Snow Days

We got a significant amount of snow - like 22 inches worth of snow. It provided for hours and days of entertainment.

 The girls spent most of their time building a snow fort

Dallin loved to shovel the snow

And even get dumped on

You could not even see David's car

David and I took turns shoveling the driveway and had many conversations about investing in a snow blower for the new house, which has a loooong driveway. 

Our front foyer looked like this for like 2 weeks.

When they weren't outside, they were creating LEGO towns. I'm always amazed at their creativity with those things. 

January Little Things

The first couple of months of this year were so busy with house things. I learned to really appreciated the small quiet moments. 

Me and all my babies.

 David and all his babies

The kids wanted their pictures taken on their first Sunday in their new classes. 

Dallin's first day as a Sunbeam! He was so excited, yet disappointed to not get to go to nursery. 

And Carmen got braces. She really is growing way too fast and soon will be as tall or taller than me. We can already share shoes! 

While these two mostly fight like cats and dogs, it pretty great when they do get along. 

Carmen was in a fun 5th grade concert where she got to play the xylophone. We'll miss the Baker Butler music program, it was so great! 

If David is home for bedtime, this is what you'll usually see. The kids all lined up for "airplane to bed". They pretend to be airplanes and David will fly them into their beds. It's a lot of fun, but usually gets them pretty riled up. 

We got quite a bit of snow in January and spent one day at Bounce and Play to help get some energy out. 

Thing suddenly became very real when this went up in the front yard.

The girls dutifully doing their homework. 

I found myself at this meeting one night.... how is this happening already?!?! 

And this cute dude, ready to head off for a morning of preschool!

2016 - The Year of New Adventures

This new year is going to bring about a lot of new adventures for our family. As soon as we wrapped up Christmas we sort of jumped both feet first into selling our house! It felt like a whirlwind decision, but it felt like the right one. We took a huge leap of faith decided to finally move forward with putting our house on the market. We've now lived in Charlottesville for 6 years, and about 3 years ago we knew we were ready to find our (hopefully) forever home.  But without the real urgent need to move, we spent those 3 years and had a lot of fun looking at EVERYTHING on the market. But nothing ever seemed right. Our poor realtor, Doug McGowan, was so patient with us! 

But then one day, I found THE one and knew we had to act fast. And so we did..... we cleared out a ton of junk. Our poor trash guys on this day had to leave and come back for the other half of this pile because their truck was too full. There was a lot piled on the other side as well.

We started packing and packing and packing boxes....... it was never ending. 

We loaded up a POD with all the things we could live without in order to stage our home for showings. The sad thing was, when that thing drove away, I didn't care if I ever saw any of that stuff again. I could really live without it.  We painted and cleaned and made repairs to almost everything. We got that place looking so sparkling great that we almost didn't want to move anymore.

I really learned a lot while the in the staging/showing phase of selling a house. I learned how much excess we really have. Even after we filled that POD, there was still too much stuff! I also learned that my kids could actually, really truly keep the house spotless clean for an extended amount of time. They could pick their toys up after playing, their shoes magically were always put away, their beds were made every morning before school. Bathroom counters stayed cleared and wiped down.  I knew they had it in them, but to actually see how good they were at it, amazed me. I truly believed they would keep it up after we moved. That's was really foolish and unrealistic thinking. 

We got an offer the first day the house was on the market, and had a total of 3 showings. Our very next door neighbors bought our house! While we no longer had to show the house after the first few days, I still every few days told the kids there would be a showing that day and they would scramble to clean everything up! A mother's got to do what a mother's got to do. Those words "Showing Today" were magical and worked like a charm. ;) We all felt so grateful that it sold so quickly. But we immediately felt more pressure to get things worked out with the new place. 

Another thing I learned was how attached I really do get to things. I remember it being so hard to sell our first mini van because I had so many great memories in that van. This house was full of amazing memories too. It was the longest we had lived anywhere since being married. Our girls are old enough to always remember that house. I'm so sentimental and was hard to let go of such a great place. I often found myself teary eyed thinking of never living there again. Even on moving day, I left that morning to go ready the new place for everything and I never went back. I'm glad I never saw it empty. It would have been too sad. 

Here are some random, out of order pictures of the house that were used for the Listing. These pictures are a little sad because we painted over the colors that I loved on my walls and we "DE-personalized" everything.