Our First Week

Well, it's been over a week actually, and I have been writing blog posts in my head the entire time. I thought I was going to have tons of time with nothing to do living the simple life, ha! I have gone to bed exhausted each night. It has been wonderful!
We have gone to the pool, gone to a really awesome park with a lake, battled ants, read all about Joshua, ate real southern barbeque and drank real southern sweet tea, we've met our neighbors, discovered other homeschoolers here in our community, caught frogs and chased lizards, gone to swim lessons, spent hours at the local book store, went to a Southern Baptist Church Service, played kick-ball, started reading some great books, fed geese at the lake, and had several picnics...

We've got the inside of our home all situated with a place for everything, now if I could just keep everything in it's place! We still need to set up our yard and all of our outside stuff, but we've got plenty of time for that.
Some of the things I was worried were going to be difficult were dishes, laundry, showers, and cooking. Here is what is going on with that:

Doing dishes hasn't really been bad. We have been taking turns and working as a team and we can knock out dinner dishes is just a few minutes and have the kitchen looking spiffy in a snap. We've adjusted to not having a garbage disposal or dishwasher. The only delay is that we are using the coffee pot to make the water warm for dishes. More about that in the cooking post later...

Since the bath houses are so nice here, we haven't even used the shower in our home. It is a bit small, and it serves as our dirty laundry and storage room. So we load up the wagon with our shower stuff and get everyone showered up all at once. The wagon actually fits into the shower, so Pops can sit in the wagon while I am washing up. He also gets a bath in the kitchen sink. He loves it.

Laundry is a bit more of a challenge. We make a lot of dirty laundry. Seriously. The basket was overflowing and I decided I needed to tackle it before it got out of hand. I loaded up all the laundry into the wagon and pushed it up the huge steep hill to the bath house. I was able to stuff almost all of our laundry into the commercial size washer for only $5. I did the towels as a separate load in the small washer and I left the whites out for next time, but everything else went into the big one. I got chased by a huge beetle and had to make an extra trip for money since the children loved sorting through the quarters from the change machine to find the states still missing from their collection. We had to time the loads so as not to leave people waiting and ended up making a few extra trips up there, what a work-out! I find myself saying "that's not really dirty, you can wear it again tomorrow" way more than I ever used to say. I am really thinking about looking for a wash board from an antique shop and trying that out, just for kicks. We each only brought one rubbermaid of clothes and we have all agreed that we still have too much. It's amazing how things change.
I never would have guessed that my first week living in a new town could feel like a vacation. I have been spending some really wonderful quality time with my family and I am so blessed. I can't find one single thing to complain about. Coming from me, that says a lot! We all really love Meridian and we really believe we will love life in a travel trailer.