Embarrassed and Ashamed!

I am quite embarrassed and ashamed that it has been nearly two months since a blog post. What the HELL have I been doing? I've clearly got nothing else to do, but seriously, I enjoy posting so that I can look back on things I never would have remembered and laugh. So I am officially turning over a back to blogging leaf! Here is a quick summary of the last two months. We have MOVED! Yes, that's right, folks. We are no longer nomads, but have a place to call our very own. It is going to be a long work in progress, but we have plenty of space. Over time we will just need to make that space our own and bring the house into the 21st century and out of 1982. We have made a huge dent in that endeavor just by redoing all the carpet, putting in wood floors, and painting every square inch. As soon as I can clean enough to take some "after" pictures, I will post the before and afters. It is pretty amazing. On top of moving, taking care of three children has become second nature :) Most of the time, they are pretty good and easy, but on days like today, I think to myself, "holy shit, this could be a long 18 years".

Maizy is 3 months old now and has some slight torticollis and neck muscle strength issues. No worries, for some reason, I happen to know a great physical therapist (at my office) who has been helping her out. She is pretty small so perhaps that has something to do with it. In fact, just last night, we were with another baby who is two days older than her and he looked like he could eat her for breakfast....actually, make that a snack. He was this adorable, yet incredibly large baby. I know they are both at opposite ends of the normal spectrum, but it really dwarfed Maizy. Not sure how much she weighs....maybe 10 or 11 pounds. I guess we'll find out for sure at the end of the month for her 4 month check up. But she did recently make it across the country to Seattle for a visit (look for that post coming soon). She was the best kid (of our three) on the plane if that says anything.

I also don't have any pictures from end of August to end of September because I lost my camera. I know, smart one. And of course with the move, we didn't have a computer for a while so I hadn't downloaded pictures in a while. So there went documented memories from August 22 to September 18. Big bummer! But I did learn a valuable lesson.....download pictures often.

The Final Goodbye

We have been ferociously packing our house this week of spring break.......why you ask? Our house is officially sold and it is 99% going to close on April 30th. The area of the house that took the longest was the dining room. We have a ginormous dining room breakfront that was like the clown closet and just kept on comin'. I'm not really sure of the answer to the question as to why we own 6 sets of dishes.....some of which are so delicate that they require individual wrapping of each dinner plate, salad plate, bowl, mug, serving piece, etc. I seriously hope we never move again. Which may be a possibility, but I'll leave that a mystery for now. Anyway, I became quite sad when packing because we'd be leaving the kids' first rooms, house, etc. So before I packed, I took pictures of their rooms so they would remember them. And I'm posting it because this has become our family scrapbook so regardless if anyone else cares, I can look back through the blog and see their "old" rooms.

Of course this is Alexis's second room, but her first room was pretty much Max's room with a little more pink.

The final goodbye will come right before the closing when the movers come and we never come back to our house again!!! But hopefully we will have something bigger and better to move on to.

March Excuses

I know there were no posts in March. So unlike me :) So either our lives were totally boring (unlikely) or our lives were so crazy that updating by blog became very low on the priority list (highly likely). So here is March in a nutshell for us. At the beginning of March, I either had a stomach bug or food poisoning that caused more puke than you ever could imagine thus dehydrating me and necessitating a 24 stint at Northside Hospital. Fun times! It took about a week to recover from that.

Then it was Purim and we hopped around from carnival to carnival with two dressed up children. Alexis would be nothing other than Dorothy. Luckily, when I was about 6, I was Dorothy for Halloween and had a costume already made. And, yes, my mom kept it. So Alexis got to be Dorothy after a manhunt for red shoes, because her silver sparkly shoes were not good enough and my idea of wearing red socks and no shoes didn't go over so well either. After finding red shoes that met the criteria for a 4 year old, I then had to find Max a costume. Not that easy in March as opposed to October. But we made do. Here is Max man the pirate and Alexis with Bess. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of her full body length to view the shoes. Sorry!

Next, we took a trip to Athens for the Gym Dogs meet. Always nice to head back to the ol' stomping ground and reminisce. The kids loved it and we even had nice enough weather to walk around downtown.

Really the rest of March is just a blur because right about this time is when our house went under contract. Like literally we decided to just suck it up and lower the price on a Saturday and then on Sunday someone came to look and by Sunday night made an offer. So the next couple weeks were spent going through inspection, appraisal, fixing a couple things, starting to pack, starting to look at houses, cleaning out my mom's bonus room and basement (so that we can stay with her until we find something). Really, I can't imagine why I did not have to make a blog post. Oh, and speaking of her bonus room.......WOW! We needed to clean out the closets and empty the room so we can stay in there. And I'm telling you, clown closets. Crap just kept coming and coming. 20 years of stuff. It was incredible.

We then held our 4th Bi-Annual Blood Drive in honor of my dad on what would have been his 54th birthday on March 28. We had about 25 people donate blood and we are very thankful for that and being able to continue his tradition.

Then all of a sudden March was about to end, but of course, we needed Passover stuck in there just to add a bit more fun. So we moved into my mom's house for the week so we didn't have to clean and get two houses ready for this crazy week! And then all of a sudden it became April. Time is ticking by and getting closer and closer to June. Oh CRAP!

At least, I'm already beating the number of posts in March this month. One down! I promise to be better. Well, who am I kidding........

Home Sweet.....Get Me Outta Here

I'm soooooooo tired of our house being on the market. I mean how fun is it to make your house spotless every single time you leave it. And I've now been doing it since June 2009 ----- that's 7, going on 8 months. Through puking and nausea, through children making disasters, and now moving on to the difficulty of bending down to pick up all those little toys as my stomach grows (which is has seriously done in the the last two weeks). I'm soooooooooo ready to be out of here. All I dream about is leaving to take Alexis to school in the morning and not worrying if I picked up that wrapped up diaper or poured the bowl of cereal down the drain. We have not had a visitor since probably October. Finally, last weekend, someone calls at 9am on Sunday to say they will be here to see the house at 10am. Really, folks? Only an hours notice on a Sunday morning. We were still in bed. I don't think I've ever showered in under 5 minutes like I did, busted my @$$ to clean up, get children ready, and pull out of the driveway by 9:59am. After a few days, we get some feedback. They came to our house by mistake....they were really looking for 4 bedrooms. COME ON PEOPLE! Isn't that the first thing you look at when you pull up a listing? So we busted our you know whats for nothing. And spent all week hoping that someone would come this weekend. So far.....not good. Unless, of course, we get another 9am phone call tomorrow.

It's a Brick House

Someone is coming back to our house (and yes, it's brick) for the 3rd time on Saturday to check it out. I'm a cleaning, praying fiend that this will actually pan out for us. I'll feel much better on the other side of things looking to buy rather than trying to sell. I'm actually just really tired of keeping our house clean. I mean I'm really looking forward to being able to leave one day without making beds, picking up magnets off the kitchen floor, and leaving a cereal bowl in the sink. All the while carrying Max around on one hip. All 21 pounds of him STILL wants to be carried around like he only weighs 10. I need to invent some sort of contraption that will attach him to my back so I can be hands free. I think I've milked the Bjorn and the sling long enough that he is too heavy and cumbersome for those now.

On a different note, Max has passed out 3 times today and it's only 2:00pm. He had been doing better for a few days, but I think we had a set back today. Hopefully, we'll have some more information soon. More about Max and his passing out when all the information has been gathered. But, he sure is sweet and we sure are enjoying this Fall weather.

Hope you enjoyed this totally random posting!

Strong Woman

This weekend we spent some time getting our house ready to be put on the market. On Tuesday there should be a sign in our yard! One of the things on the to-do list that the Realtor recommended was to power wash the driveway and walkway. Luckily, our nice next door neighbors let us borrow their power washer. The day started out like this:

But quickly it turned into this:



Yes, that's right. I power washed 3/4 of the driveway and the whole sidewalk in front of our house. I felt like a real man. That darn wand was heavy too. My shoulders were sore the next day!!!! Just in case that wasn't enough proof for you, here is a video:



I take my work very seriously!!!!