Pics/rainy day update

The family was able to begin cleaning out the house right away. There will be no delay for probate. They are being very considerate of us, and are altogether a great bunch of folks! Another rainy day today, so cabin fever is in full swing. Tomorrow's forecast is encouraging, though!


Retired life agrees with Titus.

Heading for the campfire for hobo meals/marshmallow roast

Does this child have parents?

Even Mom gets to relax occasionally...

Tucker is very happy to have somewhere to ride his motorcycle! And little brothers benefit as well.

Waiting

At the top is Bob and Trevor with Bill Forbes, the man we bought the farm from. The bottom picture is the Hughes and us waiting for our Hobo meals to cook in the coals of our fire. It is also the spot we had laid out to build the workshop/apartment we would live in indefinitely until we are able to build a house. Some of you already know that when we bought this farm, the couple selling it needed to sell because the wife's cancer had caused them financial trouble. Since their house was pretty small anyway and we knew we wanted to build, we bought with something called a "Remaining Life Estate". This meant that they could live in the house for the rest of their lives or until they chose to move for any reason. Well, she passed away almost two years ago, I think, and he has been living in the house alone. We arrived here on Friday, April 17 and that next Tuesday Bill had a stroke while at a meeting down the road. He has been in the hospital since then and had seemed to be improving at one point, but yesterday morning he passed away too. His children had told us that he was more than likely not coming back to this house anyway, so they would get it cleaned out as soon as possible for us. While we are sad for how it happened, it does take a lot of pressure off of us as far as needing to build the workshop/apartment.

I guess I should back up a little and say that when we first purchased this property we anticipated Bob's last few years in the Navy being different than they turned out and we would have been building our house on the weekends and moving right in when he retired. This is not how things happened, so we were going to have to build something small to live in until we could afford to build the house. So, living in Bill's house would save us a lot of money. However, to get back to the first part of the story, Bill didn't have a will, so we may have to wait for the estate to go through probate before they can remove the things from the house. We have no idea how long this will take. Living in the camper with seven children hasn't been too bad so far, but today, for instance, it is raining and we will have to stay inside most of the day. This gets old quite fast. Especially with Tanner, Tim, and Titus who are so young and ACTIVE...and LOUD! We might take a trip to town today to get Bob a suit for Bill's funeral. This will help.

We plan to change our focus to farming now. We will get the garden ready and start planting, and get chickens and a milk cow. We aren't sure what God is doing through all of this change of plans, but we are confident that He does have a plan that is good for us. We trust in that. He is so faithful!

Poor Timmy had his first (and hopefully his worst ever) bike wreck today. I have never seen a lip that swollen before! He is a real trooper though. He cried for a while at first, then slept. After he woke up, he was laughing with his brothers and Callie and never complained. I am praying that he looks and feels a lot better tomorrow morning!

Our New Home

This is our home for the next few months. So far it hasn't been bad because the weather has been nice enough to be outside most of the time. Some days we have to come in to warm up for a while. Tomorrow there is a 50% chance of rain. This could be a little challenging. However, we are thankful that in the morning we will go to church, then again in the evening. This will keep us out of the camper most of the day! Isn't God good?!!?

This is how it looked by the 20th. It is down even more now. I haven't taken any more pics though.

This is what the river looked like when we arrived on the 17th. It quickly went down, thankfully!

Our trip

Well, it was quite a trip up to Minot, but we are here. We've actually been here for a week today. On Wednesday last week we were supposed to travel from Omaha, NE to Aberdeen, SD. In the morning, we had a blow-out on the left side of our black trailer. It didn't take too long to get that fixed, but then about 4:00pm, we think we hit something in the road because BOTH right tires blew at the same time! This did some pretty bad damage to the trailer, so Bob drove the children (except for Trevor) and me to Brookings, SD and checked us into a hotel, then took some new tires and parts back to the truck/trailer to try to fix it. It ended up that we had it towed, but they had to take it back to Sioux Falls. So the next morning, we went the approx. 60 miles BACK to Sioux Falls to get the trailer. This turned out to be somewhat of a blessing as the folks who towed it also fixed it and they didn't charge us much of anything. They were also Christians and were SO sweet. They let us use their yard to move some of our stuff from the black trailer to the flatbed because we thought we had the black trailer too heavy. That's what the picture above is. The owner of this business gave our boys little toy tow trucks and then just as we were leaving he gave Bob a copy of the DVD Life Without Limbs. They have also called us twice to check on us and see how we made the rest of our trip. God is good to use our hard times to bless us anyway! I will post again about other parts of our journey.

Blessings,

Sheryll

We're full!

Apparently the thought of trying to fit the rest of the stuff in overwhelms Titus as much as it does Dad1

Can't fit much more in there!

3 days and a wake-up!

Here's a better picture of the children, taken at Sheryll's Dad's house. Tomorrow is my last day of work in the Navy. Wow! We're almost ready to go. We are ready to be done! I think the 80/20 rule applies to moving...you spend 80% of your time getting the last 20% of your stuff loaded. There are 5 days in the 10 day Minot forecast with highs of 50 or above, so we're hoping the 2 foot of snow still on the ground will be gone before we arrive.