We closed today!

Yay!

I forgot to take the camera....sorry. We went by the house with our realtor after we closed and it's actually starting to feel real! I can't believe it's all happening this weekend. It's crazy, but I'm so excited. We haven't got that much left to pack. The kids and I have Co-op in the morning and then we'll come back and get most of the rest of the house all packed up (all the stuff we've needed up until the end). Then Friday morning the kids are off to Grandma's house until Saturday when they'll come home to a new house!

I can't wait! Thank you to all who are coming to help us move. Don't worry, we'll have food. ;)

It's beginning to look a lot like......

we're moving! (Go ahead, you can sing the Christmas song.)

It's really happening, folks. After first waiting to hear from the bank for a couple of weeks about whether or not they accepted our addendum, and now waiting to hear from the bank we're getting the loan through, it's finally happening! We just found out today that we're closing tomorrow. Is that cutting it close enough?

And yesterday we had people at the new house scrubbing away, getting it clean so that we can move in and actually dare place food in the refrigerator (it was the nastiest thing I've ever seen), and so that Brent and I dare take a shower in the master bathroom (the previous owners could've used a lesson or 2 from my mom about basic housekeeping).

The plan was for the cleaning crew (a nice woman and her husband we found on ksl classifieds (love that website)) to clean the whole house yesterday, which the woman told us she could accomplish.

She underestimated how long the kitchen would take them. So they only got the kitchen and master bath and 1/2 bath done. No vacuuming, mopping, upstairs bathroom, dusting of the blinds, walls/doors/lightswitches sanitized, baseboards cleaned, or ceiling fans dusted. (All of which she said they would do.)

So Brent and I were left to do MOST of those things last night after we put the kids to bed (thanks to Brent's mom for coming to stay with the kids). We had to get at least the carpets vacuumed and the tile swept up because we had the carpet/tile cleaner come this morning. Brent was able to get a lot of the sanitizing done, along with the ceiling fans dusted. I've still got to get over there and clean the upstairs bathroom (the carpet/tile guy actually already cleaned the showers upstairs and in the master bathroom (they're tile)...yay!) and clean the blinds and mop the living room.

When I went over there this morning after the carpet guy was finished, I fell in love with the house even more. It actually looks like a house where I'd let my babies crawl around now! :) I'm so excited! It looks and smells (yes, smells....the previous owners had furballs of some sort that they apparently didn't think they needed to vacuum up after) SOOOOOO much better.

Friday and Saturday will be the big move-in days. And the new owners of our current house will move in Saturday afternoon. Again....cutting it close? Apparently that's the way we roll. :)

Spring Cleaning

We're doing a lot of spring cleaning inside the house since we're moving in a week, but yesterday we took the time to do a little spring cleaning outside the house.

Wanna see?
Can you guess what's in those bags?

A winter's worth of poop.

Lovely.

Yes, I make my children help me pick up poop (hey, at least I give them gloves). AJ and Roo and I were poop-picker-uppers and Tink was the poop-spotter. She'd run around the yard finding them all for us.

And yes, apparently Tink had to go potty. :)

Thoughts about music from a 3 year old

Regarding this song:

Tink: I fink dem sing 'cuz dem in wuv.


And this song:

Tink: Him miss him mommy. (Who else would you be missing if you just wanted to go home?)


This is the one she sings while sitting on the toilet.

Tink: We wiw , we wiw wock you. (And sometimes she says, "Us wiw, us wiw"......LOVE IT!)


Tink: Mommy, pwease pway "Bwake my haw-aw-aw-aw-awt."

Me: Sure, Darlin'.

Tink: (giggling) Her pwetend her have a boyfwiend.


And this is the one she sings over and over throughout the day and asks for me to play it ALL THE TIME.

Tink: I'm dat voice you heawing in da faw. Whoaoaoa, fo da wongest time, whoaoaoa.



I love youtube.

I love AJ

AJ brought this note to us right before dinner tonight. (Notice her "dad"....she just started learning cursive today in Co-op.) I'm also very impressed that she remembered there was an "o" somewhere in the word "favorite." But most of all I'm blown away by her thoughtfulness in making us such a sweet card. I thought the dance she did when she saw me cutting up the apples was "thank you" enough.

It's still a girl

I went in for a "real" ultrasound today. Originally I wasn't going to do a 20-week ultrasound since we'd already found out the gender and the technician who did that ultrasound checked other things out a bit. But I started to get paranoid that maybe he hadn't checked EVERYTHING out. And I have an online friend who's due just a few weeks after me who went in for her 20-week ultrasound and they got devastating news. Her baby is not going to live long after she's born. She has some chromosomal abnormalities and a cleft palate, among other things. Although news like this wouldn't change much about my pregnancy (I'd still choose to carry the baby to term, like my friend is) I'd like to know ahead of time to try to be prepared. So I scheduled my 20-week ultrasound for today (I'm 26 weeks today).

Luckily everything looked great! Her little heart was beating strong and we saw all 4 chambers. She's measuring just a few days ahead, which is great. And she's definitely still a girl. I'm actually really excited about it now.

Now if only we could come up with a name. We haven't had any time to think about that lately, so this little darling might just be nameless for quite sometime. I told Brent that since we're having her at home this time, it means there won't be some nurse breathing down our necks until we sign the birth certificate. This poor child could go weeks without a name!

So if any of you have any bright ideas, feel free to share! I never thought I'd have to name 4 girls!

Toddlers

Have you ever listened to yourself speaking to a toddler (or any child, for that matter) and realized you're saying things you NEVER thought you'd say? Lady's been a bit of a mischief-maker lately and I've found myself saying the most interesting things to her.

Here are a few of the recent ones:

"We don't eat dog food."

"We don't eat markers."

"We don't try to pull other peoples' eyelashes out."

"We don't open our mouths and let the dog lick our tongues."

"We don't fingerpaint on the walls with food."

"We don't draw on the walls or floors with pencils, crayons, or markers."

"We don't eat chapstick."

"We don't wash our hair with the dog's water."

"We don't sit in the dog's water bowl."

"We don't dump out all the puzzles at once, scatter the pieces everywhere, and then walk away."

"Mascara is NOT lipstick."

"We don't take things out of Mommy's and Daddy's drawers (deodorant, toothpaste, combs, brushes) and hide them where only you can find them again." (Moving is going to be like going on a treasure hunt....I'm sure we'll find plenty of things we never thought we'd see again.)

"We don't chew on spatulas and then put them back in the drawer."

These are just from the past few days. I'm sure if I put more thought into it I'd be able to come up with hundreds more (especially if I thought back to when all the kids were at this stage).

But so help me, I can't stay mad at her too long. She looks up at me with those big, blue eyes and I melt.

Just today, after I made the statement to her about fingerpainting with food on the wall, Roo said to me, "But you're going to forgive her, right?"

Me: with as serious a voice as I could muster "Why should I forgive her? Shouldn't I stay mad at her forever and ever? That's a big mess I'm going to have to clean up."

Roo: with chastisement in his voice "Mommy.....she's just a baby. She doesn't know any better. You HAVE to forgive her."

Where do you think he heard that?

Although I didn't get pics today of the beautiful art created on my wall with avacado and ranch dressing, here are some pics of when she sat in Ruby's water bowl.



And here are the big, blue eyes I have such a hard time resisting. :)

What have you found yourself saying that you never thought you would?

I'm back!

Thank you to everyone who called and made sure we were doing alright. We've had quite the February and I can say that I'm extremely glad it's over. The sun is starting to shine again in our lives (figuratively and literally) and things are looking up.

First I'll explain why I needed a hiatus in the first place. With permission from my sister I'll give a short summary of the beginning of February. As many of you know, she was due with her second son just 2 weeks ahead of me. We were very excited about this since our last babies were born 2 weeks apart (along with one other niece). It's always fun to have cousins close in age.

At 22 weeks, E's water broke. She had a very emotional hospital stay over the next 5 days and delivered her beautiful baby boy February 2nd. They were able to give him a name and a blessing before he returned to his Heavenly Father and we were all privileged to attend a small service for him later that week before he was buried near his grandpa. It was an extremely hard time for all of us, but I dare say all of us received a growth in our testimonies during this hard trial. There was no doubt that God was very aware of all of us in our mourning, and we felt His spirit with us in abundance, most especially with my dear sister and her husband. We are all *extra* grateful for our knowledge of eternal families.

This is the original reason I stopped blogging for a while. There was so much to say and yet nothing to say. It came down to the fact that I was still dealing with my emotions and they were way too close to the surface to try to put them into words (especially for public viewing). So thank you for understanding. :)

In January Brent and I decided to refinance our house. The market was excellent for this and the interest rates were insanely low. So we put in all our paperwork and waited for the lowest-possible interest rate. We were using a sweet lady in our ward who is a loan officer. She called Brent a few times telling him the rates and every time he felt like he shouldn't "lock in" even though the rates were 4.75% a couple of times. He started to feel like maybe this wasn't the next step for us......he didn't know that I had been feeling the same way. We'd both started casually house-hunting on the internet without the other one knowing. Once we found out, we had a good laugh and decided to pray about it and go to the temple to see if this was really something we should pursue (since the obviously "wise" thing to do with our money would be to refinance). We both received overwhelming confirmation that it was time to move. We needed to sell our house. And within 3-4 days of this decision it was sold, without even putting it on the market. In that time we'd also submitted an offer on another house and had gone under contract with that house. This is the house we will most likely buy, but we've been trying to do our "due diligence" all month. We've run our realtor ragged. Part of the reason is that the "new" house is another fixer-upper. We've been searching diligently for a house that doesn't need a ton of work. We've found some great houses, but none have panned out for one reason or another. So it looks like Heavenly Father wants to put Brent's and my skills to work again. (Brent's the one with most of the skills, but I'm a GREAT go-fer!)

I know, I know.....we just did this all 3 years ago, right? Exactly.

And I'm pregnant again, right? Hey, apparently it's the thing to do when I'm pregnant. This will be the 3rd time. BUT it will be the first time we're not moving across the country, so that's nice. And I'm earlier in my pregnancy than with the others.

This was another reason for the blogging hiatus. Moving is quite stressful!

One more reason....Brent just got back from a 10-day trip to India last week. I was lucky to make it through those 10 days alive (and with my children alive)....there was no doing anything "extra" during that time. (Except running around with my realtor looking at more houses, of course, and putting an offer on a house by myself without Brent's signature next to mine on all those papers....you know, nothing big or stressful!) (That was one of the houses that didn't pan out, by the way.)

And during all this time, there was still the "regular" stuff to get to. How annoying is that? Have you ever noticed how the regular stuff doesn't seem to go away even when your life is turned upside-down? I find that terribly rude.

So I guess I'm officially back, but still under a bit of stress. We're closing on our current house the end of this month, and will hopefully have another house to move into at that time. ;)

And now, for your viewing pleasure, here are some pics Brent took of the kids yesterday before church. He brought all the girls skirts/shirts that the little girls in India wear. He brought Roo a "treasure" box. He knows his kids well. :)