Monday, May 24, 2010

1 Down, 1 to Go

As of today, we are officially homeless.

After 5 months of having our house on the market and two weeks of moving stuff from the house into storage units (3 units to be exact) we are no longer homeowners. We literally made a trip to the house for the last of our stuff right before our appointment at 10am! It was such a relief to finally be done! We still aren’t sure if we’ll be settling on the new house this Friday or not, but hopefully we’ll know sometime before Friday! 

Tomorrow is our home inspection and we found out today that the appraiser will be stopping by tomorrow sometime also. So, after those two things are finished we just have to wait.

Again.

Everyone, keep your fingers and toes crossed!

I’ll try to update tomorrow…

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Memory Lane II

More reminiscing…

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6) We did many home improvement projects while living in this house, but we did more painting than anything. I’m almost positive that we painted every room in the house at least twice. I’m a terrible paint color picker outer, so I wasn’t ever happy with anything too long…but, we eventually got to colors we could actually live with and they’ve been there awhile now.

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7) Living across the street from the community park was a good and bad thing. It was only bad when the teenagers decided to hang out there, but my kids had a lot of fun playing on the equipment…even though it was really lacking until this past year when they finally added swings and another climbing structure. As you can see from the photo’s above, you really don’t even need equipment, just a big rain puddle will do!

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8) When Tony, Zoe and I all moved into our first townhouse, we thought it would be fun to get a pet. We found out about a lady who had just had a litter of kittens, so off we went. Of all the kittens, one really stood out to us, and man was he a cutie. We ended up choosing him, and we named him Zeno. Zeno wasn’t always the friendliest cat, but he was ours…so we loved him despite his ornery nature, and bulimic tendencies. Sadly, he grew old and sick and passed away in 2008. Not one of our happy memories, but an important part of our history in this home.

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9) As a family we have spent countless hours making food and crafts together. I’ve always enjoyed doing crafty things with the kids and we have done tons of projects together. Cooking isn’t my thing, but I do love making some special treats when the holiday’s roll around.

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10) Holidays. We have had some very memorable holiday moment’s here in this little house. Easter egg hunts in the yard. Shooting fireworks on the 4th of July with family and neighbors. Carving pumpkins and trick-or treating for Halloween. Opening gifts in the living room on Christmas morning. Fondue dinners to ring in the New Year.

It’s taken me all day to write this post. Mostly because I’ve been busy watching baby Lea, but also because it’s always hard for me to look through all those old pictures from when my kids were much younger!

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Glass Half Empty

Warning: This is a whiny, pouty, pathetic post. I'm in the mood to complain and feel sorry for myself…and it isn’t pretty. Read with caution.

I have always been a bit of a pessimist. I don’t know why I am this way, but I don’t think anyone who knows me would call me an optimist.

If I have learned anything from selling this house and trying to buy a home on short sale, it is this:

Being optimistic is stupid.

At least when you are pessimistic you won’t expect things to actually work out, so when they don’t, you won’t be as upset about it. When you get your hopes up and are feeling like “hey, I might as well be happy and optimistic that things will fall in place” and then they don’t…well, then your feelings get all hurt and you get mad, then sad then downright depressed about the whole thing.

Being optimistic about things is almost like being completely insane. The whole time I was optimistic I wasn’t planning on what the next step was. I wasn’t seeing the whole picture and I was pretending that all of this nonsense was going to just fall together. Now that I’m back to my old pessimist ways, I can see clearly how screwed up this whole mess is. Things aren’t going to be easy. Everything is going to be crazy, and I am actually have to live someplace weird.

We have to be out of this house by 10am Monday. Actually, we won’t be able to sleep here after Saturday because we are moving the beds out that afternoon. So, on Sunday we will only be here to clean and Monday morning we will be handing over the keys.

I can’t think of anything optimistic about any of that…except that we probably will own the house we want sometime in the future.

Maybe.

PS. Please don’t remind me of all the things I have to be thankful for…like my family, our health, yadda yadda. I know all that, but I can’t wallow in self pity if people keep reminding me how many things I should be happy about. In other words, if you have something nice to say, don’t.

Memory Lane

Since we are down to the last few days here, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the past 9 years and all the good times we’ve had in this little house. There are so many that I could never list them all, or even remember them all, but I feel the need to at least write down a few that are really standing out to me today.

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1) We have all kinds of photo’s of when we were building this house, and we were so excited about it and all the possibilities, that we would drive out here at least 4-5 times a week to see the changes. We would all get out of the car and explain what was what to Zoe, and let her run around while we looked at the poured concrete and boards that was slowly becoming our house. As you can see from the photo’s we were all pretty excited!

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2) We had only been in the house for about 1 month before I gave birth to Landon. It was tough getting things ready while I was so big and pregnant, but I loved every minute of it, especially the new addition to our family. 

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3) I can still see Zoe learning to ride on 2 wheels out here on our then deserted streets. Tony spent a lot of time running up and back with her as she learned to keep her balance. She also mastered her roller skating skills along these streets…proud moments for a little 6 1/2 year old girl! Zoe was nervous about starting a new school, but one day while we were checking out one of the other houses being built a family pulled up into the driveway. We were a little embarrassed to be caught snooping around someone else’s unfinished home, but they became great neighbors, and Zoe and Theresa have been best friends ever since.

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4) Bringing home our dog Ginger. I promised Zoe that we would get a dog as soon as we had a bigger yard, and when we moved into this house our yard more than doubled from the one we left at our previous townhouse. Our yard here isn’t even all that big, but it was a huge improvement from the one we left!

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5) Birthday parties, cook-outs, water-balloon fights, slip and slides, water slides, moon bounces, you name it and it happened in our back yard. We put a patio in the summer after (I think) we moved in and we have had so many fun times out there. We even bought a little fire pit and used it often to makes smores or hot dogs. Landon had every birthday celebration out there until he turned 8 last year and wanted to try something new. Zoe had many friends come over to play in the back, whether it be in the snow or sunshine, it was always a good time.

This post is getting pretty long so I guess I’ll stop here…hopefully I’ll find time to post more soon!

Monday, May 17, 2010

To Be Continued…

For some crazy reason I thought I’d be able to continue blogging while all of this craziness in my life was going on. Between watching a baby full time, moving, baseball games, track meets, laundry, bills, hotel shopping, closing on our house, various end of year school activities, trips to the bank, trips to the grocery store, trips to my room to cry…I just don’t have the energy to keep this ol’ blog up right now.

At least not on a daily basis.

So, I’ll be blogging less for awhile, and it is killing me to break my goal of posting once a day for the year, but something’s gotta give. I’m also going to quit my photo of the day for the year. Another thing I absolutely hate to give up, but I just only have so much to give and right now I’ve got to stay focused on the immediate necessities. Hopefully I’ll still get around to posting at least a few times a week, but I can’t promise anything at this point.

So, to my two readers…I apologize for letting you down, but hopefully things will start getting back to “normal” sometime soon.

Now I’m going to my bedroom to cry a little.

Then I gotta get back to packing boxes. :(

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Hotel Hunting

We went on a home away from home hotel search today. We don’t know how long we’ll need to stay in a hotel before we are able to close on our house, but we thought we would try to get some base prices and ideas of what is available in our area.

We determined that pretty much no matter where we stay, it’s going to cost about an arm and a leg…and possibly from more than one of us.

We looked at this hotel first, and I think it was probably the coolest of any of them. It looked like it was designed by people who create furniture for IKEA…everything looked eco-friendly and clean. They even had special hybrid car parking up front! I guess owning a hybrid has some perks!

Element by Westin Arundel Mills

Element by Westin Arundel Mills

We also looked at this hotel right outside the mall, but it was rather expensive. We didn’t get to look in any of the rooms because they hadn’t been cleaned yet, so I'm just going by the online photo’s and it looks pretty nice.

Outdoor Pool, Patio & Grill

One-Bedroom Suite

One-Bedroom Suite Kitchen

We also looked at Homestead Studio Suites Hotels and Extended Stay America Hotels, neither of which were great, but much more affordable. The downfall to both of these were the lack of separate bedrooms and even beds. The first one only had one bed per room, period.The other one had 2 double beds or even 2 king beds per room, but nothing was private. Privacy wouldn’t be such a big deal if it were only a week, but since this could turn out to be a month or so, I’d rather not have a completely open floor plan.

We looked at a few other places, but they aren’t even worth mentioning. I even called a corporate apartment complex that has short term lease options, but they require a minimum 3 month stay. I’m am REALLY hoping I won’t need anything that long!

Hopefully we will know something by the end of this week so we know where to go and what to rent. If not, I may just pull all of my hair out and go into a hysterical, maniacal rage.

But then, that could always happen anyways.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Big Moving Day

Man are we lucky people.

My parents drove up today to give us a hand packing and moving things to storage, and we got a ton accomplished. Tony and my dad made countless trips to and from the storage unit with tons of furniture while Mom and I busied ourselves packing boxes. The house is looking like a tornado hit it but things are definitely moving along.

In between moving and packing we all went and watched Landon play a super baseball game (his team won!):

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And Zoe ditched us all and went to a 15th birthday party, she looked so pretty:

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Friday, May 14, 2010

Five for Friday

1) I’ve been using this photo of flowers my parent’s brought me for Mother’s Day as my desktop background. I wish they still looked like this in real life…but they are looking pretty droopy.

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2) The back of our truck has been looking like this all week:

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We’ve boxed and moved a ton of stuff to storage, but there is still about 500 tons to go, and we are down to 9 days. Yikes.

3) My kids only have 21 days of school left for the year. The end of a school year always makes me a little sad. Not because they’ll be home all day, but because it means they are just getting older, and the end of a grade reminds me of their growth. And my age.

4) After dinner we took the kids to Cold Stone. I don’t like how they have to play with the ice cream before you get it. I mean, it just kinda grosses me out to see them slap all that junk in the ice cream and then smoosh it all together with a spoon. I got a “like it” Creme de Menthe shake…it was ok. Zoe had a Birthday Cake Remix and ate the whole thing. Landon had sweet cream ice cream with rainbow sprinkles, gummy bears and chocolate chips…and ate the gummy bears.

5) I got the results back from my glucose test on Monday. Everything was normal! I am thankful for that bit of good news…especially knowing I won’t have to drink that nasty sugar concoction and sit in the doctor’s office for three hours!

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Ruined Anything Lately?

Today was more of the same crap as yesterday. Work, work, and then more work…I’m tired.

I did come across a funny site today though, so I thought I’d share:

Shit My Kids Ruined…go there and laugh, and be thankful they aren’t your kids! :)

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

P-A-N-I-C

I know that just a few days a go I wrote how I wasn’t letting this move and new baby thing stress me out, but for some reason I woke up this morning in a panic.

Not just a little nervous, but nearly a full blown panic attack. All I could think was what the hell are we doing?! Here we are moving out of this house in less than 2 weeks, we STILL don’t have a closing date on the house we want to buy, I’m starting my bi-weekly visits to the obgyn, and I’m trying to watch a 4 month old baby and keep life as normal as possible for my kids.

All of this while also packing up the house, trying to figure out what we are going to do with the fish in the fish tank, remembering to stop all the various services, figure out where to have our mail forwarded, figuring out what we need to leave out of boxes to use for these last few days, etc…it’s just so much to think about, and I’ve been acting like this isn’t a big deal!!!

What the hell is wrong with me?!

Waking up in a panic isn’t the best way to start the day, let me tell you! I’ve never gotten so many things done in such a short amount of time, but it does make for one cranky Mom! I did my best to portray calm while getting Landon ready for school this morning, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to be such a good actress tomorrow and until this nightmare is over.

I wonder if now would be a good time to also learn the art of meditation? I’ll just add that to my list of things to get done!

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

New Subject

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We don’t do a whole lot when it comes to purchasing gifts for Mother’s and Father’s Day, but the kids always have a homemade card for us. Since Landon’s still in elementary school, he made a little booklet at school all about why he thinks I’m awesome, but he also decided to make me a little card at home like Zoe did.

I’m only sharing this one because it is just too funny not to. The other one’s I’ll keep private…mostly because I want all those sweet words the kids wrote all to myself! After all, I only get a these kinds of cards about once or twice a year!

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Since it’s a little difficult to read, here’s what he wrote:

I could not use market because if you came down I would have had no were to put the markers and  you would see my card. The mane resen I gave you this card is because you are the best mom ever. New subject, I have a pensle and I can hide it fast if you come down.

Love, Landon

I actually laughed so hard I snorted!

Monday, May 10, 2010

My Little Sugar Baby

No, not my sister, but the little guy kicking and kicking as I write…

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At the end of this week I will officially enter my third trimester. 

What the what?!!!       How did that happen so quickly?

Time has certainly flown by with this pregnancy but I guess not knowing for almost the first 3 months sped things along considerably! I had to go in for my 1 hour glucose screen today and boy did I forget how tasty that little concoction is! I know it is a necessary evil and all…but, ew!

I do love going in to the doctor’s office and hearing this little guys heartbeat every month, but I sure hate stepping up on that scale. I really loathe that monthly weight gain reminder! But, I am happy to say that I have only gained 7 pounds so far…but, I am just now hitting the stage where the baby’s going to be packing on some pounds! Hopefully I’ll be able to keep my total gain minimal!

This is the point where I have to start going in to the doctor’s office every 2 weeks too, so my busy life is about to get that much busier. We decided to go ahead and rent a storage unit to at least get out some of the boxes we’ve packed. We’ve got exactly 2 weeks from today to be out of this house and we still don’t have a closing date on the other house! Yikes! I’ve made it my daily mantra to just let this thing go and not stress about it. Five years ago I would have been flipping out, but right now I’ve just chosen to remain calm. So far, it’s working and I even have proof because my blood pressure was 120/70 today. (I’ve never had high blood pressure, but if I was going to, I thought today would be the day!)

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Happy Mother’s Day!

I think I may have just had one of the best Mother’s Days ever!

It started with a delicious breakfast courtesy of my sweet husband Tony, then the kids both gave me their handmade cards, and Landon gave me a spider plant that he grew at school. Then my parent’s, sister and nephew all came up for the day and we had a great time. Tony made us all a terrific dinner on the grill and we finished it off with some cupcakes…it just doesn’t get any better than that! :)

Here are a few pictures from our day:

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Zoe and I. Photo taken by Landon.

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Landon and I. Photo taken by Zoe.

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Jaron and Landon shooting some hoops.

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Mom and Dad relaxing outside while watching the 5 dogs sniff around the yard.

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Tish and I. She really just wanted her picture taken with the baby!

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Jaron making corn on the cob art, lol!

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My sister, Mom and I. Happy Mother’s Day to us!

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Surprise 40th!

Today has been one heck of a busy day. We had to get up early for a 9am baseball game, then pick Zoe up from a friends, run some errands and then go to a 40th surprise birthday party. We didn’t get home until close to 7, and boy am I tired!

We had a great time at the party, and I’m sure glad we went. The friend of mine who the party was for doesn’t officially turn 40 until July, but they had her party early because of some family conflicts. So, it was easy to surprise her with a birthday party when her real birthday wasn’t for another few months!

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Isn’t she cute?! She just had no idea! She was such a great sport though and even sported her birthday hat for most of the afternoon…until she found the pretty bow on one of her gifts!

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One of the hostesses passed out little soft toys for the kids to play with while we were there, and they had a great time. Landon didn’t know any of the other kids, but once he had a ball he found those kids and played with them for the entire time we were there!

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Zoe knew some of the girls there too, so she had someone to sit and talk to as well…and make creatures with!

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Now everyone’s tired and looking forward to a nice day at home tomorrow. My family is coming up to celebrate Mother’s Day, and I’m pretty sure we are going to be busy, busy, busy!

Friday, May 7, 2010

Five for Friday

1) Zoe took two AP exams this week. One in statistics and one in European History. She studied her butt off…and now I’m just hoping it paid off.

2) Landon is nearly done learning how to write all his letters in cursive. He was excited to show us how he could write his first and middle names tonight:

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3) I tried another recipe from The Pioneer Woman's blog this week and it was excellent! It is called Pasta with Tomato-Blue Cheese Sauce…and you can get the recipe by clicking the above link. It’s a great vegetarian dish, but it makes a lot, so either be really hungry or you may want to alter it a bit to fit your smaller family. Or invite neighbors. And, her pictures are much more appetizing than mine, so I hope you’ll try it even after looking at this picture I took! 

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4) We stopped by Pier One tonight so that I could pick up a birthday present for a friend’s 40th birthday tomorrow. This is what I got but with the orange candle. Landon chose the orange because it smelled the best.

Ginger Peach Candles

I can’t seem to go in Pier One without finding something that I’d like to have. I’m hoping that maybe I’ll get these for Mother’s Day on Sunday. (Hint, hint kiddo’s.)

5) We all chased down the ice cream man last night after dinner. He just happened to be at the right place at the right time. We all enjoyed our ice creams on the front porch…although I’m pretty sure Zoe enjoyed hers the most. I mean, look at those eyes! ;)IMG_0617

April Fools Pranks

The two little kids made me laugh yesterday morning.  I was upstairs getting things ready for school when I heard them talking about how ...