Are You Sick of This Yet?

If not, then I'm sure you will be after this post! I am a bit excited about this room because it is Zander's first REAL room. So, I took a lot of pictures. Mainly all of the pictures are for the grandparents so that they can see all of the details of Zander's room.

First, I want to give you the back story. When Zander was born we were living in NC in a smaller house. At the time I wanted itty-bitty Zander to be in our room, so he slept in a cradle in our room. Then Tony left for Iraq and we moved up to OH where the kids and I shared a room at my Mom's house (crazy I know). When Tony got home and we moved back to NC Zander got into his "own room." However his room was also the office and by this time we knew we would be moving soon so we did not decorate his room at all. However, for Christmas, his grandparents bought him a bunch of jungle decor for his room. Then we moved to OH and again we knew where we were staying was not a permanent place so we did not decorate. Finally, we moved and my two year old "baby" gets his first room! So, even though I kind of wanted to do something a little more grown-up, we already had all of the stuff for a jungle room. It doesn't matter because he really loves his animals.

Without further ado, here is his room:
The brown is not showing up as the actual color. It is more of a chocolate brown and not so much orange. Here is a close-up shot of his giraffe:

Close-up of elephant:

Close-up of zebra and dresser with the vine that hubs hung. (I'm not sure how I feel about it yet):

Monkey and window:

His toy box:

View from other side of the room:

From the other corner:

Hey, wait a minute! Who snuck into the shot. We better take a closer look:

What a ham!

From the front porch looking in

Here is a partial tour of our:

Here is the view from the front door looking upstairs.

A view from the front door looking in. On the left is the half bath, the right is a closet, entry to garage and basement. Of course looking straight is the eat-in area.

The front room, with the red wall, is currently empty (for the most part). So I won't show many pictures of that just yet. However, here is Tater showing off her new scooter.

And here is the shrine that hubs built of himself. LOL!

Here is a view of the kitchen and eat-in area. There are two closets to the left. The door that is visible is the pantry, and to the left of that is another one (you can kind of see the bottom of it) which we are using for storage.

Here is a closer view of my beautiful new appliances. Speaking of which does anybody have any good tricks on how to keep stainless looking good? I have noticed it shows a lot of smudges and fingerprints. Also, the crockpot holds supper....taco soup, yummy!

The eat-in area leads into the living room. The living room holds the floor that we replaced.

Here is a closer look at the fireplace. I just love having fires in the evening, so cozy and warm!

We have not even begun to decorate yet. We just hung up pictures yesterday, and now I need to do some shopping for the actual decorating. Any suggestions on what to fill my empty front room with? Or what would look good hanging on the green wall? Our what color to accent that room with? What I really need is a decorator to come and help me.

Word of Advice

Yeah, I know I suck already! Sorry it has taken me so long to update. Geesh, I said I would be MIA for the next couple of weeks. Alright so five or six weeks might be a little longer than a couple but whatever. It has been pretty eventful around here. Not to mention that moving between Thanksgiving and Christmas has got to be the worst time to move. EVER. So, just a word to the wise, if you are planning to move in the future, try to avoid the holiday season.

So, what have I been up to. Well we moved the weekend of Thanksgiving. That week was spent unpacking and unpacking some more. We also laid a floor, got appliances, and hung at least 15 light fixtures. We bought a live tree and decorated it, only to have it come crashing down the very next day and smash some of my favorite ornaments. Bah! Our basement flooded on the 19th, on the 20th we had a Christmas party, on the 21st I started painting Alex's room and Alex got sick. (Have you ever tried to paint a room with a sick two year old? Not fun.) So that was a really great weekend. Alex was sick for three days, but thankfully nobody else contracted his plague and we had no sickness for Christmas! We had five Christmas gatherings mixed in that as well.

So, I found myself having no energy to blog. Normally I blog when the kids are asleep, but with all the unpacking and organizing I have been doing there just was not time. So now that things are starting to settle down, I should resume my normal posting schedule. Hopefully soon I will have up a Christmas post and some pictures of the new house.

It's getting closer...

Because I wouldn't want to forget them!!!

I might be MIA around here for the next couple of weeks, you know with trying to move and all. Right now my house is filled with boxes, most of them empty. So, yeah I really need to get busy. However, for some reason I cannot seem to get much done during the day. Hmmm, not really sure why. Oh right, because of two small "helpers".

Also, I updated my blogroll, please let me know if I forgot someone. There are so many blogs these days that it is hard to keep up with them all.

House Update

I am a little nervous to post this, but we *might* have a house! This is all so different from the last time we bought a house that I just do not know what to expect. When we bought our house in NC, we were in a military town and the market was great. It really did not take much to get everything in order, and it seems like from the time our offer was accepted until we closed was really not that long at all. This time around everything seems to be moving in slow motion. Our offer was accepted like two weeks ago and we still do not have an end in sight. We are hoping to close by November 24th, but we still do not have our financing through, our home inspection or the appraisal. So, hopefully that will all be settled by this week.

It is a really great house!! One of the most exciting things is that it is REALLY close to my SIL's house. I won't bore you with the details, but it was one of the first houses that we looked at and loved. It was a little out of our price range at the time so we decided to keep looking. Well a couple of months later and the bank had dropped the price $10,000. We offered $5,000 less and they accepted our offer! See it pays to be patient (and picky).

A Whirlwind Weekend

This past weekend we looked at over 20 houses in three days. Yeah, that is a lot. In fact it is so many that they are all starting to run together. When the realtor emails an update about a property I usually have no clue what she is talking about and have to look the property up to refresh my memory. It is like a light bulb that then goes off and I say, oh I remember that is the one with xyz that I did NOT like. However, let's face it I did not like just about EVERY house that we saw. Either the house was to small and the yard was perfect or the house was great with a tiny yard or, or, or...the list goes on.

BTW, thank goodness for awesome family! They are so awesome that they kept our kids Friday evening and all day Saturday (even though it was my brother-in-law's birthday) so that we would not have to drag the kids through that many houses. On Sunday, we did not want to burden them with our children again, so we did drag them with us and thankfully they did surprisingly well.

We did see a few promising ones, most of which were in foreclosure so we would be getting a great deal on them. The one that I liked the most was perfect on the inside. It met all of my criteria, had everything that I have ever wanted in a house except a finished basement. The yard was a bit on the small side and was not fenced in. I keep telling myself those two things are easily fixable. We do not need a finished basement because the house is so big that we can just use the basement as extra storage and then eventually finish it. The yard, well it does not have to be fenced in...we have never had a fenced in yard and it can easily be fenced in. I keep telling myself that over and over. Truly I am in love with the house and I can easily look past those two imperfections, but am I settling? Is there a house out there with an awesome backyard just waiting for me? Will it still have my garden tub, wood floors, fireplace, etc.?

I just do not know what to do. Oh internet, please help me. Tell me if I am being too picky, or if I should keep looking. Will I be settling if we buy this house even though I do love the actual house? While you're at it could you find me that perfect house and sell it to me at a reasonable price?

The right place at the right time

When hubs was scheduled for his second tour to Iraq, we debated on what to do with our house. Should we put it on the market when he leaves so we have plenty of time to sell it, or wait until he gets home. If we sold it when he left, we would not have the extra costs and could save up money. However, when he returned in October, he would still have two months and if we sold it we would not have a place to live. Not to mention the fact that I had a baby and that the market was so good in our area we decided to wait. Mainly because I wanted to be with hubs when he got home!
So we waited. We figured we would sell our house in no time flat. When we were buying our house, houses were selling after only being on the market for a few days so we were not worried. The problem was that we had no idea where we would go. Hubs did not have a job lined up so if the house sold we would have had to put our stuff in storage until something came up. We put our house on the market towards the end of October. Then November came and went with no offers. Then December, of course things would slow down during the holidays so we had only a couple of people walk through the house. By this time I was really starting to get nervous! Our insurance had went up, making our house payment almost 300 dollars more expensive. January started off slow as well, then we started getting calls.
Well, hubs was officially discharged on January 1, 2008. We had decided around Christmas, that to save money we would pack up our clothes and go to Ohio to stay with family during our time of transition. In the meantime Tony's Grandma was getting ready for a three month visit to her daughter's house in South Dakota. In mid January we got an offer on the house, after a few counter offers, we sold our house! Our closing date was February 22. However, we were still not sure what we would do with our stuff.
About the time we accepted the offer, Hubs' Grandma decided that she was going to move to South Dakota permanently. Meaning we would have a place to stay! Isn't God good? The week before our closing, we boxed her belonging and Hubs and his Dad drove her belonging to her. THE WEEK BEFORE! If things had happened in our timing it would have been a big mess. We would have not had a place to live and would have had to move our stuff twice. However, God saw the big picture. He knew that Grandma would be moving and that it would be a perfect opportunity for us. I am so thankful that He is in control!

Dude, don't be so moto!

As our house is being (very slowly) packed up I have been reflecting on the past four years of military life. Mainly reflecting on things that I have learned, some deep such as how I can be a strong "single" mom of two while hubby is deployed for seven months, the pride of being married to one of the few, and some silly. For now let us focus on the not so serious. The followings are words and phrases that I had never heard of prior to enlistment and for those of you not in the know I will give you the definition:

Head - bathroom

Field-day - sounds fun, but really it means cleaning

Rack - bed

Moonbeam - flashlight

Go fasters - tennis shoes, you know cause you can go faster in your tennis shoes then your combat boots

Semper Fi(delis) - Always faithful

Devil Dog - a nickname for any Marine

Oorah (not to be confused with Hoorah) - can mean a number of things, like if somebody asks a group of Marines how they are doing, it is usually answered with a loud oorah!

PT - no not physical therapy, physical training

Various ranks

The significance of 10 November - The Marine Corps birthday in 1775, which is to be celebrated every year with a ball

Commissary - Grocery Store

Exchange - a mini mall!

Boot - Usually refering to somebody fresh out of boot camp who is still in that deer in the headlights phase. Commonly used like so: "That guy is so boot!"

Skate - referring to not doing any work, just skating by

Moto - Referring to somebody who is really motivated

Key Volunteers - A network for wives, sometimes really, really informative and others not so much

A few phrases my husband picked up:
That's a negative, or sometimes he just says "negative."

Roger that

The phonetic alphabet, you know like alpha, bravo, charlie which sometimes gets a bit annoying when I want a simple answer to a simple question like how do you spell...

Funny story about hubby field-daying. When he fresh out of boot and at his specialty school he would call me whenever he got a free minute. Usually when asked what he was doing, he would say that he was field-daying and wasn't supposed to be on the phone. With my limited knowledge of such terms I just assumed it was something recreational, like jogging or something. I mean don't you remember when you had a field day at school and would get to be outside all day doing various fun physical activities? It took me a few weeks to realize what he was talking about. Mainly because he started being so specific, saying he was field-daying his room and that his roommate was a slob. Um, ok! I don't know if I ever told him about that or not.

Seriously, it has been a great experience. Being here has made me sad. I miss the community, the instant family, the (ahem) steady job, great benefits and most importantly seeing my cute husband in uniform. Have you ever seen a man in uniform? Seriously, almost any guy looks good in uniform, so take my cute hubby + uniform = hottness!!! That being said my husband is happy to be a civilian. However, I think once he gets a "real" job he will be shocked at how easy he did have it. I mean how many jobs do you know of where you go in at 7:30 get a two hour lunch and usually be home by 4:30? Of course that was not always the case as they "owned" him and technically he was on-call 24-7. It has been a great ride, we have had our ups and downs but we would NOT trade it. So, good-bye Havelock. Good by Marine Corps, Semper Fi. I will miss you...(sigh)

Stuck in the matrix

Things are such a mess right now. We came up to Ohio a couple weeks before Christmas without any definite plans on how long we were going to stay up here. We packed a bunch of clothes and took off. Now, two months later we are still here. Living one week with my parents and the next week with his. It is such a hassle to move back and forth every week. Not to mention I never know if I lost something or if it is just at the other house. Right now I am missing two hairbrushes...two! If I was smart I would have left one at each house and been done with it, but instead I had one in my diaper bag and the other I would pack. Well now I can't find either of them.
Not to mention the strain it has on the marriage. You know, being treated (and some of us acting) like you are teenagers again can also put some strain on the marriage. I keep telling myself, just a couple more weeks...just a couple more weeks. You can do this! However it does not seem to be working. Everyday I get a little more frustrated, everyday I hold that frustration in. We don't want our families seeing what a crazy person I am! So for now I just feel stuck. Wishing that things were different. Wishing for that ocean breeze, wishing for a stable job, wishing for health insurance at least for the children. I am just stuck wishing...

The crazy man has moved in

I never knew the craziness that was involved in selling a house. I mean seriously people, do not call and expect to see a house in 20 minutes! As a mom of two young children I need more than 20 minutes to frantically run through the house and shove a bunch of junk into hiding places, um I mean put things in their rightful spot. This has happened twice now. Once yesterday in which I obliged and once this morning. This morning I told them no way, the kids were still sleeping and the kitchen was still a mess from supper last night. There was no way it could be ready to go in 20 minutes. So, we kindly asked them to pick a later time, for which they no showed. Ah well at least my house is spotless again.

Also, the house knows man! It knows that we are trying to sell it and is working against us I swear! Since we put the house on the market we have had: the dishwasher break, the hot water heater start to leak and the tub faucet start to leak. Therefore we have spent a lot of money in plumbers lately.

The worst part of it all is that we do not know where we will be relocating to. This of course means that we cannot start to house hunt. I mean the best part about selling your house is knowing that you are going to find a bigger house...hopefully a much bigger house.