Clark's First Visit With Santa...

...and he HATED it!

New House

Drum roll please...
It only took 70 days to get here, and we almost lost the deal more then once, but here are the much waited for pictures...
Living Room Before:





Living Room After:



Kitchen Before:





Kitchen After: (Clint did so much work on painting cabinets and making the kitchen look so much nicer. We love it!


Dinning Room Before:



Dinning Room After:


Clark's Room Before:





Clark's Room After:






Hallway Before:


Hallway After:


Master Bedroom/Bathroom Before:






Master Bedroom/Bathroom After:






Not much has changed in the bathroom/shower area yet.

Downstairs Bathroom Before:


Downstairs Bathroom After:


Entryway Before:


Entryway After:

Front of the house. We haven't done anything to this area yet, but soon there will be some plants and a BBQ. :)




As you can see, we aren't completely finished getting settled in, but at least all our boxes are unpacked except our China because we haven't gotten a buffet for it to go into and my teaching boxes which will sadly stay in a box until I decide to go back to work.

So come visit us!

Some Days Feel Like There's a Monkey On My Back

At least Clark is an adorable "Monkey" and the weight of him on my shoulders isn't as heavy as the weight from buying this house.

It only took a mere 70 days from our offer being accepted to us getting the keys to our new home. We had set backs due to Veteran's Day, then further set backs due to the incompetence of our escrow lady. She very nearly cost us the entire deal and we almost lost the house. After we wired money into the escrow account, she called our loan officer and said the money wasn't there. Wrong, she just didn't look hard enough. Then she forgot to put the unit number on the documents so the bank rejected the papers. Not that the unit # has much significance. We still have no idea why it's there. The post office says we don't need it and it doesn't match the number on the house. Then the real kicker was that she said we had to have our own hazard insurance when the association was paying for it. The people at the bank denied our documents again and said the deal was no longer valid because we had taken too long. Thankfully our loan officer talked to the bank and explained that the escrow woman was a class A IDIOT and bought us another day.
So last Monday we were able to get our keys and move in. :) I am pretty sure that the TV shows lie and don't actually give keys to people minutes after they sign documents or California is just messed up and makes you wait. It was an entire week for us, but should have happened much faster if the escrow lady wasn't a moron. Oh well. Hopefully we're done dealing with her.

I don't have pictures yet of our place because there are still boxes everywhere and we aren't done painting and fixing up the kitchen. Although, I can provide you with this picture though.


Clark got into the down stairs bathroom and had unrolled an entire roll of TP. My friend Jeanette has a similar picture on her blog only her TP is in a diaper box. My bathroom isn't big enough for a box, so the bathroom sink is making due until I use it all up and put a new roll on the holder. :)

Awake

It's 3:28 in the morning and this is what Clark is up to!

Instead of fighting him to go back to sleep I am waiting out the Benadryl. Before you think I'm a horrible mother who drugs her kid to get them to sleep, Clark has had a really bad rash and the Benadryl was for that, but there is the nice side affect of the product.
He's been sleeping pretty horribly this week. Wanting to be up and in our bed. The in our bed part is normally fine because he'll sleep, but this week it's been Clark wakes up, then comes to bed with us and insits on laying on me. Fine too, but it doesn't last long and he rolls around on me and Clint and none of us get any sleep.
So here I am writing a blog at 3:30 waiting for him to get tired.

So while I'm waiting for him to get sleeping again, I've noticed changes in his development as a growing kid. For instance, he loves to play with my cell phone. He holds it up to his ear and says, "YA YA YA" or looks at the screen. My phone has a Pandora AP and Clark loves to listen to the music because I think he thinks it's talking to him.
I was also noticing that he is now able to crouch down, pick up something and then stand back up.
He's also mastered the skill of turning off the kitchen light. He hasn't yet learned to turn it on because he's not tall enough.

Moving to my parents' house has been a great bench mark for measuring Clark's growth. When we first got here Clark was just a blob on the floor. Then he learned to move around on the floor, then crawl, and now he's running around the house. He's also almost completely stopped spitting up. :)
It will be nice to use our new house as a bench mark for further growth and some serious sleep training...