As of this day, I have survived six weeks of insanity and the battle is almost over.

When I wrote the post back in August about completing six more weeks of construction, I didn’t realize just how close to insane I might become. But today the laundry room is complete and I have saved a week’s worth of laundry to do in my new washer and dryer for this afternoon.

You may have thought the story of firewood was long ago finished as well, but it was not.

Nick and I hatched a plan for getting the wood from the driveway below to the wood shed up above that did not include me pushing it up the winding path in my wheelbarrow.

He threw the wood onto the back of his truck and then he threw it to the yard up above. I threw it a few more feet inside the woodshed and stacked it in neat rows. We both had nightmares about throwing wood but finally it is all finished.

There have only been two more sources of insanity that would have to be resolved to officially end the six weeks: Dylan and The Ivy.

The word we say in this house most often is “Dylan!”. This is, of course, the name of our manic standard poodle.

I have tried to write about Dylan on many occasions only to realize I was venting, like a mother weary from a week of rainy days and bored children. Dylan is a beautiful dog excited about life…. on steroids. I want him to be Dylan, but a slightly more subdued version of Dylan.

So, today Dylan goes to the Doctor and gets a little snip, snip. Yes, he should have had this surgery years ago and somehow we never got around to it. I was opening a store, then we were moving to Ecuador, then moving back and here we are four years into his life regretting there was never time.

The Ivy can not be fixed by the doctor. It covers the entire property and being a little OCD myself, I can not stand that it is out of control.

Friends come over and admire the ivy. I ask them to take it home with them. Some of them do and we fill buckets and buckets with all we can dig up. It still consumes my life.

The lesson I have learned from these six weeks of insanity is to accept that which we can not change and change what we can.

I announced to my husband last weekend that from this day forward I will accept the ivy. I can trim it and keep it within its boundaries but I will no longer attempt to eradicate it from this yard.

It has been a difficult six-week period. I have cried, screamed and pouted about the house being a wreck from the construction, not having any privacy because of the construction, not being able to sleep in because of the construction, and Dylan gets crazier than ever because of the construction.

Finally, I have reached the end of this chapter and have a few good lessons in my bag:

1. Get your dog snip, snipped before he becomes a terror,
2. Limit construction projects to less than a year at a time,
3. Let the ivy grow…..change what you can, learn to accept the rest.