Summer Life in Colorado

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We've been settled in Ft. Collins, CO for a little over a week now.  Our praises include that the girls are sleeping well, have adjusted to the time zone and caught up on lack of sleep from our travels, and no one has been sick!  The children's program will start next week, so please say a prayer for all the kids that illness wouldn't be spread and that parents would be aware when their kid is getting sick so they can keep them out of the program for the day.
We managed to fit all the necessary objects in our car for the summer.  We minimized with a system that gave each person one suitcase, and one container (we have 4 rubbermaid drawers about 1 foot high, 2 feet long, and 18 in. wide).  It was quite a challenge since we had to bring everything but furniture, and I was really stressed about what to choose and what life would be like here for the summer. But now that we're here, it's actually really enjoyable.  I have been cooking meals using one pot and 2 cookie sheets, but the clean-up has been a breeze that way. Keeping the place tidy is easy as pie, since there is a ton of storage, but we don't have many belongings.  The girls play longer and more imaginatively with the few toys that we brought, and we are all outside more.  We keep and use the things that we normally throw away. An empty spaghetti sauce jar is a measuring cup and a vase. An empty paper towel roll is a toy of endless imagination--megaphone, microphone, spy glass, etc.  And you know what? They fight the same over that empty paper towel roll as they do over their 2 bedrooms of toys at home! All that to say, the experience is rather freeing, and is a good wake-up call that so many of our possessions are not really "necessary" to live, but just luxuries.  The only task that I don't appreciate is washing dishes by hand (which Karl does most of the time, so I can't really complain). However, this is the first summer housing we've had where we don't have to leave the premises to wash our clothes, and that IS a HUGE luxury! The more kids we have, the more laundry we have, and the harder it is to go off-site to do laundry.  So any time I have to hand-wash a dish, I think about how the washing machine is two-feet away, and then I don't mind so much.

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