Stretching!

Life has been a bit too full for me lately.  3 months away cooking at tree planting camp, home, away to karate camp weekend, home, away to daughter's lovely wedding, home, trip to California, home, away for 1 1/2 months on our trapline on the Yukon border....then Christmas!!!  For someone who has gotten used to not much happening, this is exhausting!  Not that I haven't enjoyed doing it all....it's just not having had much time to just relax and enjoy the great weather we've been having and the do the 'puttering' things I enjoy doing.  Oh well....
There has been even less time to work on this blog, which I had hoped would be a daily pleasure, where I could include projects, recipes and ideas.  But, as it has developed, there has been absolutely not time for any of those things!  Hopefully this winter, things will settle a bit...but as I peer into the near future, I don't see a whole lot of it!  After Christmas we will have some down time until February when I have the delight of going to take care of my adorable granddaughter while my daughter and SIL go on a much needed and deserved holiday.  After a year of dealing with Taylor's leukemia, which as you can imagine, involved a lot of stress, worry, and hospital time, they need some 'couple time'.  Then we are almost to the next tree planting season in May!  Over the long, cold winter days we are hoping to make some head way in finishing the basement.  The shack's basement was completely unfinished when we moved in and is still pretty much that way, aside from it being divided up into bedrooms, laundry/ bathroom, family room and craft room.  It needs ceilings, real walls, floors, wiring, and a whole new layout to boot!  Once the sunroom is insulated we can begin to move basement stuff out to it and have the room to work we will need without tripping over furniture, boxes and junk! That's the plan anyways.
The kids and I head out Thursday for our trip south, which we are all excited about.  I've been spending computer time mapping out our route and where we will stop to camp overnight, and a few places to stop and explore on the trip down.  Zac is anticipating a stop at Lava Beds National Monument in California.  Looks amazing!!  Once we've been to Disneyland for 4 days, our itinerary is open for whatever we feel like doing or seeing!  We have a few places on our list of 'must see's, but other than those, we are going to wing it!  This is a budget trip, so we won't be doing anything too pricey, but it will still be a lot of fun and I know the kids will get a lot of great memories from it.  Who says fun has to cost money??
While we are gone we also begin our homeschooling year.  We are going with a new school this year, which we are all really excited about.  SelfDesign has a wonderful approach to learning, and is very much the way I view how children should learn.  We will begin our school reporting (a weekly requirement) while we are on the road and will have plenty of learning experiences to share.
Well, after spending the morning helping our neighbours with their first time at butchering home grown meat birds, ( I can't eat chicken now for a while!), I'm off to help Trev with some firewood.  Winter isn't far off and the woodshed needs to be topped up.  TTYS!