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Pretend Play

Aspen has started doing pretend play and its sooooo cute!!! It seems really young to me though. But I can only compare to Max, and he didn't start "pretending" until he was well over 2, maybe closer to 3. She is 15 months...almost 16 months. One thing she does is she will go to her lunch box from school and will bring it too us and reach into it and get "pretend" food for us and hand it to us (or put it in our mouth) saying "yum! yum!". She will pretend to eat it too. She also pretends with her dolls. Giving them pacis, pushing them in strollers, etc.

Anyways, Curt and I thought it was pretty neat to watch her last night. And we thought it was really early for her to be doing stuff like that. But we could be blinded by biases though, haha!

Day of Firsts Tomorrow!

Tomorrow Max has his first day of Pre-K and his first baseball game of the fall season. Aspen starts MDO tomorrow as well. They are both going 4 days a week from 9:30-2:30. I'm not worried about Max because we met his teachers the other day and he is pretty excited. I'm a little nervous about Aspen though. She's been so clingy lately and just wants to be held. Plus she'll be the youngest in her class since she barely made the age cut off for that particular class. I think the teacher in there requested to get her because she had Max and wanted Aspen too, lol.

Max is really excited about his baseball game tomorrow too. He is on a team with 5 and 6 year olds this time because they didn't have enough 4 year olds sign up for the fall league so they just put them on the older kid's teams. They will actually pitch the ball to them and they get 5 chances to hit it and if they don't then they can hit off the tee. Max will probably like that better since he outgrew the tee a while back. He has 3 games this week! 

I can't believe that summer is "officially" over tomorrow. Not that we've had much of a summer at all this year. It's been a weird one.

Still a Peanut

Aspen had her 15 month appointment yesterday and got one shot and a weight check. She's still such a peanut at 17 lbs 3 oz. But the girl LOVES food and she has tons of energy.
Anyways, she hated the shot. Screamed like crazy.
Her personality is really coming out lately. She is quite the diva and has the little attitude to prove it. Going to have to work on reigning that in before it gets out of control, lol.
Anyways, just a mini Aspen update. And a few pictures from this week

I know this is out of focus, but I like it anyways. Plus Max took it 

Wearing Max's Spiderman shirt,

Curtains and Such

Are you all sick of house stuff yet? One of these days I'll get back to some type of normal and have better topics for you. But for now, this is all I got, lol.

We put some new curtains up in all the rooms (except for the kitchen because I can't decide what to do there). Geez was that expensive! I never realized how much it costs to do curtains when you have to factor in curtain rods and having to buy two panels for each window. But now it's done and I don't feel like we live in a fish bowl anymore. We bought the same type of curtain for our bedroom and the front room because we liked them so much. But they are different colors so I don't think it matters too much.

Our room,

The only other thing we have in there is our bed and this antique dresser that Curt got from his grandparents that I absolutely love. I'm kinda stumped about what else to do in there. We need some bedside tables, but haven't really had a chance to look. My biggest problem is knowing what to put on the walls. Any ideas?

And in the front room we did burgandy curtains. Everything else in that area was neutral so I wanted to add some type of color to the room. Plus we have a single leather chair the same color so it ties it all together.

Part 3: Having Fun at the House!

The day we closed on the house, I took the kiddos to a park while we waited for Curt to get off work. This picture of me and Max was taken while we were there.

Max's friend Brandon and his mom came over the first two days we were in the new house and his mom Kristie help me get a lot of stuff set up. She was a great help! The boys had a lot of fun playing together. They are like two little peas in pod and Max is so excited that Brandon lives so close now. They live about two miles away now, as opposed to about 20 miles apart that we did live.
Eating lunch on the deck. Check out our "pet" horses, lol

I got the kids a slip n' slide. I'm so excited to finally have a yard that they can play in and not have to worry about cars or strangers.

She wasn't crazy about the water sprinkler

Aspen asleep in our bed. She's actually been in her own room in her crib for the most part, but she took a couple naps in our room while I was doing stuff in there.

Smile!

Sneaking some of Mommy's drink. I swear the cup was almost as big as she is!

Max dressed as a super hero

Super moves!

Thanks for looking!

Part 2: House Progress Pictures

I wanted to make sure we got the kid's rooms set up first because I wanted them to feel comfortable at the new house, especially Max. I'm so happy with how their rooms are coming along. Max's room is super hero themed. The only thing we really had to buy for his room was curtains. I also ordered the wooden super hero letters from etsy, but those aren't here yet. I can't wait to get them though. Aspen's room is just lots of different colors with owls and birds.
Aspen's room here.

crib bedding,

Rocker with a cute pillow

Her curtains are sheer with different sheer ribbons and flower hanging off it. Super cute.

Little bird pictures. I still need Curt to hang up the owl painting I got for her walls.

Part of the kitchen. We FINALLY got some appliances on Thursday. I love our new refrigerator.

Max's room.

Aspen and Curt's neice Rachel playing in Max's room. You can kinda see the rest of his room in this picture,

Kid's bathroom. I just ended up going with primary colors. I love the shower curtain. It has little pockets all over it. I had a couple better pictures of the bathroom, but they didn't upload for some reason. I'll try again later if I think of it.

Master bath. It's hard to get a really good picture because of the layout of the bathroom. But you get the idea. We are doing turquoise and brown in there.

Living room area.
We haven't done much in here, just put down a rug and we added blinds to the patio doors. They are the kind that are under glass and you can move them up or down with little levers. Love them!

The front area is a little play area for the kids for now until Aspen gets older. Eventually their playroom/rec room will be in the basement once we get it finished. But I'm in no hurry because I don't like the idea of having kids so young down there by themselves.

And that's all I have for now as far as the rooms go. We are still working on our room. That's the room we've done the least in. We finally got curtain rods today and I have curtains picked out for the side window. I'll post more pictures of that room when we get closer to being done in there.

Next post will be things the kids have been doing the past week since we've been at our new house.

Part 1: Moving Day!

MOVING DAY!!
It poured the rain on the day we rented the moving truck. It was the kind of rain that came in sideways and soaked EVERYTHING. It was so not fun. We loaded and moved everything in two days. By the time we got finished last Thursday we were super exhausted. We had to move everything into the garage of the new house until the following Monday when we could finally close on it.
Here is Aspen checking out the HUGE moving truck in the backyard.

Max and Aspen hanging out while we packed everything up.

At the new house garage Aspen found Max's old tricycle. She looks so big here!

Filling up the garage. We were barely able to fit everything inside.

Neighborhood view from the right side of the house,

Neighborhood view from the left side of the house.

First family picture at our new home!

Another post to follow...

Update on Us!

We aren't getting internet here for a while, since Curt has wireless on his work laptop. So that means my desktop isn't hooked up at home and the only time I can get on the computer is when Curt's home from work.
Not that I have much time to be on the internet these days, but I like being able to check my email throughout the day.

Anyways...we are getting settled in nicely at our new home. I'm a thrilled with this place! It's so peaceful and I don't think we could have picked a better home for us. We still have tons to unpack. We've been up till midnight or later every night working on getting things organized. Our appliances are supposed to be delivered tomorrow. So we can finally cook dinner and do laundry! Can't wait!!

The kids rooms are almost finished. Aspen's room is going to be so cute! Max's room is just about finished too. I finished their bathroom too. I love how it turned out!

I'm going to try and upload some pictures onto Curt's computer tonight and get some posted online.

We closed on the sale of our house last Friday. All that week leading up to Friday, Curt and I both were anticipating having a feeling of relief at the end of the closing because we knew that one part of the process would be over and we were that much closer to moving into our new home. However, I should have known that things never ever go the way they are supposed to and the closing on Friday ended up being a complete disaster and we left with our stress level about 3 times what it was already. It was pretty rough.
To start with, our realtor told us that people bring their kids with them all the time to closings and that it would be fine. Which was perfect, because trying to find a babysitter anytime for us is nearly impossible, let alone a Friday at 1pm. He expected us to only be there about 15-20 minutes because we were the sellers and the buyers were paying with cash.
But unfortunately, there was one person in the room set on making everything just as difficult as could be.
Our buyer's realtor was a complete jerk. Our closing started at 1pm and he was just making all kinds of demands on top of what we had already done. I finally just had to leave the room while they finished. I didn't want them to see how upset he was making me because I'm sure that would have looked bad. So I just took the kids out to the truck.
Some of the things he was bringing up weren't even issues until he decided to make them issues. It's probably going to sound confusing if I type it out, but I'll try. When they did the inspections they asked us to hire someone to clean the boiler and determine that it was functioning correctly. Which we did, we hired someone to come out and do all that. On the inspection the inspector also said that he couldn't get the heat pump to work and recommended that we hire someone to look at it and determine why it wasn't working. Well the problem is, we don't have a heat pump. It's completely radiant heat, there is absolutely no heat pump. So we addressed the boiler issue and did everything that they asked on the inspections, except for the heat pump issue, because there wasn't one. So today the buyers were asking about the heat pump because apparently on the home listing it says we have a heat pump. But we don't. Anyways there were fine with us saying that we didn't have a heat pump and that it must have been a mistake on the listing...until their realtor was like, "Now wait a minute...the listing says there is a heat pump." And he was just being sooooo mean about it and asking what we were going to do about it. He was acting like it was a deal breaker, even though the buyer kept saying it wasn't. But he wouldn't let it drop. We were like, we can't call someone to look at something that ISN'T EVEN THERE!!!! It was a mistake on the listing. And the inspector was an idiot thinking that there was a heat pump even though there wasn't one. We ended up saying we would look into it more and they seemed satisfied with that.

Then, they asked when we were going to give them possession of the house. All week the plan had been and had been confirmed with the buyer's realtor that we weren't having back to back closings that Friday because our builders were going on vacation from the 17th through the 27th. The buyers were fine with that...again, until the realtor opened his mouth saying we needed to pay the buyers for not giving them possession right away. So they were trying to get us to compensate them for wanting to stay there for a few extra days. Honestly, when we made the closing dates and we knew that it was going to be a few extra days, we were prepared to be asked to pay rent. But they were cool with those dates originally, because technically they don't even need possession of the house until after August. There was never an issue with us staying until the 27th until the realtor brought the issue up on Friday. And if the realtor hadn't been such a jerk through everything, we probably would have just said, fine we'll pay. You should have seen the way he was acting. I told my realtor that I would have been embarassed to be his client. At that point we were just like, fine, give us a day and we'll be out. Finally Curt just said, when do you want us out by and we'll be out. So now we have to move out on the 23rd instead of the 27th and for every day that we aren't out after the 23rd, we have to pay the buyers so much per day. We can't close on the new house until next monday. So we have no idea where we are going to go. But no way are we giving them ANYMORE money. So now we have the extra stress of having to move our stuff somewhere for a week.

Ugh. More stuff was said and our realtor was flabbergasted at what a jerk their realtor was.

Oh and to add to the stress, my grandmother is in the hospital in the ICU with what they think might be internal bleeding. She's in pretty poor health and I'm not sure we are going to have her much longer. We ended up going to Morehead on Friday and saw her Saturday morning.

Plus, Aspen has been sleeping pretty horribly lately and running a fever. She is definitely teething, as I can see a two white spots on her bottom gums. Today on the way to Lowe's to pick up more boxes she puked all over herself and her carseat. So I just turned the car around and stopped at Curt's office so he could help me clean it up. I ended up heading back over to Lowe's because I had to get more boxes and we have to have everything loaded up by tomorrow or Wednesday. We are handing over the keys to our house on Thursday.

I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed at the moment. It's just hard to stay focused on the end result. I just can't wait for Monday to come so we can get the keys to our new house and have this all behind us.

But at least the bright side is that our home has sold and we are now homeless for the next 7 days. Anyone have a couch we can crash on?

Teething and Moving

I'm soooo tired. Aspen has decided that things are not crazy enough around here with all the stressful house stuff, so she figures now is a great time to grow some teeth. 

Poor girl is completely and utterly miserable. For two days now she has been running a fever and is pretty much inconsolable for 90% of her day. I had to work Saturday and Sunday, so Curt was home with the kids. Aspen wouldn't let him be away from her at all so he was pretty much stuck inside holding her and walking around the whole time. He didn't get anything done on the house at all. Sunday was the worse. She only took maybe a 20 minute nap and wouldn't fall asleep until after 11pm last night. All through the night she would wake up crying and screaming.

I do feel so bad for her. We've been giving her motrin and even piggybacked Tylenol with Motrin last night because she screamed for a good 45 minutes. She finally went to sleep at around 2am, but woke up later and would only go to sleep if you held her. She's still asleep this morning, thankfully.

The hardest part is that we have sooooooo much to do this week. We are probably going to be closing on our house either this Thursday or Friday. So we have a few punchlist items to take care of before then. We aren't closing on the new house until after the 26th, because the builders of that house are going on vacation until then. But our realtor is trying to negotiate with them about us putting our stuff in the garage all next week so we can hand over the keys to the house we are in now the day we close on the new house.

It's hard not having a lot of family or help around during times like this. Normally Curt and I don't mind at all having the kids with us all the time. We love it actually. But it would be nice when we have so much on our plate like we do now to have my mom close by so she could help out with Max and Aspen.

I just hope Aspen feels better soon. The last time she was teething she had a hard time for about 2 weeks. I can't tell which teeth she is getting now. They haven't broken through at all.  You can tell the teeth on either side of her two bottoms ones are about to come in, but I don't see anything else. But she is constantly chewing on her hands and drooling everywhere. And she NEVER drools. I hate seeing her like this.