Rain on Moving Day!

So we are doing our final move today, and it is raining. Crap. I mean RAINING. With thunder and everything. The worst part? It was about 80 yesterday and sunny and so I let my kids wear shorts to the last day of school. Here's to hoping they didn't have any outside activities planned today that are getting ruined. And here's to REALLY hoping that it stops raining and warms up and dries my un-enclosed trailer before 5:30 when people show up to start loading the last of the heavy items! I still have one set of couches, 1 upright freezer, 1 chest freezer, 1 fridge, 6 kids mattresses, a 57 in. flat screen tv, the computer desk, and a couple of my scrapbooking cabinets. Plus some other random boxes which should all fit in the van (it has no seats in it right now) and the back of the suburban. Please, please let it stop raining!!! I am already stressed out about a move that I didn't want to do and all that I still have to do. I can't deal with this!! Grrrr!!!!!!!!!!!

School, Internet and More

Well it has been a while since my last post, so I better get on it. Today is the 3 older kids last day of school. The kindergarten got out yesterday. They are excited to be out. They are especially excited because every year on the last day of school, I go to their classes early and take pictures of them with their teachers and their friends and in their classrooms. I have done this since Hailey and Austin started kindergarten and they all love it. I love it too cause it is nice to have pictures of them in their scrapbooks with their teacher and all their little friends.

I know I have been lame about writing, but it's so hard to get on here when I'm moving, especially since we don't have Internet at the new house. I don't even know if I am going to. The area we are moving to is so new they only have dial up and satellite connections. I didn't even know satellite Internet existed. Unfortunately it is waaaaaaay more expensive than regular Internet. So I may have to do what I have done the last couple times. Hook up to someone's unsecured internet connection and deal with having the slowest connection on earth. Which I don't want to do, cause I'm pretty sure it's even slower than dial up! Grrrrr!

On an positive note, I had an awesome Memorial Day weekend. Other than the fact that we were supposed to do a picnic at the park with my family and it rained. It was ok though. Since my new house is so big and can hold everyone, I had everyone over to my house. I had my parents, Robyn and Joe with Henry, Jacob and Natalie, my Aunt Jeanie, my cousin Aaron and his wife Marissa and their baby Mila. Plus my wild monkeys. It was so fun! I LOVED seeing everyone! I hadn't seen Jeanie and Aaron since Dec. of '04, right before John and I got married in Jan. so they hadn't met John or the boys and Amelia. It was so nice to sit and talk for hours and hours. I will get on here tonight and post a bunch of pics. :)

I also got some work on my basement done this weekend. My scrapbook room is coming along nicely. I have the ceiling and one and a half walls drywalled. I can't wait to get that done and the playroom done. Since John goes back to the dr. on June 6th, I am going to try and get them done before then since he will be going back to work after that.

Ok. I have lots more I want to say, but I have to quit being a slacker and get to packing. We are moving the rest of the stuff today and I still have stuff that I need to box up and get ready. That is the problem with having 3 weeks and living in 2 houses at the same time. You keep going back and forth, but you still need stuff at the old house cause the kids still have school.

Yay! More time!

I can only do a quick post because I have my whole family here, but I just wanted to say that John went to the doctor yesterday and he extended his disability til June 6th. So that will give us time to get settled here and hopefully he will get that new job before his time is up so he can just stay here.
Well I'm off to enjoy my mom, dad, Jacob, Natalie, Robyn, Joe, and baby Henry over at my house!!

2 More Weeks Please!

John has his doctor appointment today at 3pm to see if he is going to get his disability continued for another 2 weeks or if he has to go back to work in CA on Sunday. Please pray with me that he will get the extra 2 weeks. I don't know what I am going to do if he has to go back to work this weekend and we are moving on Thursday. How am I supposed to do that alone - ok not alone, but with 6 not very helpful kids? I just need 2 weeks to get into my new house out in Saratoga Springs and get settled in before he leaves. Plus, he is sure he got the job at that surgery center in Park City and I am hoping that they will get the ball rolling on that in the next 2 weeks and then he won't have to go back to CA at all and he can just stay here with us!

Getting a Little Racy Here

I totally had a good laugh this morning. Why you might ask? Because I was surfin' and lurkin' on others blogs, like I like to do, and I came across this post on the Ten Cow Wives blog:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Racy Relief Society February 6, 2007

I heard from my Mom that there was a Q & A session with the Bishop at church and someone asked a question about sex games! Makes me glad I am in primary.
I was wondering if it was one of you. My Mom thinks that is couldn’t possibly be any of her “Silver Streaks” ladies, so it has to be someone I know! Joann thinks it was Norma Nausin.
Who do you think it was? Was it you?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why is that so funny? Because the person that asked is. . . . ME!! It was SO funny to be reading blogs and then come across a post about something I said over a year ago! Here is what I posted as my comment:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Haha! It was me that asked! It is so funny that you put that on here and I happened to find it! I asked if it was ok to have sex toys or to play games or whatever. I asked because I have friends that have them or do that, and I wondered if that was ok. My mom said it was bad and that people should never have/do those things. I thought, if it’s not degrading and it’s just to bring you closer together or encourage you to be more intimate when that area is lacking, then it should be ok, right? I’m glad that the bishop was so candid, and if he wasn’t someone that I have known my whole life, I don’t know if I would have had the guts to ask. I agree that the main purpose of sex is for children, but it is also to bring couples together and I think that as long as you don’t cross the line into it just being for fun or entertainment, instead of the emtional connection between husband and wife, as the bishop said, then it is between you and your spouse what you do. Hope you all enjoyed that!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So I hope you all enjoyed my first "racy" post on my new blog and have a great day!

Say What?

On Tuesday:

Brooklyn: When grandma was babysitting us while you were at the new house, she gave us celery with peanut butter on it!

Me: Oh yeah? (I hate celery and peanut butter - together or not.) Did you like it?

Brooklyn: (LOUDLY) Oh yeah! It was soooo good I wanted to pull my hair out!

I don't know where she comes up with this stuff! It cracks me up. It reminds me of when Hailey was about 3 and I said something to her and she turns to me and says "I'm gonna cut you like a salad carrot!" What a freak! I can guarantee you she didn't ever hear that from me!

The funniest thing about Brooklyn and the celery? My mom said she didn't even eat any of it! She is such a wierdo sometimes. I can't get enough of it!

Then there's Amelia. On May 16th my baby brother Justin got married.

Me: Amelia, Justin got married today.

Amelia: Oooh! That's nice.

I just thought it was so funny. Not a comment you would expect from a 2 year old. Totally cracked me up!

Here's another one, this time from Austin when I had Robyn's baby shower:

Austin: How long is mom going to be at the baby bath?

John: The what?

Austin: The baby bath.

John: What's a baby bath? Do you think they are going to give Henry a bath while he is still in Robyn's tummy?

Austin: Um . . . no?

John: It's called a baby shower.

Right. That cleared it up. I am sure that he just thought we were going to shower Henry in utero instead. Nice.

That same day driving on I-80 by the airport:

Austin: Wow! Look at all those planes flying! It's like it's airplane day or something!

Yeah I never claimed to be raising rocket scientists. There's a reason for that.

In Shock!

Am I the only one that is in shock over the American Idol finale tonight? It's not that I don't think David C. is a talented singer, it just never entered my mind that he would win! I have thought that David A. would win from the get go, so you can imagine my surprise when they announced the winner was David Cook! I almost fell off the couch! And that he won by 12 million votes!! Of course I had to get my phone right away and see what Robyn thought and she had to try and trick me into thinking that she hadn't watched it. Yeah right. I am too smart for that! So now I guess I will just sit here and wonder how this happened!

Stressed!

Well I didn't get all the moving done I thought I would. It was still raining, so we couldn't use the trailer. When we got to the house, we got the playroom air vent put in and the closet framed and put up all the insulation. So now we just need to put a vent in my scrapbooking room and we will be ready for - DRYWALL! I am so excited about that! (except for the part where I have to help carry it down the stairs. I am still going to try and convince John to see if he can get one of the neighborhood men to help with that.) Then we had to leave and come back for my appointment with the bishop. We all had to leave, cause John didn't want to take 2 cars. So since we didn't get done all that we wanted to get done, we are going to go tomorrow while the kids are in school. My neighbor has a daughter in Camren's kindergarten class, so he is going to walk home with her and stay at their house til the big kids get out. That way we can go to the new house after dropping the kids off at school and stay til the big kids get out. Hopefully I will be able to sheetrock at least one room during that time. The vent takes just a minute, so then we will have the whole rest of the 5 hours to do nothing but drywall the rooms. Yay!

Then, I didn't get the cord to the camera. Not only that, but I took the camera with me and now I forgot it at the house too! I swear I am losing my brain! I told John I can never have any more kids because at the rate I am losing brain cells with each child, I will have to be committed to an institution if I had one more!!

In other news, on Friday we find out if John's doctor is going to send him back to work now. He only extends his disability for 2 weeks at a time, and then reevaluates him. Well he goes in Friday, and there is the possibility that he could say that he could return to work on modified duty. Which would really suck. Not that I don't want him to go back to work, or that we couldn't use the money since disability doesn't pay anything. But he would have to be back at work this Sunday (the hospitals start their work week on Sundays) and then he would be gone for 9 days and then home for 5 as usual. Except that we are supposed to move that following Thursday, and I would be left home with 6 kids by myself. How am I supposed to move everything and get it to the new house?? Grrr! John is going to see if his doctor will continue it for 2 more weeks. I really hope that he does. I don't want to have to do this move by myself! This is really stressing me out. He would find out on Friday, and then have to leave Saturday so he could be back in CA at work on Sunday. So I will just continue to pray that he gets 2 more weeks and that I don't have to deal with that.Or he can just get the job in Park City and not ever have to go back. I don't think that is going to happen before Sunday though. He talked to the lady today and they are still trying to get things together. He is pretty sure he got the job, but it takes a while with medical jobs to get the ball rolling and actually complete the hiring process. Very trying on my patience. It is a long commute from our house, about an hour and 15 min. and that is probably with no traffic, but it isn't any worse than when we were living in Patterson and he was working in Berkeley and Oakland. He used to sleep at the hospital because his commute was so far we couldn't afford it and he wouldn't have time to get enough sleep if he came home. So a little over an hour, I can handle that. Especially since the alternative is him working in CA for 9 days, and then 5 days here which equals out to him being home about 10 or so days a month. Yeah that is fun with 6 kids - not! So I guess I will just have to wait and see. Patience is sooo not a virtue I posess! Good thing I only have to wait a couple days! :)

It's Raining, It's Pouring!

I am so disappointed that it is totally pouring right now. Did the weather forget that it was 93 yesterday? Did it not realize that I was going to take another load of stuff to my new house and now not only is it raining, but the trailer I was going to use (which is a flat bed trailer with a wooden floor) is now totally drenched and I can't put my stuff on it. Grrr! Good thing I have be at the church tonight. Why? Because that means we are taking 2 cars to the house, so I can take the seats out of the van and put a ton of stuff in it and the kids can ride in the Suburban. Also I can back the van into the garage (the trailer doesn't fit) so I don't have to get wet loading everything in. Well I guess I better go get started gathering things. It's early day, so only

Show Me Your Buffalo Face

My brother Justin told Brooklyn to show him her buffalo face and this is what he got. I think this picture is soooooooooo hilarious so I had to put it on here! This one is definitely going in the scrapbook!

Where's the Dang Cord?

Well dang it. I was supposed to be putting pics of our awesome progress on the basement right now. Instead I am sitting here annoyed for 2 reasons:
1. The cord to the camera is at my other house, so I can't get any pictures off my camera 'til tomorrow (or should I say today?) when we go out there again.
2. The card on my camera is full and I can't take any more pictures until I unload them onto the computer. Which I can't do because of problem #1.

Arrrgghh!! How did the cord get to the other house? I didn't take it there. Maybe John took it, thinking he would load the pics onto the laptop at the other house? I should have downloaded them onto the desk top because the laptop is totally crapping out! As in, when you turn it on, you have to turn it upside down and slam the bottom of it to get the screen to come on. Nice. Anyway, hopefully I will get this matter resolved tomorrow afternoon. Because photography is one of my favorite things to do. And if I don't constantly take pictures of my kids, I will shrivel up and die. You think I am kidding. You just better hope I get the cord tomorrow, or you will find out it's the truth. My ex husband used to joke that if we put all the pictures of Hailey in order and flipped through them, you could litterally watch her entire life like she was living it right in front of you. Ok, so I'm a little obsessed. I just figure it is better to take all the pictures I can now. I don't have to scrapbook every one I take (glad I finally came to terms with that little compulsion) but if you don't take it, once it's gone it's gone and you can't get the moment back.

In other news, I did absolutely nothing today. Ok, maybe that is not the exact truth. I did the laundry and cleaned the kitchen and of course, hung out with my kids. I also watched American Idol and the series finale of Reaper. What I meant to say is, I did nothing related to my move today. It was nice to take a little break. I did however make a list of the few things I still need to do, so I could FEEL like I did something without actually having to do it. :) I feel ok about that since we are going to the house tomorrow and I know that I will have to work my butt off so that I can get everything done before the kids get out of school tomorrow.

Speaking of that I better get to bed. It is after 1am and I am still sitting here online. Don't think that it is because I am obsessed with being online or anything. I am a total night owl, which is a total disaster when you have kids that have to be up at 7:30 am and you are up til 2. Yeah I have tried everything I can think of, with the exception of sleep aids. My husband uses those since he is in pain from his neck injury and I think that one of us should be un-medicated in case there should be an emergency. So I guess I will go and stare at the ceiling and think about what I have to do tomorrow until I bore myself to sleep. :)

More Henry Pictures!!

Joe and Robyn with Henry.
Wrapped up like a burrito and asleep.
What a little cutie!!
Awake and checking everything out.

He is just the cutest nephew ever, I know. I can't stand it! I just wanna squeeze him, but I told him I will wait til he is bigger. :)

My Weekend

I would have posted earlier, but we stayed at our new house over the weekend to work on the 2 rooms in the basement. (Well we did go home to shower and go to church, but then right back.) We got them both framed and wired. We just need to do the closet in one, and we are ready to throw up the sheet rock. Well maybe throw is not the best word. Have you ever had to carry sheetrock? It is HEAVY!! I told John when he wants to carry the pieces downstairs, maybe he can get one of our manly neighbors to help him. I know I am a weenie, but it is really hard to carry and there is a lot of it!

I took lots of pics to post on here, but I don't know where the cord to the camera is, so as soon as my husband gets back from the chiropractor I will have him find it and get them on here.

In other news, I got the kids registered at their new school for next year. Oh my heck did that take forever! You think of the 5 million papers that you have to fill out to register a child for school, then multiply that by 5. Nevermind the extra pages I had to fill out because Brooklyn is starting kindergarten and apparently they need twice as many papers filled out for that! Needless to say I was there for over an hour. The kids are very excited and the school is SO nice. The staff was very friendly and helpful, and the school is almost brand new and all indoors (Can I just tell you how much I love that about Utah schools?)

So now we are getting down to the end of the move. 9 days til we officially get all of our stuff out of here. But we will still be at the new house in the evenings and on the weekends, moving stuff we don't need here and working on the basement. We should have both rooms finished (except for the flooring, which is going to cost about as much as finishing the 2 rooms - Yikes!) by the time we move in. :) Yay! We will hopefully get the sheetrock up tomorrow. I don't know yet if we are going out there tonight, but we are for sure cause tomorrow is early day and the kids get out 2 hours early, at 1:10. That means we will have way more of the day to work.

Anyway, I have to go do all the cleaning and laundry that I haven't been able to do while I've been at the other house. :)

Moving, Decorating and Other Thoughts

Well, we got a lot done yesterday. We moved another Suburban/ trailer load to the new house. I think that we have more than half our stuff at the other house now. I had enough furniture there to actually set up my living room. I didn't hang anything up in there though, cause I want to wait 'til I get my piano there so I can make sure everything is where I want it. My new living room is smaller than the one I have here (because the one here is open to the kitchen and has no walls, and the new one is an actual room) and so I have to figure out how to arrange things so it doesn't FEEL small. Luckily decorating is one of my favorite things to do, so I am enjoying it. I already have a lot of my stuff on the walls. I didn't want my house to feel naked while I was moving into it. The first thing I did when we started moving our stuff over was take my huge picture of Christ and put it on the fireplace mantle in the family room. It is one of my favorite pictures, and unlike the traditional pictures of him in the red robes, he is smiling. I wanted it in a central place in my house so I could see it often, because it makes me feel so happy every time I see it. The next thing I put up was my huge picture of the Oakland Temple. That temple is special to me and I have spent countless hours there filled with peace and joy. So I wanted it to be somewhere prominent. I found the perfect place in the hall upstairs. I have an open staircase with a 2 story front entry, so it is also the first thing you see from the front door. I like that it is somewhere I will walk by and see it often. I also hung up some of my shelves and little decorative things, but those are the 2 I was most excited to get up. Now I just have to go get a new picture of the First Presidency for my living room. I had that centered on my wall between the 2 declarations - The Living Christ and the Declaration on the Family. But since the reorganization of the First Presidency, I haven't replaced the picture. I have thought about it, driving past Latter Day Book, every time I go to Wal-Mart, but that is as far as I have gone. I think part of it is I am sad to take down the picture of President Hinkley. He was such a great man and it makes me sad to take it down. Maybe I will put it in another frame and put it in my office, or put it in a scrapbook. I don't want to just throw it away or anything.

Now if I could just get over to the kids new school and get them registered! I was supposed to do that yesterday, but we ended up leaving here too late to get there before the office was closed. Darn it! That was the whole reason I had planned to take the stuff yesterday! Now I am going to have to go tomorrow, which will work out because I won't have to take all the kids with me. Yesterday was early day, so I would have had to take all 6 with me. Tomorrow is a regular day, plus the kindergarten is having a field trip til 2pm, so it will just be Brooklyn and Amelia with me. So maybe I am glad I have to do it tomorrow, because it will be less stressful registering 5 kids for school (Brooklyn goes next year) if I don't have all of them with me. I want to do it now because I want to make sure that they have places for them all. When I was in Concord, their school didn't have room for all of them and they said that they would have to go to 2 different schools, and one of them was over in Clayton. Yeah right! So I ended up home schooling them for 3 months until they started the new semester and they had room for them. As fun as that was to have them home and do school together, I don't really want to do that again. I am sad that Brooklyn is starting kindergarten, but I am looking forward to it being just Amelia and me. Since she is turning 3 this summer, I have a couple years of just her and me and I am looking forward to that. Plus I am looking forward to all that I can get done with only one child at home. Am I being overly optimistic? We shall see. In the meantime, I am going to enoy the summer with all of them home. I am looking forward to getting settled in our new ward and neighborhood over the summer, and I am planning lots of fun things to go do and see.

I am so glad we are moving during the summer!! Every other time we have moved it has been during the school year How many times, you may wonder? Since getting married 3 1/2 years ago, this will be our 4th move - and that doesn't include the girls and I moving in with John and the boys when we got married! I am so excited to finally have a place that is ours, where we can put down roots and stay. Where we can make friends, and then not have to leave. I am just so excited to finally have somewhere to call home, instead of just a house we are living in.

Blogging

Well, I am obviously new to this. I have a lot of my friends blogs that I love to read, and I want to keep a journal but have thus far been to lazy to do it. So since I am on the computer all the time, I thought this would be the perfect solution. Now if I could only figure out how to make my page so great looking like all my friends pages. I think that once I am settled in my new house, I will get together with Cheryl and see if she can show me what to do with my page to make it a little more exciting. Or to add my friends on here. Yeah I am lame, but I will figure it out. :)

I'm Finally an Aunt!!

So Robyn and Joe had their baby on Monday morning, the 12th. They came to my house for dinner Sunday night (Mother's Day) to spend time with my family and my mom, who is staying at my house while my dad is out of the country in Uruguay helping Justin get married (that is a whole other posting, so I will get to that another time). Anyway, everything was fine and they left kinda late. Well I guess she got home and went to bed and got to sleep for about 45 min. before she woke up because her water broke. So my mom came in and woke me up at like 12:30am and told me. I went back to sleep, cause it would be a while, and had nightmares about the doctor not being there and me having to deliver him. LOL! My mom came back at 5:30am and said that she was at an 8 and that we were going to go down to AF Hospital where she was having him. So I peeled myself out of bed and we went down. We got there around 7:20am and he was born at 9:42am. It was so exciting to get to see him, and I was the first non-parent to get to hold him. His name is Henry Joseph. He was 8 lbs. 1 oz. and 19.5 in. He has lots of blonde hair that I am sure it is going to turn white blonde like my daughters. I told Henry now that we are going to be living so close, we are going to be spending lots of time together and I am going to babysit him so Robyn and Joe can leave the house. :) I am glad to be moving near them (see previous post) so Robyn and I can hang out. In August when Brooklyn starts school, it will just be me and Amelia at home. So I am hoping that the 4 of us will get to hang out together a lot. It is amazing. I have always loved my friends kids, especially Emilys. She is my best friend and they are like my family. But there is something different when it's your sister's baby. I never knew that I could love someone else's baby the same as I love mine. I love Henry so much, as much as I love my own kids. I asked Robyn about this (since she has been an aunt to my kids for 8+ years now) and she said that when I had my kids she loved them so much, she didn't know what it would be like to have her own because she loved mine like they were hers. It's totally true. It is amazing that you can have enough love for all of them.

On the Move Again

<----This is our new house!

----------------------------------------

Yep. You read that right. After a whopping 7 months (well it will be when we move out) of living in my house, we are moving again. I keep asking John, didn't we just do this a minute ago?? To say that I am not thrilled by this would be an understatement. Here is why: We were supposed to be able to buy the house we are in now. We wanted to live in it for a year first to try it out. You know, make sure we loved the ward, the school, the neighborhood. Well we do. We LOVE it here! The ward is fabulous, the kids school is amazing, and all their school and primary friends all live on our street. So why are we moving you ask? Because we didn't get it in writing. The thing is, we were supposed to do the agreement to buy the house after the first year, so we just had a verbal agreement. Well apparently that agreement didn't mean as much to the owners of the house as it did to us. They legally separated 5 months after we moved in, and the wife put in the papers that she gets first option on the house for the next 3 years! Nice. So we began looking for a house in March and we found one last month. We put a deposit down to hold it and gave our notice, still hoping that something would work out here. Well we heard nothing, so a month later, on the 7th of this month, we went and paid our money down on the house, finished the final paperwork, and got the keys. Yay! We finally had a house that is ours! That afternoon (I am not kidding, within an hour of getting home) the owner comes over to reconnect the sprinklers and he tells my husband that 2 days before we had submitted our notice, his ex had taken her option out of the paperwork! Grrrr!!! Why did he not tell us until a month later, after we had already finalized on the other house and couldn't walk away without losing thousands of dollars? Because (according to him) he thought we were moving for financial reasons. This is so frustrating to me because we specifically told him, "We're moving because your wife has put an option on the house and we can't buy it anymore.". If he had told us she had taken it off, it would have changed everything and we would have stayed here where we are happy! (Deep Breath!) Anyway, we are excited about the move because the new house is beautiful. It is huge and has all the upgrades we could ever want. It is basically brand new. It was built in late 2005, but other than about 3 months where she had renters in it, it has been empty. So it is still as pristine as if it had just been built. Plus we are getting an AWESOME deal on it because the owner bought it as an investment property and then the market tanked, so she is selling it to us at a major loss just to get rid of it. It is in a beautiful area, you can see the entirety of Utah Lake and the mountains from my front porch (yes, I have a HUGE front porch - and all the cold storage in the basement that goes along with that! Something I have always wanted.) and from all the rooms at the front of the house. It is also way closer to my sister Robyn, who is building a house in Pleasant Grove and my friend Cheryl, whom I met back when I was living in Concord, but as since moved back to her house in Provo. It is also about 15 minutes away from my ex's parents, which I am excited about because I love them a lot and am glad for them to be close to me and the kids. So while we are sad to leave the wonderful place we are now, financially it is a great move for us and we hope that it turns out to be a great place for our family. We have already moved half of our stuff, and will slowly finish moving in as we approach the 29th, which is when the kids get out of school. My goal is to get everything moved and unpacked, so when we move in, we can just walk in and live there. I hope I can get it done! 15 days and counting.