Life....

....has certainly been crazy lately! We have literally been living in chaos for the last month! I so happy that we are finally able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It is beyond amazing to know that we are almost done remodeling our house...now it's just time to get my booty in gear and get us organized. Seriously, after a month of not really being able to do much in the way of cooking, cleaning, and unpacking I am finding it really hard to muster up the motivation to actually get things done around the house. When does nesting usually start? I never really went through that when I was pregnant with Brooklynn, but I could certainly use some of that ASAP!

I thought that I would finally get around to posting about what's been going on in our lives since I don't have fun pictures of our unpacked and organized house! 

So, after moving we spent the first 2 weeks living with my parents. We are so grateful to live so close to family who love us (well, let's be honest they are in love with Brooklynn and will do anything they can to spend as much time with her as possible) and are willing to let us invade and take over their home! Seriously, Brooklynn pretty much takes over when we are at my parents house. Eric and I spent a lot of our evenings those 2 weeks doing thing around the house (hanging curtain rods, setting up bedrooms, but no actual unpacking).

After 2 weeks at my parents house we decided that we needed to get Brooklynn back to her things and getting used to her new house. Brooklynn did really well while we stayed with my parents, but it was definitely time for her to be "home." Thankfully she adjusted really well to her new room and house, in fact she really seems to love it! Anyways, we spent the next 2 weeks waiting for our kitchen cabinets to come in so that they could be installed and for a small list of other random things that needed to be fixed or taken care of. Let me tell you, it is much more difficult to live without a kitchen than I thought it would be (especially pregnant). I did plan ahead and had a weeks worth of frozen casseroles (which based off of the time frame we were originally given would have been enough), and plenty of frozen muffins, waffles, pancakes, and cold cereal.. As for cooking we had a card table with our toaster oven on it. That's it. Not even a microwave. We definitely did not starve but I quickly figured out that I was extremely limited as to what I could eat during the day. I was pretty much hungry all day and in perfect timing started having heartburn (which of course was made worse by lack of eating). Brooklynn has been in heaven though because she gets to eat on the floor or the couch every day. Not looking forward to getting her back in the habit of eating at the table!

Aside from my food issues, it was wonderful to be living in a home that felt like it was still half under construction. It was always (and still is) dirty. In the spirit of full disclosure I will admit that I have not yet cleaned my house! I am obviously not a neat freak because it just wasn't worth it to clean when we kept having people in and out working on things. I have run the vacuum a few times and I sweep the living room every day, but that is the extent of my cleaning endeavor thus far.

But, like I said, we are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel! Our kitchen is finally completed (more on that later!), the little odd jobs are mostly completed and really the only thing left to take care of is some fixing of the laundry room wall! Oh, and I guess I still have quite a bit of unpacking and organizing to do. Bring on the nesting stage!!

I promise posts to update about Brooklynn and our kitchen craziness soon!!

Moving Day!!

We were finally able to move "into" our house. I say "into" because while our belongings are now in the house and we have checked out of our apartment, we are NOT actually living in our house! (But I'll get to that...)

Our plan for moving was to take Wednesday and Thursday to move things over (because of Conference weekend we didn't want to do it on Saturday) and then Friday to unpack before we headed over the mountain to spend the weekend with the Comptons. We were promised by our contractor over and over that the house would be ready for us to move on Wednesday. The carpet was supposed to be put in Tuesday/Wednesday and definitely done by 2:00. So we were going to finish packing the apartment and then head over the the house to do some cleaning and make it livable after the construction. Then we would go back to the apartment on Thursday grab anything that was left behind and clean the apartment.

Eric stopped by the house on the way to get the rental truck and the carpet people told him they would be done by 4:00. Ok, we can deal with that. We adjusted our plan and packed up the truck then moved everything that didn't fit into the truck to the living room so that we could clean the kitchen, bedrooms, and bathroom. We can definitely roll with the flow. We had taken Brooklynn to a friend's house to play while we were working (thanks again Jami!) and on our way home from picking her up we swung by the house to see if they were done (it is now 4:30). They tell us that they have about another hour (which is what they told my Dad when he went by the house looking for us at 5:00)! So we ate dinner and then headed to the house. They were still not done, but were so very close. They were finishing up the master bedroom and bathroom. So we unloaded the truck and set aside anything that needed to be in those 2 rooms to move in when they were done.

They finally finished the carpet and bathroom floor around 6:30 and we (and by "we" I mean Eric, our amazing family, and amazing friend Trenton. I don't know what we would have done without the Little's, they have been such amazing friends to us the last few weeks!) finally finished unloading a load and a half of the moving truck around 8:00-8:30. 

So, why aren't we living in the house?? Well, when the flooring guys left on Wednesday night all we had in way of a bathroom was a beautiful new floor, a tub (with no walls or shower head), and a half bath with a toilet sitting in the middle of the floor and a toilet that desperately needed to be cleaned. All of our window need the finishing work for the molding and whatnot and half of our bedroom and living room needs baseboards installed! It just was not very plausible to unpack and set up beds when there was so much work to be done still in the house, not to mention that it was already past Brooklynn's bedtime! So we packed up some clothes and headed to my parents house.

We stopped by the house last night after we got home from Wapato and the windows are now fully framed and the bathroom is functional (but still needs some wall touch ups and baseboard). The baseboards in the living room and master should be done by the end of the day, and hopefully they will finish the bathroom as well (*crossing fingers*). We will probably remain at my parents house for the next week and spend the evenings unpacking and setting up furniture. As soon as we are somewhat organized we can vacate my parents house and give them their space back! Hopefully our kitchen cabinets will arrive in the next few days and they will be able to complete the kitchen by the weekend so we wont have to spend too much time without a kitchen or washer and dryer.

Our camera got put in the drawer of our entertainment center and thus in the moving truck, so I didn't get any photos of the moving process. Also, because of the hectic schedule of the flooring guys and getting our things moved in I also didn't get the shots that I wanted of the empty rooms, but I took some pictures of the rooms with our stuff piled in on my phone. So this is what our house looks like right now:

Living room, facing the kitchen

Living room, view basically from the corner
where the fridge is in the previous picture

craft/spare room

Kid's room (this room has a tough angle to photograph
because the wall sits out  a little bit right by the door)

Full bath (this was taken the morning after we moved our things in,
the night before there was no vanity or shower wall surround.)

Master bedroom. We don't have a walk-in closet, but this is still the largest closet we have had thus far!

Bad lighting, but unfinished window in master
(and our new car out the window) 

New carpet and missing baseboard in master

Half bath

another view

Little Princess

Eric's sister is getting married in May and we got Brooklynn's dress in the mail a few weeks ago. We tried it on her and it was instant princess! She walked around with a huge grin on her face, was twirling around, and had her arms held out like she was practicing for Toddlers & Tiara's. It was so funny to watch and absolutely adorable!

I had no idea that becoming a princess the minute one puts on a poufy dress was innate! But apparently that is as innate for girls as growling and car noises are for boys!

Painting Party

We were FINALLY able to paint inside our house yesterday. We had to reschedule it 2-3 times and it felt like it was never going to happen! We are so grateful to our family and friends who gave up their beautiful Saturday (it was absolutely gorgeous yesterday) to help us paint.

It is amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do! The walls were originally this cream color that was quite yellow and even just a coat of primer made it look so much better. 

I wasn't able to take too many pictures because I couldn't be in the house too much because of the fumes and I was trying to keep our little munchkin out of the way. But here are some pictures from the day:

Getting the walls cleaned and prepped.

Cutest little helper!

Someone submerged her hands in the primer!

Finally getting some color on the walls! The lighting was bad by the
time we got to the living room color, it looks yellow but it is actually green.

We weren't able to paint the kitchen because it looks like this:

And we ran out of time to do anything but prime the half bath, but we got a lot done in 12 hours. 

There is still some work that needs to be finished by our contractor, but we are so close! We have been promised that the house will be finished on Wednesday so that we can move in before our mortgage is due. I am definitely ready to be done and in our house!

A big shoutout to Mom & Dad Perkins, Mom & Dad Compton, Nicole, Trenton, and Erich & Kelly for working so hard to help us make our house beautiful!

Almost 2!?!?!?!

My beautiful little girl!!

I cannot believe that in 2 1/2 months we will have a 2 year old! 

(And in 3 months we will have a new baby!)

Relaxing with Daddy and watching March Madness.

Brooklynn is turning into quite the talker the last few weeks. She is picking up words right and left (she will finally say "more" and not "nee") and is even starting to ask me questions. She of course has discovered, "why?" and I hear that all the time. But she completely shocked me a few weeks ago when she walked into the kitchen and said, "doing mama?" That simple question  has now evolved into "watcho doing?" Sometimes with a mama thrown in there and more often than not "doing" becomes "doinginging." Those extra "ing"s are just so cute!! She even will ask where we are going or what is happening (and yes, with the extra "ing"s).

She loves playing in her kitchen while I am cooking.

I am constantly amazed at how smart she is and how quickly she picks things up. She is now a pro at her colors, things are no longer all blue or red! She has counted up to 6 on her own (if we point to objects for her). She will often count off to do something, but it is generally "2,3,4" or "3,4,5." For some reason she does not like to start with 1! She will say the alphabet with me, or rather repeat the letters, but has become a pro at picking out letters that she sees. One of her favorite new activities is to climb into my lap and pick out the letters on my shirt/sweatshirt. She has even started calling out letters that she sees on road/store signs. She also has a few letters that she knows the sound of.

We got some new headbands and she had to put them ALL on!

The best new development, in my opinion, is that I am starting to be able to reason with her. I can give her choices, which have the same outcome, and let her choose which way she would like to do it. I can give her warnings of when things, like naps/bedtime, are going to happen and she seems to go a little more peacefully. Yesterday I told her that we were going to read 2 books and then it was naptime. She went to get a book and I reminded her that we were reading just 2 and then it was naptime. She looked at me with a sugary sweet face and said, "One?!" like she was trying to convince me of it. Worst. Bargainer. Ever.

She loves to have books read to her (finally) and she
also loves to lay on the couch and "read" to herself.

One of the hardest things that we are working on right now is her getting frustrated with not being able to do something or when things get stuck or aren't working how she wants them to. (She is very much like her Aunt Ali). She shrieks and screams and the little vein in her neck pops out, not fun! I feel like I am constantly telling her to settle down or calm down so that we can fix it. Fortunately I can make use of her newly forming reasoning skills and help her to find a solution to the problem, usually to try again or start over.

Such determination!

She is very much in the "I do it" stage and I hear that pretty regularly throughout the day. Eric even tricked her into picking up toys the other day when she didn't want to. He told her that he would do it since she didn't want to and all of a sudden it was "I help you!" It was pretty awesome. She has mastered "I want some!" And I heard that about just about everything on our grocery shopping trip yesterday!

She loves to help Daddy make his protein shake!

Helping Nana make Kool-Aid

She loves trucks, buses and trains (we live really close to the train tracks so anytime we go anywhere we pass the trains) and we spend our time in the car looking for them. She can be very particular and only want to see buses or only want to see trucks, which can be challenging (especially when she wants to see buses on the weekend!).

She stole her P-Pa's seat (she is a HUGE seat stealer....
don't get up if she is around she doesn't believe in "tap, tap, seat back")

Enjoying some pre-bedtime popcorn with Daddy.

Delays.....

So, without a doubt the theme of our home buying process is delay. The purchasing process was frustrating and full of crazy delays and I wish that I could say that the renovation process was smooth and crazy free! 

We are SOO ready to be done and in our house. And we would have been, but we have again been plagued with delays.
The framers and the plumber got stuck on other jobs, so they started about a week behind schedule on our house.When the plumber turned on the water in the rental water started pouring out of the ceiling (both houses are slab on grade, so the plumbing is in the ceiling). Apparently the pipes cracked over the winter. So the entire plumbing had to be replaced. The framers started working and had all but 4 windows done (2 of which also required new walls to be built) and someone from the city happened by. Apparently we need to have a permit in order to replace our windows! Our contractor has never had to have a permit in order to put in new windows and even the inspector, or whoever, said that it's probably just a money maker for Auburn. Fortunately he allowed them to continue working enough to build the wall that had been ripped out since the rain was coming! Hopefully our permit will be obtained tomorrow and work can resume so that we can't paint next week and move on the weekend. We would really like to move next weekend so that we can be in our house before the mortgage is due!
But the good news is that I don't have to rush to pack!!

In other news.....

I have lightened my load during the week. I had some rough weeks where I found myself in a funk that was not allowing me to be a good wife and mother. My child watching schedule had increased and I no longer had any part of my day without any kids to watch. It was just way too much for me. Not having the freedom to get out of the house to run errands or do something fun with Brooklynn was affecting me more than I knew or thought that it would. So we made the decision that I would quit watching the little girl that had been coming since September. It was amazing how just making that decision lifted the darkness and my spirits, I started to feel more like myself again. I have loved the time that I have had the last few weeks to spend one on one time with Brooklynn and to even have a little more time for myself.

Also, we traded in our Altima for a Chryself Pacifica. We are loving our new car (especially that even with rolling over the remainder of our loan on the Altima our car payment is still a little less that what we were paying before)! Brooklynn especially loves being taller and able to see out the window better and I love that I don't have to bend over to get her in/out of her carseat!!

Here we are!

Brooklynn has just started getting into the mimicking stage. Seriously, it has been so hard to try to get her to repeat or say things, but now it seems like she is constantly amazing me with new words and actual phrases. We spent the day with my parents 2 Saturdays ago because Eric had to work. We took a long drive and ended up on the other side of the Puget Sound. We thought it would be fun to take the ferry back (Brooklynn has only been on one in utero). When we got upstairs and found a seat my dad said, "here we are." Brooklynn pretty much repeated that phrase the whole time we crossed the Sound. It is so cute to hear her excited "Here we are!" exclamation. She has reused her new phrase the last few days and it is super cute every time! 

Some other new words/phrases:

~Light on (She is constantly exclaiming "light!" when she wants to play in the kitchen, but adding "on" was a fun new development)

~ Help please (she has long been saying each word separately but we spent last week working on her combining those two words and she is doing pretty good at it.)

~Phone (she misses the "ph" sound and adds an "n" at the beginning)

~In there (usually referring to the baby when we ask her where he is and she pokes my belly button)

~somersault

~work

~look (usually when she is telling me to look for trucks and buses in the car for her)

~House (anytime we talk about family we ask where they are and she will say "house." She is so adamant about it that she gets upset if we tell her they are somewhere other than their house). 

~I don't know (it used to be "no know")
~I see you
~I got you
~another one
~other one

Brooklynn is also getting much better at pronouncing words she's been saying for awhile properly. "Doh" has become "show." "Dar" has become "Char." She is also working on her letters and colors. Thanks to "Super Why" she can sometimes point out letters along with the show and will even sound them out with Princess Presto. She also now loves to sit on my lap and pick out the letters on my sweatshirt/shirt, and she's getting pretty good at it. I absolutely love watching her grow and develop this way!

"Here we are!"

It's a......

We were supposed to have our ultrasound last Wednesday, but the tech was sick. Fortunately they were able to reschedule us fairly quickly and we were able to have our ultrasound this evening. YAY!!!

She really wasn't digging having her picture taken, but we are super excited to be having a boy! Fortunately Brooklynn's brother wasn't shying away from the "camera" this evening. We got plenty of great views of him and we don't have to wait 2 more weeks (like we did with Brooklynn) to find out that he is a boy!

I love that the tech put "looks like a boy." Eric did make a point to ask her how sure she was and she said, "I'd be surprised if we were wrong." So diplomatic.

 I love little feet!

20 weeks

So I have finally decided that I look pregnant and not fat. In fact, at church yesterday as I was climbing over Eric and Brooklynn to get back into our pew I could see the couple behind us whisper to each other. And then he asked if we were expecting another. They did say that it's the first time they have noticed any showing-ness, so hopefully that means I wasn't looking as fat as I thought I was! I guess this makes my prego belly official. So, here's a belly shot (please forgive my end of day no make-up appearance!):

I have also been feeling pretty pregnant the last week or so. My lower back has been killing me! I am experiencing the difficulty breathing (shortness of breath/getting winded) and have chronic nasal congestion. (That combination makes it hard to eat without my mouth open, which Eric loves to make fun of!) I don't remember when that all started with Brooklynn, but I feel like it is way early this time. It is getting more and more uncomfortable to bend over and to have Brooklynn sit/lay on my lap. I have also seen the return of my pregnancy toe cramps. I used to get them pretty frequently even before I was pregnant with Brooklynn and then while I was pregnant with her all I had to do was move my toes the wrong way and they would instantly cramp. No fun and definitely not something that I am excited to have return, especially since I don't recall experiencing any cramps since Brooklynn was born.
One thing that I am excited has not shown up yet (knock on wood!) is heartburn. I remember taking a bite of salsa in my first trimester with Brooklynn and I had almost instant heartburn. I pretty much stopped eating spicy food with her (which seriously decreased my tolerance for my love of spicy food). And even without spicy food I still had heartburn pretty much constantly. With this little bundle I have been eating tons of tabasco and I had a jalapeno burger last Friday. I have yet to experience any heartburn! I wanted to test it out last night, so I had some of my mom's buffalo chicken wings (even though I hate eating meat on a bone). Nothing! Let's hope it never shows up!
We are so excited for our next ultrasound and to find out what this baby is!! We find out later this week, feel free to place your guesses!

We bought.....

....A HOUSE!!!!

That's right, we are now officially homeowners! We found a super deal on a multi-family home. We have a 3 bedroom 1 1/2 bath home and a one bedroom detached apartment. So not only will be homeowners, we will be landlords. Scary, right?!

It is without a doubt a fixer-upper and it has tons of potential. Because we don't have tens of thousands of dollars laying around to do the work ourselves we went with a rehab loan. So the cost of fixing the two houses will be wrapped up into our mortgage and we will have a contractor do the heavy work for us, which will take like 3-6 weeks. We will do the easy stuff. Like paint and replace doors (because interior doors would cost like $200-300 through the contractor because of labor. Crazy, right?!) and of course decorate! I am so excited to decorate! I never really did much by way of decoration in either of our places the last 3 1/2 years because they never really felt like "ours." Well, now it is most certainly ours and there is so much fun decorating that will be happening.
I am so happy that the loan process is finally over! It took FOREVER....like nearly 5 months. We put an offer in on the house in September and were on track to be done with the loan and in the house by the end of the year. We were going through a family friend to obtain the loan through Bank of America. A few weeks into the process he was told that BoA was no longer going to allow outside lenders to offer their loans. He talked them into letting him finish ours. He was just about to get into the meat and potatoes of the process and he was told that he was not going to be able to finish our loan. So we had to go directly through BoA and they started completely over and did so at a snail's pace. They kept saying things would happen by a certain time and then it would actually happen like 2-4 weeks later. We had to get like 3 or 4 extensions, all of which they said they could close the file by and then couldn't. It was absolutely frustrating!! But it is finally OVER!! And now the real fun begins!

Gymnastics

I've been wanting to sign Brooklynn up for gymnastics for quite a while now. I finally got Eric on board with the idea (probably because our Parks and Rec department offers it for $33/month) and intended to sign her up starting in January. Oops! Totally forgot!!
Last Friday I got a great reminder that our little girl needs to try out gymnastics. Brooklynn was playing around and she had her head on the floor and her butt in the air and she just kicked her feet over and did a somersault! I know, I know. It was totally not intentional. But she realized how cool it was after it happened and then she did like 3-4 more, and those were intentional. So I called that afternoon and signed our little Monkey up!
We had her first class tonight and it was tons of fun (and super tiring for this mommy). We were waiting for her class to start she kept saying "play! play!" She did really well considering it was her first time and she's really not used to such structured "playing." Her favorite part was jumping down the long trampoline but she also like swinging on the bar.
It was so crazy trying to keep her in line and not running off and helping her do all the different things that I wasn't really able to take any pictures, maybe someday someone will be able to go with me and they can be the photographer.

Off we go....so excited!!

It's really blurry because she was moving so fast, but
you can still see how much fun she was having.

Winter Finally Hit

And it sure hit hard!! 

Last week we got enough snow to cripple the Seattle area. (We just don't get enough of it on a regular basis so the city is not equipped with snow plows and good preventative measures. Plus, there are so many huge hills in the area that driving around can be pretty treacherous. Call us wimps if you want, but it is what it is). I think we had about 3-4 inches here in Auburn between Sunday and Wednesday morning.

Enjoying the snow on Sunday after church.

Let's go for a walk! (Eric assured me you wouldn't be
able to tell I buttoned her coat wrong....not true!)

So pretty!

Our accumulation

Wednesday was a snow day for the City of Tukwila, but Eric had to go in because no one else would/could and his boss doesn't actually know how to do any IT stuff. We were really looking forward to a snow day so we could play with Brooklynn. It turns out that B is not so much a fan of playing in the snow, but she loves the idea of going out in it and playing or just watching it out the window. We tried to go for a walk while it was snowing on Sunday and it was just a bunch of tears and she refused to walk. I bundled her up on Wednesday and she would only stand on her own in our neighbors tire tracks. But she was super excited when I told her we were going out and she loved being in her snow suit so much that she wouldn't let me take it off for a good 10 minutes after going inside. 

Don't let this face fool you....

....it spent most the time outside like this!

Done "playing" but still in our snowsuit!

The real trouble came late Wednesday night/Thursday morning. We had some freezing rain that completely covered our trees and bushes in like 1/2-1 inch of ice. Therwere tons of branches and trees that came down, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of people losing their power. We were the lucky recipients of losing power at 5:45 Thursday morning! We had no idea when we would be getting our power up so we packed ourselves up and headed to my parents house because they never lose power! We called everyday at least once to get an update on when our power would come back we were always told that they had no estimate of when they would be able to fix our outage. So we "moved" in with my parents and stayed with them from Thursday mid-morning until Monday evening. We found out on Monday that we had power and a neighbor informed us that our power returned Friday night! While we were happy to find out our power was on it was frustrating to be told for 3 days that we did not have power and they had no idea when it would be fixed! Regardless of the frustration of being misinformed we are very blessed to have my parents so close and that they are willing and able to take us in and keep us warm and fed. We are especially grateful that we had a place to go at this time because Brooklynn ended up getting sick and needing multiple baths that we would not have been able to give her with our power out!  Despite being sick, she had a great time spending a long weekend with Nana and Papa.

Some of the results of the icestorm in our neighborhood:

This tree is right outside our door and was
hanging so low I hit my head a few times!

a tree in our backyard

our privacy bushes almost completely covering Brooklynn's slide/climber
(they have mostly gone back upright...only a few branches were too weak to go back up)

ice we took off a branch

Some broken trees down our street:

Hanging out at the refugee center:

We saw a lot of this face over the weekend. Poor sick baby.

We played some Wii bowling and Brooklynn thought
we were playing Kinect and tried to play along.