selection day

Here is what we did today:

Started at 8:30am with a meeting at the plumbers place to pick out tubs, faucets, sinks, etc.


To cabinet guys place to discuss cabinets, colors, style, etc.

To flooring place to pick out carpet, laminate & vinyl.

To the lumber company to pick out siding-soffit-facia colors, door styles, front door, other exterior doors, trim size and style, railing, door knobs, and shingles.

Drove around to check out homes to get ideas on colors for stucco and stone.

Went to pick out our garage door and opener

Went to paint place to pick out stain color for doors and trim and look at paint color options

Went to appliance store to pick out appliances--fridge, range top, oven, microwave, dishwasher, washer, dryer, & a chest freezer

Drove out to land to check out the house and see if the guys made any progress!! Here's what we saw.....

Front of the house....Nathan's standing in the garage.


Our view out of the window in the living room


Looking at the master bedroom


Back of the house...getting dark out!


View into living room, dining, kitchen area

grasshoppers

(My pics for this post are not loading...surprise, surprise...so I will continue to work at it and when they do, I will be sure to share! So sorry it's not as 'exciting' without pictures...haha :)

Sorry, sorry, sorry!! I do have great intentions to blog more often, it just doesn't seem to happen!! For example, last night I was all ready to blog. "I'm going to get caught up!" I thought. Well, when it was time to sit down, I started helping Nathan with his workbooks and an hour and a half later, it was time to go to bed! So I didn't get any blogging done but I can identify and name most all of the lineman's tools! :) I do have to say that he got a score of 100% on both sections I worked with him on...so I might just have given myself another job each night :)

So obviously the big thing around here still is the building of our house!! It is hard to be away from the construction site, only because we cannot see it whenever we want to! Our builder does do a great job of sending us pictures, almost everyday so that has been awesome. My dad was also out there the other day and he took a few pics so they were nice to see. The process has been going great, only one surprise so far. The water level in the ground was up a lot higher than we had expected and that left us with no choice but to raise the level of the house. They hardly had to dig at all to make our look-out rambler, which means they will have to fill in a ton in the front of the house to make the front of the house underground. For example, when looking at the block on the front of the house, you can see an opening that a window is supposed to go in. It looks as though it would be the level of a normal window, but that specific window is an egress window!! We are super excited to go and see it next week!..it should be mostly framed by then!

The kids and I have been loving the beautiful weather as we try and make it out on a walk every day. We usually walk to the grocery store or the dollar store, which are right next to each other. It's fun to just walk through the dollar store but I did have to threaten yesterday that if I heard "mom, can we get this?" one more time, we wouldn't be going back to the store for a long time. :) In order to get to the store, we need to walk through town and then we take a walking path which takes us almost right to the grocery store. While we are on the walking path, we usually see tons of grasshoppers. Yesterday the kids decided that they wanted to catch the grasshoppers so we brought a glass jar and caught about 8 or 9 grasshoppers! They saved them until Dad got home and then they let them go outside :)

Puzzles are another thing we continue to keep busy with! The kids LOVE puzzles! Tiernan will sit for hours and put puzzles together...yes, my Tiernan :) Brayan can do 25 piece puzzles without help, Caedmon has 'graduated' to doing 100 piece puzzles by himself (a Toy Story one in particular :) and Tiernan flies through the 100 piece puzzles, even putting together 200 piece ones with little supervision! I love the kids loving puzzles!...great eye-hand coordination skills, attention spand skills, trial and error skills, and they are QUIET! But the down size is that they are a pain if they don't get put away properly. Just a minute with a little sister playing in the puzzles can create a days worth of work putting them back in their correct boxes and counting all the pieces, esp if you have over 20 100 piece puzzles...not that I would know anything about that!! ;)

Nathan fixed the other side of our couch...remember the recliner on one side didn't work? Yeah, it works now! So our $50 couch from the garage sale has 2 recliners and we love it!

I am almost done building my website for my business and once I think I have it mostly complete, I will share it with you! We are super excited about it and we hope to be a blessing to people! Along those same lines, I am still sooooooo excited to go to Dave Ramsey's counselor training one day. It didn't work out this fall to go b/c we up-and-moved right before the training and since we live a little farther from Tennessee now and I can't just drive there as quick as I could before, it'll take a little more planning. But I WILL GO! In the meantime, I continue to help and advise those to contact me through email and once we are settled in our home, I plan on being able to meet with them as well! I get so excited when I see people starting to win with money, it's such a blessing! By the way, I think I've mentioned it before, but if you have an iphone, you can get Dave's free app and listen to certain calls and get your daily fix of 'what would Dave do' without having to listen to his radio program :) I love it!

Next week when we go home, we will also be winterizing our camper and putting it in storage for the winter time. Come spring, we will take everything out of it (because we'll finally have a place to put everything!), clean it up real nice, and will be putting it up for sale. If you, or someone you know, is in need or want of a super nice 5th wheel, let me know!! I seriously have not seen another camper with as nice of a layout as our camper! I've looked at a lot of them online, even the brand new 2011s and it seems as though most of them are still made with the ugly blue and gray typical 'camper' decor! I can't believe it! Ours is beautiful neutral earth tones! Another thing is the height of our ceiling. Most campers have a lower ceiling, making it feel a lot smaller inside. Ours has a super high ceiling, making it feel really spacious! And one last thing that I think is truly unique with our RV is the kitchen layout. The campers I see online or in person always have the kitchen sink in the corner with about 3 inches on one side of it and then the stove on the other side, leaving you with ZERO counter space. The way our kitchen is with everything along the wall leaves you with a ton (in rv standards!) of counter space on the end! So anyway, if know of someone who is interested, let me know! :)

Well, it's time to make lunch....ya know because it's been a whole 14 minutes since my kids have eaten...and they are starving!

construction zone

The start of our home!!




Can't wait to see it in person!

cops were called

So I figured it was about time I made myself do a post :)

It's not that I don't want to do a post, it's just that I seem to never have time to do one. And when I do have time, I have better things to do...like sleep :) Plus I have a horribly slow connection so it makes for posting pictures etc a struggle because I have to wait forever for them to load. So anyway, that's why it's been so long.....sorry if ya missed me :)

So LOTS has been happening lately around here....Here is the low-down....

1) OUR HOUSE IS IN THE PROCESS OF BEING BUILT!!! YAY!!! FINALLY!!! We broke ground last Friday and construction is under-way! When I go home in a couple weeks, I'll be sure to take picture of the progress thus far and post them. We are so excited to have our house, it's still weird to think that it's actually happening!

2) Nathan is getting more used to his work. He is learning alot and after working 98 per week, they have decided to "drop" the hours to "only" 7 days a week, 12 hour days....instead of 14. 12s is still alot, but WAY better than 14. Instead of 6am to 8pm, he is now working 7am-7pm. It helps that it's light out when he starts working. He's got his first class tomorrow that he needs to drive to the cities for. We'll see how that goes tomorrow.

3) Here's the story of our first run-in with the police because of our kids... So a few days ago the boys were playing outside on this giganic pile of huge boulders they have behind the apartment building. Since I don't really like them on there because Nathan hasn't checked out the safety of it yet, I went outside with them to tell them to come down until Daddy says it's safe. They said okay and came down and we went to play by our patio door. While I went inside for a couple mintues, I heard a car door shut. Since we live on a dead end road, there is no reason for anyone to park outside our door so I immediately went to the door to see who it was. A cop. A police car was parked outside with a policeman walking up the grassy area to our patio door. I went outside to greet him and he said he got a call that some kids were on the rock pile. I said they were mine and that I told them to stay off until Dad checked it out. He didn't really care about the kids being on there, he was just answering a call. As we were chatting, a lady drove up, got out of her car, walked up, introduced herself to the cop and said she was the one that place the call and then looked at me and said in the nastiest voice "That is a dangerous place! They could loose their leg...or die!" And then she walked away! The cop looked and me and shugged his shoulders. He waited for her to leave and then said "I think she was a little more upset about it than I am". I told him I would keep the kids off but they were just being boys who like to climb anything high. He answered me "Oh, I hear ya...I've been there. Have a good day". So yeah...my 4 and 5 yr olds are already getting in trouble with the cops...it's definitely time to be out in the country! (To add to the trouble the kids are getting us in...the manager said today in passing that she's heard from the main guy that the guy who mows the lawn keeps mowin over rocks that are outside our patio door and it's ruining his equipment!. Oh geez...well, pick up the rocks first! What can I say...My boys like to climb and they like rocks. I guess I will have to keep them inside....Is our house done yet?! :)

4) We were getting closer to telling people that we were expecting our next child but last Thursday night I miscarried baby #6. It was early in the pregnancy, only in the start of my 6th week. Everything is back to normal and I feel great so that is a blessing. I was a little disappointed though as I was looking forward to having an late spring/early summer baby! Plus, my good friend Meggan is also pregnant and our due date were only 11 days apart. But we can rejoice knowing that baby #6 has joined our baby #2 in the presence of the Lord and that we will meet both of them one day!

5) There's also been something else that I have been working hard on but I'm going to keep it a secret until it gets a little closer. I'll just say that it's a business that I am going to be starting once we have the house and it's our hope that we can one day get "Daddy home" so he doesn't have to work on the road! So more to come on that later!

Well, I think that's all for now. I'm watching the Vikings, kind of, in the background as I type this but it's pretty pathetic. We now have Moss back on the team so they were supposed to do so well with Favre, Moss and Peterson but it's 9-0 Jets....not lookin' so hot for the Vikes. Nathan's going to bed so I better head too. Hope to update sooner than later and with some pics next time!