Countdown...19 days

That's right, we will be moving in 19 days.

Today I spent most of the morning making phone calls having utilities turned on and off. All I have left is to call Verizon and have them cancel our service. Tom has to call U-Haul back and reserve a car hauler since that is what we finally decided on (until tomorrow). We even have a California phone number scheduled to be turned on on the 24th!

The ceiling fan in the master bedroom decided that it wanted to be a PITA, on Saturday morning. By PITA I mean popping noises, sparks and suddenly ceasing to turn. So we had to run to Home Depot today to get a new one, we also cut a new piece out of the wall from upstairs, because why would the "white" paint in the house all match? Crazy talk I tell ya. Nothing can be easy for us at this point. lol

We have quite a few small details to work out still about the move. I wish the small details didn't matter, but they do. For instance, finding a hotel in the area for the night of the 17th that accepts pets. Luckily so far I've found 2 and will check the hotel on base tomorrow. Hopefully things will start to fall into place and we can start to feel a little better. As of right now we still aren't sure if TMO is going to change our pack up and move out dates, we won't know until the end of the week. *note to self -- add to to-do list* Such a process. Hopefully things will go fairly smoothly for us soon. We've dealt with enough for a while I think, can we have a break, please?

Infectious Laughter

Alex has the best laugh. I wish I could capture it on video or sound recording each and every time he busts out with a giggle. Sometimes it's an honest-to-goodness laugh, other times it's a fake laugh that leads to a real laugh because he's so amused with himself.

He just did this as I got him a cup with a straw and proceeded to pour him milk. He said no as I started pouring it into his cup. So I asked him if he wanted chocolate and what kid would deny chocolate milk? lol He happily said yes, and as I pour the chocolate syrup into his cup he squealed and giggled. The look on his face was sheer joy and I wish I had had my camera or the video camera to capture the delight on his face and in his laugh.

He also finds it highly amusing when I "blow out" the gameboy advance games. Sometimes when we put them into the DS they aren't always recognized right away, so we have to take it out and blow out any dirt that might be in there. He laughs at me each and everytime I do that.

If only he was this cute & adorable all the time. ;)

Autumn Blossoms

A new collab from Amanda Heimann & Pineapple Plantation Designs is available at The Digi Chick today and it's 20% off today only! For good measure, here's my latest layout using Autumn Blossoms (plus a few other things), click for full credits.

Are you wearing the same

thing you had on yesterday?????

Was what was heard in my house this morning, not once, but twice.

lol Anthony fell asleep on the couch last night after eating dinner so I threw him in bed in what he was wearing. He came downstairs in the exact same thing he wore all day yesterday. Then I took a closer look at Tommy. I knew he was wearing the same shorts, kind of hard to disguise the blue plaid shorts. A second and third glance at his shirt told me he was wearing the exact same thing as yesterday also! lol I tried to be nice about it, but Tommy had hurt feelings over it.

I meant to get my camera this morning when I woke them up, I was contemplating doing a layout about our morning routine. Maybe stealing the idea from this layout by Ali Edwards. Plus I need to get my camera out more often, it's just awkward with the dog and Alex never wants to cooperate. lol I'm trying to research getting a new P&S camera for the trip to CA. I don't really want to spend the money, but there are times that I wished that I didn't have to lug around my big camera.

I ordered two calendars this morning for Christmas presents, it cost me a bit more than I wanted, but I was able to pull it altogether through iPhoto and it looked nice. I was able to put 7 photos on a page, some pages had less. Total cost after shipping/fees for one 13 x 10.4" calendar was $25.98. I had to place 2 orders since I add more photos that include J in the one for my MIL. I hope they turn out nice. Then all I have to finish working on is the cd calendars for my Grandma & Grandpa. I'd like to get a photo calendar for my house, but I think I'm going to do my fav photos from the year so maybe I'll order one in December.

On a roll though...if only getting the car situation figured out was this easy, or cleaning my house. hahaha

Monday ramblings

Cute altered notebook idea here on The DigiChick's blog.

A cute sweater that I have my eye on from AE. They are also buy one get one 50% off. Tempting, although I really don't need to be spending $50 on a sweater right now.

Looking for quotes on shipping DH's car to CA has been a headache. I lost the email quote that one company sent me a few weeks ago that was by far the cheapest, but I need to find out if that included taxes & fees. It would figure that is disappeared. DH's been emailing me quotes on & off throughout the afternoon.

I called our bank to see about a personal loan if we end up needing to sell DH's car and we, of course, owe more than it's worth. The countdown to moving is going faster so we need to finalize alot of the little details before we have no internet service and all our stuff is packed up. I need to make a list of things to call on and get set-up for disconnection.

Rambling...again...lol One thing off my mind is that I was able to get through to the new school for the boys & the lady Stephaine was so nice and helpful. I have a list of things we need and thankfully the only thing we have to go out of our way to get is a copy of Anthony's physical. He's already had one though, so it's just a matter of getting a copy. It looks like Anthony will be going to half day kindergarten once we move. I do need to call and double check on when they are due for their next teeth cleaning, I want to get that done before we move.

Ok, ok...going to go now. Start making me some lists.

Thinking ahead to the holidays

I'm amazed at how quickly the holiday season is creeping up on me. I know that it's still a few months away, but with a big move in a month it's really putting a kink in my shopping. I was hoping to have some things taken care of before we move, but I can't justify getting anything right now and having it get "lost" in the move.

This will be our first Christmas away from family. I'm not sure what we are going to do yet. Tom's cousin J lives within 6 hours of us, but I kind of want to have it at our house for a change and take a break from driving all over. We haven't really talked about it, so we'll see when it gets closer.

For Thanksgiving I think we will be having the Lewis' over for the day. Kathy is going to cook a turkey because she doesn't like my idea of crockpotting a couple of roaster turkeys. lol I'm hoping to have some money to go shopping with the day after Thanksgiving. There are plenty of places to go shopping at in Temecula so I'm hoping to be able to knock everything out in one day. Minus the calendars that I'm hoping to have at least designed up before we move. I think there will be quite a few gift cards purchased this Christmas to reduce the postage cost.

I don't know why I got all wrapped up in the holiday thinking this morning, I must've heard/read something online about Christmas. Just got me thinking about our move and the holidays.

More landlord woes

I am really grateful that our move to CA will enable us to not have to deal with Mr. Landlord anymore. I am beyond ready to be done with all the crap that comes along with renting from him. I'm hoping that our new landord is better and has had some prior experience renting out his property before. Although, his cashing of the post-dated check makes me wonder, he's lucky the money was there. That's beside the point, back to the current Landlord troubles. He scheduled a company to come clean out the duct work yesterday. Their window was 9-11 and it was supposed to take hours, up to 5. Well, no one showed. Mr Landlord called to double check someone showed around 10:30 or so. Then at about 12:30 he called to tell us they were about 10 minutes out. Great, by this time their 5 hour timeframe was going to push them into the beginning of Tommy's soccer practice. They showed, sat in the driveway, and continued to sit. I hate when people do that, I'm usually here by myself with one or more of the kids and it just gives me an eery feeling. Then Mr Landlord calls to tell us that the company told the service people only to clean the outside unit, so they can't do the duct cleaning, they didn't have what they needed. Wonderful.

It didn't help any that when I took the kids outside that morning to wait for the bus that I suddenly had a nausea attack and my stomach felt like someone had punched me multiple times. I thought it would pass, unfortunately it didn't and I ended up puking into the bushes. Thankfully the boys bus driver is the best, so when the boys just waited at the end of the driveway instead of their normal stop at the corner, she stopped to get them anyway. Tom ended up coming home because of the duct cleaning, so that I could not deal with it since I didn't feel well. I slept on and off throughout the day, but the appointment wasn't held.

They re-scheduled for Friday, let's hope the service people get the right instructions and bring the appropriate equipment this time. I'm really tired of waiting for people to show up.

On a better note, Tuesday when Anthony came home he had a note from his teacher. It was notifying us that they had nominated him for Student of the Month for September. They are having a breakfast for them on Sept 26th. Hopefully Tom won't have any issue getting off work to go. They only allow adults to attend and I don't know anyone who will watch Alex for me. It's a treat for Dad to be able to show up when he can, so he'll go this time.

A nice little visit

Sam and her kids stopped by overnight last night. They are headed from her parents house in NY to NC. Chris comes home in another month or so and they are having a house built so she is anxiously awaiting getting her hot little hands on those keys. lol I wouldn't blame her at all, it's nice to have a place to call your own.

The garage guy actually made it by today. We were told not to open the garage door anymore because of where it's rotting is where all the springs and pressure it. The guy said basically we were in the worst situation to be in. It's going to cost $650 for a new panel. He suggested buying a new door, but obviously it's up to Mr Landlord. So, this ought to be interesting to see what he's going to do. Oh and tomorrow the people to clean out the ducts will be here from 9-12 for 5 hours! He didn't even ask if it was ok with my schedule. Which is funny, because tomorrow was the one day I was going to head to the store. Alex and I haven't had the privilege of a store trip by ourselves yet, so I thought we would run to Target and pick up the baby gift for M & M.

That's all from me today, I'm feeling lazy so after lunch I think it'd be a good time for a movie.

FOB2Y 9/11

For the blog challenge at SSD this week. I'm a few days late for it, but at least I remembered this week. :)

You Are 70% Real

You know who you are, and you're pretty darn comfortable with yourself. Like everyone, you struggle with the parts of yourself that aren't so great... But you're good at accepting who you are and not dwelling on your faults. As a result, you're confident, optimistic, and very real.

How Real Are You?

Paint, Soccer and other misc things

So, after trying a handful of times to blindly buy paint to cover up Alex's lovely artwork we gave up. Tom grabbed a box cutter after Mr Landlord wouldn't give us any suggestions or guidance about what color paint to buy and cut out a part of the wall. That was interesting.

Tommy had soccer pictures this morning. I felt bad but I didn't buy individual photos, I did get him a copy of their team picture. I told him that I would take some pictures of him and then we'll email them off and later when we have some extra cash we'll get some prints done. After his pictures we stopped at Wal-Mart to grab some stuff, then off to his soccer game. After the game we had to stop by Lowe's to get paint and spackle. Unfortunately, the employees at the paint counter weren't interested in helping us, when they finally acknowledged that we were breathing & waiting for some help the little color matching machine didn't want to work.

So, off to Home Depot we went, Tom was in and out of there with a matched gallon of paint, spackle, and sandpaper in much less time than we were in Lowe's. A quick stop by Giant for some groceries and then we came home. We arrived home to see that Mr Landlord left our garage door totally open while he left and ran to Home Depot. Tom has thousands of dollars worth of gear in the garage; I was beyond pissed.

Thankfully the paint matches and we are set for the weekend. Tom just got back from a quick run to the gas station on base for some more Peach Schnapps and orange juice for my yummy calypso coolers that I have fallen in love with.

So, I'm off to enjoy the cooler air and thunder and a nice refreshing drink. Here are a couple of pictures from our week.

Anthony watching the soccer game

Alex asleep on the couch with the gameboy

Tommy at his game during a break on Sat.

what a {bad} morning

Ugh, I hate mornings like this. The ones where you wake up in a panic, don't know what exactly is going on, but know that something is wrong. That was my morning.

Normally we wake up at 7:10 for school. Well I was awoken by Anthony at about 8:35 telling me that Mr Landlord was here. What?! I flew out of bed, grabbed my sweater because of course I had been sleeping, so I had my sleep shorts on and a tank top with no bra. lol I flew downstairs as the phone starts ringing. I get the alarm turned off and open the door to Mr Landlord standing there, I must've looked absolutely freaking awesome. He wanted to know if it was ok that the a/c guy was ok to come out in a half hour rather than the time frame of 10-2 that they gave us yesterday. I tell him that's fine. I run inside & immediately get on the boys cases about why they didn't wake me up. I checked my cell phone to see why I didn't wake up to my alarm, well, it was probably because my phone died in the middle of the night. Wonderful.

So, it's almost 1 and I'm really feeling overwhelmed and edgy since I had a bad start to my morning. The a/c guy said that the whole system really needs to be replaced due to the age and efficiency of it. It'll cost $1300 to get the system replaced or $600 for him to come out again and clean what he can. I knew there was something wrong with the system, there just had to be. Now Mr Landlord is saying the guy told him he adjusted it so it'd be working better, etc and to let him know how it is. Of course it's a nice, coolish day today with no real need for the a/c to be running.

This is so our luck.

Rain, rain

Tommy's soccer game was canceled due to all the rain we got from Hanna. His playdate with L was also canceled, I guess she had wanted to have a picnic, so they will try next weekend.

We ran out to the store today and of course the commissary was super busy, doesn't help that they were running the case lot sale this weekend. Thankfully we only needed a handful of things and got done fairly quickly; going there give me a panic attack.

We've successfully sold our large Fisher-Price toybox and Hummer Power Wheel on Craigslist in the past week. Now for the stroller & car seat. I also have a few things that I need to get listed on ebay, a couple of I Love Lucy barbies, my old iPod and some video games.

I finished this layout yesterday. It took a while to figure out the look I wanted, I changed the layouts to black and white, but struggled with out to set it up on the page. Then I came across Nikki's Stripped template and I immediately knew that was it. So, using Amanda & Melissa's Autumn Pop kit and a few other goodies, I have another cute layout of my favorite middle man. :)

I'm also a guest for Karah Fredricks this month. I love her stuff, I have an overflowing folder full of her stuff. I wish I had some motivation to scrap though! lol The layout I just did took me all day to get the way I wanted it - and I used a template! lol Maybe tomorrow. I've got to knock some things out though...near the end of the month I'll be busier and might not get a chance to just sit & scrap.

mommy...mommy...mommy!

So, this is what I hear alot from Alex lately. I don't know where he picked up the Mommy part of it, I usually refer to myself as Mom to the boys. The boys have never called me anything but Mom. I'm trying to figure out how well he likes being the only one at home, but I think the change is still too new or him. I was hoping to be close to a routine by the end of the week, but it's not happening. I was soo tired this morning that I went back to bed til I hear a little voice coming up the stairs yelling, "Mommy! Mommy!" lol

I looked at Tommy's soccer schedule yesterday when Tom got home and realized that he has games 2x a week for 2-3 weeks along with practices 2x a week. There is a week or two at the end of the month that there isn't even a game on Saturday. It's really odd how they have done the game schedule. Tomorrow is his first game and I forgot to ask his coach which jersey he's supposed to wear. lol

Well, I need to go get started on the mess in the toy room. I have a horrible mess waiting for me in the computer room. It almost makes me sick each time I see it. lol

And just for kicks, a video of Alex...He didn't like it when I tried to give him the lightning bug. It's a video from my SIL's cell phone, so it's not great quality.

{soccer mom}

So tonight I took Tommy to his first soccer practice. Since the bus was running a little late I had him change right away when he got home and we ran out to run a couple errands beforehand. We ran into a slight snag trying to find the soccer field; note to coaches, if the practice field is at an elementary school, say so - not everyone might know what B means. lol Tommy had a good first practice, his first game is scheduled for Saturday.

Anthony and Alex played on the playground equipment and got really dirty. It was great for Alex though, he got to be outside and play. Once we got home it was a quick dinner of quesadillas and then upstairs to get cleaned up and pj's on. Now it's 10pm and I am ready to hop in the shower and get to bed. Alex has other plans though.

Here are a couple pics from this evening, it was a bit of a pain to try to take pictures and chase after Alex.

Action shot

Alex was really dirty

1st day of '08-'09 school year

My boys left a little under an hour ago to go to their first day of school. They'll be gone until just about 4pm. The littlest man of the house is still sleeping. I took some pictures, they aren't great, maybe tomorrow morning we'll try again. Tom stayed home to see them off on the bus, it was weird to see the 2 of them get on the bus. Anthony didn't seem bothered one bit this morning which is a relief for me. I was really afraid that he would go into a meltdown while getting dressed, putting his shoes on or getting on the bus. No meltdowns this morning, which makes me happy.

1st day of 2nd grade

1st day of Kindergarten

1st day of 08-09 school year

Walking to the bus stop

Waiting at the bus stop

After the boys left for school and Tom left for work I got my pretty, new, inscribed iPod and got on the elliptical. Baby steps, I did 1/2 mile in just under 12 minutes. By the end of the week I'm hoping to be up to 3/4 mile. I am determined to try to take off 5-10 pounds by the time we move. Hopefully the hubby will be helpful in my quest, usually he makes all sorts of promises of helping, or working out together, only to sit on the couch and watch me run around taking care of the house. lol

Well, the littlest man is up now, so I should start to get some things done and get into a routine.

September, already?

I can't believe it's September already. I don't have anything specific to write about today, so I'm just going to point out some highlights of my weekend.

I found out that My Pic Tales is offering a single page printing service now.

They are also offering 20% off until today (though I read somewhere they extended it to Sept 7th). I just got some prints done through scrapbookpictures.com in July. I'm thinking about getting a couple prints done if the shipping isn't too much for just a handful of prints. Maybe I will get a couple extra to put in the 12x12 scrapbook frames I've been wanting to purchase.

I listed some things on Craigs List yesterday & today, there are still some other things that I'd like to get listed. The games I listed on ebay for the boys ended yesterday, we didn't get as much as I'd hope for them, but we will be free of them.

The boys start school tomorrow. I'm excited for them, it's going to open up so many doors for Anthony. Tom is going in late to see them off on the bus the first day. Tommy has his first (the team's 2nd) soccer practice on Wednesday evening.

I've got to go on a digital supply spending freeze for the next few months. I've done good in August & July, not buying too much, though I did buy stuff that I probably didn't need to. I would like to still allow myself $10 each payday, but every penny we can scrape together will help. We have alot of money going out in October, and not nearly enough money coming in. Ah, the joys of moving!