Life has become very complicated!

Just when you think things are settling down...

HD's company tells us on Friday, that they are handing out termination letters, but being that he is in the union and works for a major phone company you know the one that says "can you hear me now" they have to first offer us a lateral move.  The move is in a neighboring state but is still hours from where we live.  Hours from where we just buried my Grandpa.  Hours from our friends our church our lives...

So being that HD makes very good money we have to go.  We have always been blessed beyond measure with his jobs and our health care.  We wish we had more time or more of a choice but we have to go.  They are giving us the offer on Nov. 3 and we have 1 week to answer.  From that point I don't know when we will have to report to our new spot.  We had a realtor come this morning to advise us what we need to do to sell quick. 

As much of a shock as this is I am at peace.  God has different plans for us than I knew about.  Pray for us as we are going to be super busy!  We have to paint and trim and we are having new Kitchen floors and counters put in. 

So what I mentioned about moving was only a rumor in the company which came to pass this weekend.  I will keep you all posted!

$15.94

Our weekend was filled with lots of fun.  Saturday we had a birthday party at my house for my Grandpa he turned 79 on Sunday.  I made Pioneer Woman's Lasagna, and it was wonderful!  I also bought some Italian bread which I like much better than French bread, I put a garlic butter spread on it and bake.  We also had Pea Pickn' Cake and it was great!  So we gave Grandpa a party and his gifts.  We enjoyed our time with My Aunt (Twice Blessed Mommy) and family.  The babies loved playing with our Little People toys.

On Sunday we all went to my favorite Chinese restaurant.  I love the sushi, not the kind with raw fish the kind with vegetables.  The owner's name is May and she is as sweet as she can be, she had the staff come and sing to my Grandpa.  I feed the babies rice, and noodles, they loved it.  Until Reese stuffed a huge bite in her mouth and choked, (Kristen I thought of you) we scooped the mess of rice out of her mouth and all was well.  I tried to get her to take a drink of water, but she doesn't know how to drink from a straw.  I will be working on that, on our vacation to Florida, in less than 3 weeks, have I told you all that we are going on a beach vacation in less than 3 weeks, we are going with Dana and Joe.

After dinner we went out to our land, just the kids Happy Daddy and I.  We walked around for

 a few hours dreaming and planning where our new house is going to be, where we want the barn and the garden...  So after all our walking, and after 20 minutes of picking ticks off of ourselves we were kinda hungry not really hungry, so we asked the kids if they wanted to have ice cream for dinner.  You will never guess what they said "YES"!!

So off we headed for our local DQ.  I had a medium Reese Cup Blizzard, and did you know that Dairy Queen had the name Blizzard copy righted in 1954 but we did get to try the first Blizzard as we know them today until 1986, I bet you all needed to know that, didn't you.  Have I mentioned that my favorite food is ice cream and that I would give up a whole days worth of food for ice cream.  Happy Daddy had a large Heath Blizzard.  Luke had a Chocolate dipped waffle bowl with vanilla ice cream and camel sauce.  Daisy had vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce and Bo the middle child had to be different he wanted a lime slush, now mind you this is dinner, we wanted him to have a little calcium at least.  We gave in he had his lime slush.  And our total was $15.94, I think that's a lot of money.  I could have bought a half gallon of Edy's Vanilla Bean for 3.94 and a whole lot of Reese Cups and made our own Blizzards.  

It was really good though.  I'm not sure if  it was $15.94 good.  Daddy pointed out that we also could have ordered a pizza for $10, and got the ice cream and some banana's for the same price.

Oh well, our kids think they have the greatest parents in the world!

Chickens and a Coop

Daddy is working late this week, that means he goes to work at 9 and gets home at 6:30, not so bad now that it is staying light longer.

Here is a picture of our chickens.  We have 5 of them.  The white one talks alot!

They are in a temporary house while Daddy finishes the coop.

Some of our chickens have their back feathers plucked out, this is due to the number of chickens that were in our friends pen, he just had too many so us taking a few will help.

I guess that's where we get the saying "the pecking order".

This is our coop.

This kind of siding is called Dutch Lap.  Daddy is busy nailing here.

Daddy busy working before he goes to work...

HGTV

Hey did you guys know that you can enter once a day to win an HGTV dream home?

And this year it is in Hilton Head SC which we vacationed last year and it is beautiful, oh and this house is totally Green...  So go here and enter.

Tomorrow I will post pictures of our new pets...  We got 5, ten month old egg laying chickens!  I am so excited!  Daddy worked all weekend on our coop, I will post pictures of that as well.

Good night.

House plans

I know I mentioned last week that if I viewed even one more house plan my head would explode well it didn't...

We did however find our house.  This house, the perfect house for us!  We are not going to look anymore.  We are going to order this blueprint and get started with all our estimates and junk.  We are really excited and I wanted to share with you all.  I would take pictures of our new land but it just looks like forest right now.  More to come.

Spring Cleaning

Today is all about lists and cleaning!  I have a ton on my list to clean.  Yesterday I cleaned out our medicine cabinet, I should have taken a before picture!  I had a whole trash bag full of old medicine and other things.  I now have a totally organized medicine cabinet, so if you need a Band Aid I know just where to find one....

Today I will tackle the laundry room.  We have a freezer that sits just about 1 foot from the wall and at some point in time we (I) started stacking things in this tiny space, it now is a junk pile all the way up to the top of our stand up freezer and onto the top of the freezer and so I have a big mess.  If we ever want to get this house on the market I have got to get busy, so today is eliminate the mess in the laundry room day.  Tomorrow I am going to clean all the base boards in our house as well as the hall closet.  I think I will take pictures so you can see my progress.

I want to buy the boys new quilts for their room and give them a new look.  They have had a Spider Man room, an under water room, a jungle room, an airplane room and as of today their room is just a room I have taken all the pictures off the wall and painted we now need to order their new quilts, I found these at Target. I thought this lamp would look great and maybe this rug too.  I just know Kristen at We are that Family will love them because she is all about the Rodeo these days, go read and she is having a contest this week too.  I thought I would hang these barn stars on wall maybe three of them and stencil " Real Cowboys Sleep Under The Stars..." 

So I have alot to do before we can put the house on the market.  I will post pictures later.  I must go teach my child how to add double digits today.

If I look at one more house plan my head will explode!

As you all know we bought land about a month ago, so now we have to find and AGREE on the house plan...

This sounds like it should be an easy task well it is not!  I think I have viewed my 9 billionth house plan this evening and we still have no real idea what to do!

We have some real wants and some real needs like for instance we need to have 5 bedrooms, one for each child and (the 3 we have and the one we hope to have soon) and of course a master suite.  We want a class room or office for our home school, at our current home we use the kitchen, it works but it could be better if we had a room.  I want an island in the kitchen, now this is a want but I feel like it is a need!  We need the family room to flow with the kitchen and dining room, we like an open floor plan.  

We both like a colonial or country farmhouse design, we live in the rural south and will be on a 12 acre mini farm when we move out to our new land.

We need the house to be between 2200 and 2700 sq feet.  

I found this house tonight after oh my 50th hour of looking it has everything we are looking for except the country porch, which we could add, it is a little bigger than we had first thought we needed at 2658 but after all the looking I think we might have to go bigger to have what we think we need.  I also like this house, but who gets the big ol' bed room?  The only other home I could find was this one, which might be to small and it has no office, we are going to have a basement and plan to put our playroom in the basement but I really don't want to put the class room in a basement, we spend alot of time doing school and with each child doing school, we could easily be in our new class a good par of our day.

After we finally decide on a house plan we can purchase the blueprints and start getting bids on the jobs.  Daddy is going to contract out all the work his self, we will become Owner Builders, saving ourselves hundreds of thousands of dollars...  This is a very exciting time for us but boy oh boy is this overwhelming!

We are getting ready to do some big home improvements at our home now and plan to put the house on the market in a few months.  I will post pictures of the improvements as they come.

We Did It!

Ok today was so big!  Really Really Big!  We refinanced our home in order to buy the land we want to build our new home on.  We have owned 3 homes now and will be building our 4th...  The greatest part about the whole thing is we have found a wonderful Christian Doctor in TX to do Daddy's vasectomy reversal.  It looks like we will be able to close on the refinance in late January and hopefully have the reversal done in February.  We have never had a get away like this before or at least since we have had children.  We will go for a long weekend starting on a Thurs-Tues.  I am just so excited!  What seemed like might take forever is coming together quite quickly!  I am so thankful to Daddy for first of all being able to contract and build our new home he is just The most handy smart and handsome man I have ever known!  I am Thankful he loves me enough to forgive me for asking and pushing him to have a vasectomy in the first place!  I am Thankful he wants more children and is willing to go through a not so pleasant experience to have one with me!  I am just very pleased today Very Blessed....