of our favorite Alaskan flowers!

Within minutes of arriving, we had blood and screams (thank you, Hazel) that probably made the neighboring campers think something far more tragic than a scraped knee had occurred. Let the craziness begin!

Since it doesn't get dark until after 10:00 up this far north, we had plenty of time to set up camp. Aaron went for a tent village arrangement, with 3 tents for our family--a girl tent with an air mattress for me, a little tent that Xander and Elodie set up on their own for Xander and Max, and a tent for Dad and Oliver--instead of one huge tent. It seemed to work quite nicely. Oliver LOVED his first camping trip!

As it was finally getting dark, we enjoyed singing and sharing scriptures around the campfire, watching the moon rapidly rise above the mountain, and of course, roasting mallows. When Aaron finally put Oliver to bed in his tent, that exhausted little guy just laid right down in that big, cozy sleeping bag, laid his head on his favorite blanket, and went right to sleep, not waking up until morning. We've never had a one-year-old who was such a champion sleeper on a campout before! Everyone slept well and that made the campout SO MUCH more enjoyable! I'm glad we squeezed this little adventure in before a newborn arrives!

Aaron made sure I did plenty of relaxing, knowing we were a good 2 hours from a hospital and not wanting things to get too adventurous.

We decided to hike and explore back where the trees had not been scorched and we soon had several refreshingly wet shoes (or tragically wet, if you happen to be Hazel). Who can resist a bridge made of logs? 

And how can a kid not slip and get at least one foot in the water? Luckily, Dad found a mama bird in a tree feeding her babies to distract Hazel's mind from her soggy sock. She LOVES babies. That tactic worked far better than my reasonable cajoling.

I love how long kids can enjoy some water, sticks, and stones.

Max was pretty impressed with the evidence of a bear nearby. There was even black bear fur stuck to those claw marks.

No body wanted to stop exploring, even Oliver who desperately needed a nap by then. He caught a little snooze in the car while the energetic took a short hike.

On our way down from the mountains, we stopped by Eureka Reservoir to cook one more meal in the great outdoors before heading home. Naturally everyone was soggy and muddy right away. 

Good times and great memories. We just love the outdoors!

The Next Chapter Begins: Choteau, Montana

I must say, we are all loving life up here in Choteau, Montana. It's a great little town in an absolutely beautiful part of the country. The weather is gorgeous! Most days it doesn't get hotter than the mid-70's; some days it doesn't get past the high 60's. It actually feels quite a bit like an Alaskan summer, but with less mosquitoes! Two years ago, moving from Alaska to southeast Kansas while rather pregnant made for what felt like the hottest summer of my life. Moving from that hot Kansas humidity up to this dry, fresh, cool air while rather pregnant has been bliss! Aaron loves it no less than I do. For, him, just breathing the air up here feels like home. He is one happy, thoroughly contented man!

During the first week here, we were blessed to have my parents around to help us unpack and settle in. Grandpa made sure to include a little exploring to keep things interesting. He took Xander fishing at the nearby river, but all Xander caught were 4 crawdads, 3 of which were smart enough to escape. The remaining poor little fellow had the privilege of amazing a crowd with the fact that he turned from muddy brown to bright red when boiled. Xander and Grandpa thought the tiny morsels were delicious.



While Grandma and Grandpa were here, we discovered a few other things, as well. For one, that we were blessed to move into a wonderfully welcoming ward. With open arms, meals, treats, and people dropping by to introduce themselves, they welcomed us days before we even got to go to Church to meet everyone. It's so nice to feel wanted and needed! While it's not quite literally true that our family doubled the primary, it's pretty close, at least on weeks like today when some regulars are on vacation and no visitors are there. Today we had 9 kids in all of primary, junior and senior meeting together, and 4 of them were Dahles (plus, out of the 2 Nursery kids there today, one was a little Dahle). Aaron was substituting for the regular senior primary teacher (yes, all of senior primary meets together in one Valiant class) today and the only kids in class were Xander and Elodie! I happen to know these specifics because I was called a couple weeks ago to the same calling I had in our last ward: Second Counselor in the Primary Presidency! Primary is such a fun place to be. And as an added bonus, since junior and senior meet together during the second block, primary leaders get to go to Relief Society!

  

We also discovered how nice and generous our neighbors are when they offered us their lawn furniture and folding table and chairs while we waited for our furniture to arrive. And we discovered our cozy little library that kept the kids in books while they awaited their personal collection.



On the day the moving truck arrived and the crew unloaded our truck, it was so nice to have Grandma and Grandpa off entertaining the kids as they explored the Dinosaur Museum, library, park, and ice cream parlor! I tried to figure out where everything from our 4-level house with lots of storage would go in this little house with limited storage. By using up every bit of room in our allotted half of the detached garage and utilizing the second kitchen in the basement as our food storage room, we were able to fit everything in fairly well. In fact, I'd say we fit pretty cozily in here. The tightest fit is our dining room table in the little kitchen eating area, but as long as the person sitting in front of the fridge is flexible about moving if you forgot the salad dressing and the skinny little kids are in the back by the wall, we discovered that we can fit our family and two guests around the table. "A house filled with love has elastic walls," as a wise woman once said.




I'm so grateful that we found this affordable house that is big enough for our family and stuff (over 21,000 pounds of stuff!! Unbelievable!). We can stay here as long as we need to while we save up and look for just the right house for our family to settle in to for the long haul. My favorite part about the house is that it's right in town, close enough to walk or ride bikes to the library, school, pool, grocery store, church, scout hall, tire shop, and most everywhere. The town has such a great, safe, family-friendly feel that after only being here a week, I felt just fine about having Xander bike himself to and from basketball camp at the school 3 blocks away. He bikes himself to scouts on Tuesdays, he and Elodie bike together to swim team daily, and they biked together to Church one week. It simplifies my life so nicely to have them transporting themselves to activities, and they've taken the responsibility on beautifully! Speaking of beautiful, check out how clear this water is!



Aaron, Grandpa, and most of the kids went out fishing and exploring the beautiful reservoirs around us while my mom and I unpacked and turned the heap of boxes and furniture into a cozy home. We are all feeling settled and happy here in rural Montana!

     


















(Written on July 17 in an attempt to catch up!)

Attic Finishing

When we were house hunting in Independence, Kansas, the potential of this attic space


was a big selling point for us. So we bought this beautiful, old, brick house



and got to work on making the attic a dream-come-true 4th bedroom-clubhouse for the older kids. Well, Aaron did. I was like this



so I just dreamed and surfed the internet for pictures of beautiful finished attics like this



The morning of the day this little guy arrived on the scene,



Aaron was doing some exploration in the attic, and as he tore out a kneewall, he also cut off power to 75% of the lights in the house. Awesome. I'm in labor so let's go to the hospital and we'll deal with that later. With the updating of 1930's knob-and-tube wiring suddenly bumped to first on the old house priority list,



 finishing the attic was not something he could make time for right away. The attic had to wait with all of his other time demands: being an excellent dad,



monthly weekend Guard Duty,



monthly temple trips,



monthly visits to his family in Texas to see his sweet mom who was suffering from pancreatic cancer,



campouts with the YM,



and working one Saturday a month at the clinic. All that left the attic still looking like this


We hired local Lee's Cooling to install an air conditioner up there. But even after they were done, it was still SO HOT up there! They blamed it on the lack of insulation. Based on a YouTube idea, Aaron decided to frame in additional 2x4s to increase the depth potential of insulation, and thus its R-value. So framing began. Progress was SLOW. Wires had to be run and lights and outlets planned and prepared for. Finally, over a year later, it was ready for insulation. Aaron was ready to hire that job out, too, but we couldn't even find a local guy willing to take on the job. A great deal on some stiff foam insulation fell into our laps



so Aaron manned up, as usual, with his trusty sidekick Xander, who did not relish the hot, sweaty, itchy job but definitely learned a LOT!

Again, progress was SLOW.



Then we felt like it was the right time for us to fulfill Aaron's dream of moving to Montana to settle down and raise our family. In the slow real estate market of our little town, we didn't think that a work-in-progress (AKA hideous construction zone) of an attic would sell the house, so we threw balance to the wind and Aaron devoted all of his spare time to actually finishing that attic! As the moving date neared and he had only hung a few sheets of drywall, reality hit so we hired the wonderful Jeff and Vance to finish drywalling for us. They finished the Saturday before the moving truck was scheduled to arrive (on  a Tuesday). Then we had to paint, clean up the construction zone floors, put a railing on the stairs, and install all of the recessed lights and outlets. The goal was to finish all of that up on Wednesday, Aaron's birthday, and then drive out Thursday morning.

Thanks to the Xander & Elodie, the missionaries, and some selfless friends, we nearly got the drywall mud scraped and scrubbed off of the floor. It was far from perfect, and there was no time to actually stain and finish the cool old wood floor, but we did all we could and we'd have to be OK with what we could do. For the first time, I can honestly say "we" because on Aaron's birthday, I actually chipped in with some personal elbow grease up there instead of just consultation (since the moving truck had come the day before, I was totally done with all of the packing) and experienced for myself just how miserable the working conditions were in that hot, humid, filthy attic. Heat rash, puffy allergy eyes, and utter exhaustion (apparently, I'm a bit of a wimp, though in my defense, I am in my 3rd trimester)



really made me appreciate how dutifully Aaron just mans up without complaint to get it done! Let me just say, I did not marry a WIMP! I love this guy--I am so very very thankful for him!



Sadly, Aaron did not get the one birthday present he wished for: that all of his work on the electrical piece on his birthday would just please come together so that when he flipped the magical switch, there would be light. At 11:30pm, he was finally ready for the moment of truth. He flipped a switch, and no light. He flipped another switch and there was a flicker as brief as lightning, then nothing. The final switch: nothing. Calmly troubleshooting with his tired brain and exhausted body got us no where. But we were supposed to move out the next morning!!! Oh no!! In frustration, I texted my mom. She texted back some wise counsel that we gratefully followed: get some sleep and leave a day later. That extra day proved to be just what we needed. Aaron discovered that the drywallers had indeed drywalled right over an outlet, preventing the circuit from completing. After a little exploration (AKA cutting) into the brand new drywall, he found that hiding outlet and was able to get some lights on. Another circuit was overloaded--in his characteristic "go-big-or-go-home" style, he had simply installed too many lights for the space, you know, to make sure that it didn't feel like a dark cave up there any more. So after removing half of the lights (yes, leaving recessed holes in the ceiling), those lights worked, too. We ran out of time to trouble shoot the lights in the last dormer area, but were in the right frame of mind to accept that we'd done all we could and were just out of time. We didn't get it perfectly finished or staged for selling our house like I'd hoped, but what we accomplished felt pretty awesome, and we enjoyed tucking our kids into bed in the attic on our really, truly final night in Kansas. It felt beautiful up there to us after all we'd put into it, and we enjoyed a lovely last night in our nearly empty house.

Imagine that the built-in twin bed has an actual mattress on it and that there are books and a cute little lamp on the shelf.

I'm sure that this window seat reading nook would have quickly become Elodie's favorite spot in the house!

    


Imagine Xander's bed there where the old attic fan is in the before picture, and a sweet Lego Land in that big, open area to the left.



Aren't those lit up lights a beautiful sight? Just ignore those extra round holes in the ceiling. And the white drywall mud residue on the floor; we're pretending it gives it a rustic white-washed look.

We all loved how it turned out and were sad to leave it behind, but so happy to have a cool space up there to help sell the house! When our realtor came to take pictures of the attic on Aaron's birthday (and I was kind of an emotional wreck at the moment because it was not done at all and things just weren't coming together despite all of our blood, sweat, and tears), she was able to look past the construction-zone residue and tools and empty paint cans everywhere. She was impressed enough that she said she didn't think we needed to lower the price of the house to generate interest, after all. Woohoo! She likes it! Cindy likes it! That helped my emotional state considerably.

(Note: In fact, just two days after arriving in Choteau, Montana, our realtor called to tell us we'd received a full price offer! We had only had one showing in the previous 7 weeks, then we finished the attic and actually got an offer! It was such a miracle and we felt so incredibly blessed!)

(Written on July 10 in an effort to catch up!)

A Chapter Ends: Good-Bye Independence, Kansas!

The last couple weeks in Kansas were HARD! Saying goodbye to the great friends we made over the past two years was definitely hard. Here are some of our favorite faces and places that we had to leave behind.

Hazel just loved her year of preschool with Mrs. Allison Daily and Mrs. Jessica Belt.


I always loved watching Hazel hug and kiss her little brothers goodbye before she confidently walked into preschool by herself as I took off to try to keep up with Mr. Speedracer.


These are some of our favorite buildings that we passed on those frequent walks/rides down Maple St. The Presbyterian Church.


The library, with such a great children's floor up top. The best small town library I've been to!


The quaint Episcopal Church, where they held the monthly CUFF dinners (Community United Feeding Friends) provided by a different Church in town every month. I enjoyed walking down there to drop off a crock pot of something or a pile of cupcakes, made by Elodie with love.


Picturesque, old, brick houses.






The kids' favorite place on Maple Street was definitely playing outside with the next-door neighbors: Mariah, Lisa, Harmony, Memphis, Denver, and Quinton.












Xander and Elodie loved Mrs. Vicki Clifton, their loving, talented, generous, fun piano teacher. She was a great blessing in our lives and I appreciated her friendship and example through adversity.


We're all going to miss our wonderful Independence Ward family. I sure love those primary kids, teachers, and leaders. Oliver was struggling with the Nursery adjustment, but was happy to sit next to his big sister in primary!


We were happy that we got to enjoy another Cinco de Mayo fiesta with our amazing friends, the Krause family.










So many wonderful faces I didn't capture--playgroup friends and MOPS friends, kids' teachers and classmates, so many people who blessed our lives while we got to live in Independence! We will miss it!

Another HARD part was desperately trying to finish the attic to help the house sell. We just didn't think a work-in-progress attic would cut it. We were SO grateful for help from these fun and self-sacrificing missionaries, Sister Girard and Sister Frederiscksen!


Aaron worked like a slave up there.


Xander was a great assistant and spent many hot, sticky, dusty, even smelly hours up there at Dad's side.


Of course packing up the entire help with this little "helper" was pretty hard, too!


Kansas was a great chapter of our lives, with some hard work and hard goodbyes there at the end!