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.