November already?!

There is about an hour left of October. I can't even believe how fast this year is going. Each day it's starting to get a little bit cooler here, not enough to break out the electric blanket, but of course we keep it kinda warm in the house due to Caylee.

November is a pretty busy month for us we have my husband's birthday, my birthday and our anniversary (6 years!) We also have Thanksgiving, which we will be traveling to Tennessee to visit our "family". I'm just praying we sell some things we have on Craigslist so we can have the money to pay all our bills and make the trip. You can pray too if you want! ;)

Well, it's kinda late, we just got home from visiting a good friend of mine and Caylee's eaten and ready for bed, so I guess I'll head that way too!

it's Friday!

I just thought I'd let you know in case you didn't.

Friday's are wonderful, not as good as Saturday or Sunday, but they are nice because I know I get to spend the next two days with my husband!

Tonight we're going to visit a good friend of mine that I haven't seen in years. She hasn't even seen my kids! Her name? Beth Ann. yup. She was one of my youth leaders when I was in high school. She means a lot to me. I even lived with her for my senior year of High school while my mom moved to Indiana a head of me. A few years ago her and her husband moved to Virginia, but I never got up there to see her. Recently she moved here, to North Carolina, only about an hour away!! So when my husband gets off work tonight we're loading up the car and heading down to visit!

I thought maybe I'd share some pictures from when my mom was here. Enjoy!



Here's our whole family. The girls weren't ready for this picture to get taken, but it's still the only picture we have of the four of us!





Here's my mom and Lexi, I thought it was cute that they both had the same color shirt on.









And here they are building with the megablocks my mom bought at Goodwill for $2.99. the best $3 every spent on Lexi
I think!







My mom made Lexi and I matching aprons, and Caylee a matching bib. This was our attempt to get us all in the picture. Lexi didn't want to stop playing with her blocks as you can tell since she pulled them into the kitchen for the picture. :)

My mommy has gone to Maine

I really enjoyed the time my mom was here, but unfortunately it had to come to an end. After all she does have 4 more children all of whom live in Maine. Although I'm the youngest, I'm not the only one who matters.

Caylee got really spoiled by her Grammie, as did Lexi so I'm sure the next few days will be interesting. Too bad we couldn't have gone to Maine with her, I'd love to see all my family. Grammie bought Lexi a wagon full of Mega Blocks at good will on Saturday night and that is ALL Lexi has played with since then. Looks like getting more might be a smart Christmas present option. Lexi enjoyed playing with her letter magnets with Grammie too, she likes to show people that she knows all her letters. I haven't decided if she's too prideful of what she knows or not. We always praise her for what she does so she really doesn't know any different. In fact, sometimes she tells herself "goodjob" when doing something.

Caylee just got held a lot and hasn't wanted to be put down too much. I got spoiled cuz I had someone else here helping with the laundry and dinner! I was hoping she'd teach me to make rolls but we didn't get the chance.

We did however find the world's best fabric store yesterday! We ended up way down south of Charlotte, at Mary Jo's cloth store. it was about a walmart sized building full of just material! My mom bought a bunch of material to help her make things to start her etsy store. I just had tons of fun walking around drooling at all the pretty fabric. I WILL go back there once I get some spending money!

Life has been pretty busy lately with visitors and moving. I think we're done until Thanksgiving when we get to go to Tennessee to visit! I'm SOOO excited for that trip, we miss all our friends and "family" there.

We have been facing a few small delemas lately. One is that Eugene's work has lost a big project and pretty much has no work. The owners told them all that they have enough money to last through the end of the year. All the employees are pretty much looking for new jobs. It's not an easy task since he is a draftsman (like an architect) and everyone knows the housing market is not exactly the best field to be in.

The other thing going on right now has to do with us moving out of our old house. We had a verbal agreement with our landlord that she would give us our security deposit back even though we only gave her an 18 day notice instead of a 30 day notice like our lease says. She had been avoiding us for a few days, then finally called my husband with this news: she "hired a safty inspector" to go through the house and check for any mold. (the reason we moved out was because of a horrible mold smell in Lexi's and our bedrooms.) Well the "inspector" didn't find any mold, so now she doesn't want to give us our deposit back. She said if she gets it rented out before the end of the month she'll give it back, or she'll prorate it and give us what is left. There are a few problems with her logic... first of all we were on a month to month lease, our only requirement was a 30 day notice- despite our reasoning for WHY we moved out. Also, North Carolina state law requires her to give us writen information about where our deposit will be held and she didn't. All in all, we could both legally be wrong. We didn't give a full 30 days notice. We did give a notice, and talked to her to make sure the 18 days was enough. She said yes. We should have gotten that in writing. She failed to give us the information North Carolina law requires, she told us she would give us our deposite and is now saying no. The biggest issue is that we told our current landlord that we would be getting it back and give it to him as our deposit for our apartment.

So yah.. that's that.

She laughs and talks and smiles!

Within the past two weeks Caylee has started smiling, laughing, and talking. The first smile was for her daddy. The first laugh was for her daddy. Her first talking was for her Grammie... Maybe she'll roll over first for me.

She's been very gassy lately, normally she only acts this way when I've had dairy. I guess the chocolate chip cookies I've had contained too much milk. :( I really miss ice cream, chocolate, cheese and milk.

My mom has been here since Saturday and we've really been enjoying our time with her. I'm glad the girls are getting to see their Grammie, it's good for them. Lexi has really enjoyed playing with her, and apparently Caylee likes her since she started talking for her.

That's the brief update on why I've been so quiet and what's going on!

Hurray!

Most people hear a lot about getting a car insurance quote, to making sure you're getting the right deal. Car insurance is one of the insurances that is always talked about; everyone needs it, so everyone has it. I just wonder why there isn't as much out there about renters insurance. We just recently realized how cheap renters insurance is and we've also recently started the process of getting life insurance (outside of my husband's work).

Since we moved we've managed to save money on renters insurance! Our apartment is newer, and is right in down town, less than a mile from the fire station as apposed to our old trailer in the middle of nowhere!

I love saving money.

on a different note, here are some much needed pictures of the girls.

Why don't boxes unpack themselves?

So we're all moved in. I think we have too much stuff, I'm getting ready to go on a mass Craigslist spree and try to sell some stuff. Yes, I know it's kinda backwards to sell things AFTER we move, but oh well!

We thought we had done good with the move, everything looked good. Until we tried to watch a movie the other day. It seems our electronics are on strike. First our DVD player wont give us any video. We can hear everything, but we get no picture. So we put the DVD in the xbox (you know, that really expensive toy I just bought my husband in July...) and it freezes. So my husband messes with it and messes with it, and tries again. It still freezes.

We ended up watching the movie on the computer. Luckily the xbox has a 2 year warranty on it, so after talking with Microsoft we learned all we had to do was mail it to them (postage paid) and they will send us a new one. YAY!

Another thing I've been busy doing is running! I'm trying to get back into it since it's been awhile. I was very pleased with myself, because even though it had been a year since I ran I still managed to do almost a mile the very first time I ran. By the 4th time I had done almost a mile and a half. Then I took a weeks break because of the moving, but I was able to still do a mile. (I haven't tried further yet, my knees are hurting a bit). Yesterday I decided I would see how fast I could run the mile. 8 minutes. I was happy with myself. I'm hoping to run a 5K in December. To someone who runs a lot that is nothing, but I've never ran much at all, and last time I was running regularly I had just made it to the 2 mile mark. running in a 5K would be an accomplishment to me.

The girls are doing quite well, Lexi counted to 9 in Spanish today. Every once and awhile we count to 10 in Spanish, French and German. We just thought it would be something fun to teach her. Caylee's face is clearing up, I'm still not sure what it was/is that was going on. She still has a few red spots and it's still dry in places too. It seems as long as I wash it (with just water) a couple times a day and put Aquaphor on it once a day it is clearing up and looks better. She did have some puking issues today. One while I was driving that was so bad she couldn't breath. luckily my mommy instincs told me something was wrong so I looked back and saw her wide eyed with spit up coming out her nose. That is one of the scarriest things to see. She does way better with the screaming/gas when I'm off milk, and it seems that the puking is related to me having acidy drinks (I had juice last night).

We have aquired an outside cat. The people who live here before us left their cat (which was apparently an inside/outside cat because it keeps trying to get inside. I felt bad for it because it was sitting outside meowing so I bought it some food. My husband is not pleased about that. He says he doesn't like cats, he's allergic so it can't be inside, but I don't see a problem with an outside cat. Did I mention it's all black? By the way, what kind of people move and don't take their pet???

All Moved!

Well, the move on Saturday was successful, we had a friend and his kids helping us, which was great because it gave us someone to help entertain Lexi and someone to help Eugene carry all the heavy stuff!

I've been very busy the past few weeks, between packing, having my sister here, moving, unpacking and on Saturday my mom is coming. Not to mention I have a baby who STILL eats every 2 hours through the day and sometimes at night too. Hopefully I'll be able to blog more soon, maybe even post some pictures of the girls and our new place.

For now I'm signing off, hopefully I'll talk to you tomorrow!

6 weeks over, time to lose the baby flab!

Welp, since I got the clear to exercise I decided it was time to start running again. I haven't ran in over a year, but when I was running I was really enjoying it.

I was never a runner before, but I decided I wanted to try. it took me about 3 months and I got to the point that I could run 2 miles, then some things happened and I couldn't get to the park to run and our road was too busy to run on, so I stopped running for a week. After that week was up I never started back up. Then I got pregnant.

So, a year later I'm running again. My sister (an avid runner) came down from Maine to visit and got me jump started on running. She helped me make it over a mile by the 3rd time I ran. I was impressed.

But since she left I've discovered it's hard to find time to run with two babies! I wish I had a treadmill or something so that I could run during nap time. Unfortunately, we don't have the room in our apartment for one.

hopefully I'll be able to find time when we move to our new place. it's much closer to my husband's work so he'll be home earlier after work. it just might give me the time I need to run before it gets dark!

freedom

Now that Lexi is two she's learning all sorts of things. I think my favorite thing she's doing is playing pretend. I love to see little kids cooking, cleaning, playing house and dress up.

Lexi's getting quite an imagination. I've heard her talking to her dolls, even reading them stories. We also give her the freedom to pick her own clothes sometimes. When she does I just say "oh my!" some of the things she puts together are interesting to say the least. Especially the shoes she picks. I think she might be the next Manolo Blahnik.

That wouldn't bother me at all, she could take care of me when I get old, and I'd have the nicest shoes around!

She's also loving her little sister more and more each day. She tries her hardest to comfort her when she is crying, it's too cute to hear her say "I know Tayee, I know." ( Tayee is how she says Caylee). They're gonna be great friends in a few years, I just know it.

Worry? I think not.

So lately all sorts of crazy things have been going on with the economy. House market is going to the dump, jobs going over seas, shortages on gas and even the market crashing.

Do we panic? are we in for another great depression. Some people say we are. I have to be honest, I can't worry about it. I can't think about how in debt we are as a country or how a ecommerce merchant account is doing. (or even what it is). Because if I think about that stuff I worry. and How can I worry. I know worrying is not the thing for Christians to do. After all God says he clothes the lily's of the valley and feeds the birds of the air, and we are way more important to him than those things. We are his children!

So when I hear something that makes me want to worry the best thing for me to do is pray about it then never thing about it again. Sometimes that is easier said than done, but each time I think about those things I have to just pray again and leave it in His hands.