Settling In!

Well, I'm finally posting to you from our very own house in Leonardtown, Maryland! Yeah!!! We closed on Monday, the movers unloaded on Tuesday, I threw a fit on Tuesday night in the middle of the chaos and now things are settling down. We still have a lot to do, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel of boxes! Here are some highlights from the week...

• I taught three Jazzercise classes at the Pax River Jazzercise Center. The first one was rough and it didn't help that my iPod was on shuffle for the whole class and I didn't know it. But the next two classes went well and the class owner said she got compliments from the customers on me - so that's good!
• Nolen and Max already have friends in the neighborhood! Sarah lives next door and is 6 years old, Jadeyn (sp) is 6 and lives 2 houses down, there is also a little girl named Katie but I don't know much about her yet. Wednesday night I was unpacking boxes upstairs when Sarah and Katie walked in! I guess that's how things go around here! Haha! I'll have to get used to that! Ms. Berta never let herself into our house in Enterprise! hehe!
• The NEX sells Vera Bradley!!! Holy Cow! Look Out! They seem to be about 20-25% off and of course, no tax!
• As soon as I unpack my computer (I'm on Ed's laptop now) I'll email all our new contact info.
• The dogs have been at Fran's all week. She is bringing them back this weekend - which is good, but I've enjoyed walking out the door without kicking at the dogs to get them to stay in!
• Knock on wood, Nolen hasn't been complaining about school as much this week. And, he has brought home some great papers where he has traced and copied all of the color words. I hope he's in the top reading group or my heart will be broken. I'm such a bad mama!

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Ed is moving boxes around. I can't resist the urge to go check on him. I have to make sure that he's not bringing boxes from the garage into the house that I already moved out of the house into the garage. hehe I see a garage sale in our future. Ugh!

Update from Richmond

Well, things are going better than they were on Friday! I'll start with the good stuff...we came down to Richmond on Friday after school/work. Ed's mom, Fran, lives here and its been a wonderful weekend. First of all, the dogs are at her house (thnak you thank you thank you!) Second, we have had a babysitter which means that Ed and I could get a free minute to finish a conversation! In fact - last night, we had a full fledged DATE! It was a lot of fun! We went out with Stephanie, one of the teachers from Fran's school, and she is a HOOT! I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. I even managed to spit my gum straight out of my mouth! First we stopped at the Capital Ale House (77 beers on tap and Ed convinced me to do a Washington Apple shot), then we had Indian food for dinner, stopped for coffee since my bedtime is now earlier than the kids, and tried to find a cool bar to hang out at. It took three tries to find one that actually had people to watch but when we finally did it was worth it. There was some good people watching to do there! Overall, an A+ date night!

Today we are going to visit Dale's Aunt Joe. She is in an assisted living facility and she always sends the boys cards a dollar each for holidays and such but she has never met them! I hope she really gets a kick out of them.

Now for some quick backtracking...

Nolen loves school. He walks right onto the bus each day with no whining or anything. His official party line is still that he doesn't like Kindergarten because its too long and he gets tired. I hope he stops saying it because it bugs me and he really does like it. He has a half hour of recess, he tells me what number they put on the calendar each day, and he tells me what they have for lunch. Due to some first day confusion and trying to pack a lunch out of a hotel room, he has been buying his lunch this week. I really like his teacher and I can't wait to see what kinds of work he starts to bring home as the year progresses!

On Thursday I felt settled enough to venture out to the Pax River Jazzercise Center! Yeah! Its gorgeous! She has a spot in a brand new mini-mall or office park or something. Pergo floors, all new tubes, weights, mats, and balls, sounds system with iPod dock, childcare room for 3 classes per day and even a computer for the class manager to sign people in. Its awesome! Starla is the class owner and she immediately asked me when I can teach! Ha! I guess a lot of her girls are out of town and she has to pick up the slack because she owns the classes. She was on her 9th class of the week!!! I wasn't prepared to teach that day and lets face it, Momma is out of shape, but I am teaching on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week. It should be fun! Wish me luck!!!

We had some other events last week (fender bender, mortgage company being stupid, etc.) but I don't even want to think about all that balogna right now! So if you want to hear about it, you'll just have to wait!

Tonight we'll go back to MD and leave the dogs here so that we can stay somewhere better than the Super 8! Monday afternoon we close on the house and Tuesday our household goods should be delivered. If they aren't delivered on Tuesday my head might explode - not pretty - so keep your fingers crossed!!! Maybe by the end of the week I can be posting from my very own living room!!!!

Hope ya'll are doing well! Miss you, love you!

Playing Catch Up!

Well, I'm finally back in the blogosphere! I was starting to have severe withdrawals! Luckily, it appears that blogging goes on without me so I've already spied on all of you! Haha! I would like to make this a cutesy, creative post, but I'll be lucky to get all the highlights of the past week in here...so nothing fancy!

Friday August 15...
We decided to clean up the house and leave on Friday instead of Saturday. We thought we would drive to the lake house and have a nice relaxing evening before our adventure began...wrong. We found out while we were still South of Troy that the lake house was occupied. But we decided to keep on trucking anyway and made it past Atlanta and spent the night in a hotel there. Other than that, day one was uneventful.

Saturday August 16...
This was our big day of driving. We drove over 500 miles to get to Richmond with a plan to see Grammy while we were there. The boys did great in the car. We even found a cool park to play at in the afternoon while we were looking for a potty break. When we were about an hour away from Richmond we got a phone call from Aunt Laura...Fran had to go to the hospital! She was bleeding from somewhere but they didn't know where from. It turns out she had a bleeding ulcer. She was able to go home on Tuesday afternoon but she's still pretty tired. So, unfortunately we had another change of plans that day. We visited Grammy in the hospital, then I took the boys to McDonald's for dinner and to the hotel. Ed stayed with his mom and sister for awhile so we didn't get to see much of him, Grammy or Laura in Richmond. :-(

Sunday August 17...
(Get ready for another day of being flexible) Today we visited Fran again before we left for MD. It was an easy 2 hour drive from Richmond and we went to Ms. Jean's house first to have lunch with her. She has a beautiful house right on the Potomac River! Its gorgeous! We had a nice visit (except that the dogs didn't get along with her terrier) and loaded up again to go check into the Navy Lodge...here's where it gets fun...they had a reservation for us...in OCTOBER! We ended up going back to Jean's for a precarious night of trying not to get in the way. Everything worked out in the end but Ed was certainly getting stressed about the situation.

Monday August 18...
Monday my tasks were to work on finding a pet friendly hotel to go to and get Nolen registered for Kindergarten!!! I found the Super 8 Motel for us and the pets. It leaves something to be desired but we can handle it for the next few days. Its clean enough even though its a small room. As far as registering Nolen for school...I made such an effort to get his physical taken care of in AL but I FORGOT to hold onto his birth certificate! It is totally packed on the moving truck! As I was lying awake worrying about it, I remembered that Ft. Rucker Primary School made a copy of it last year when he was enrolled in Pre-K. Lucky for me, they STILL HAD HIS RECORDS! They faxed everything I needed up to Leonardtown Elementary and we were all set! Hooray! After that, we drove around and looked at our new house, found a park to play at for a bit, found Target (why does it feel like a relief to find Target? Knowing it is here isn't really the same as finding it. haha) and went back to Jean's to have dinner with her and pack up.

Tuesday August 19...
A settled, boring day...finally! Laundry, got some food for the hotel room, ran some errands, and went to Nolen's open house!!! The school was rebuilt last year and its brand new! The kids don't have cubbies, but rather they share lockers! How cute is that? His teacher, Ms. Murray, is very young and so is the para in the class. I tried hard to point out all of the things in the classroom that I knew Nolen would like...computers, little clocks for learning to tell time, pretend money and books. I think he is going to have a good time there. The class is more open than his previous classrooms and his teacher seems really great! I can't wait to hear what he has to say when he comes home tomorrow afternoon!

After the open house we had dinner at the house we'll be buying! That was a lot of fun. They are a wonderful family and the house, while small, is very nice! I'm so excited to get moved in! I kept joking last night that their kids, 9 year old Donovan, and 6 year old Hannah can stay with us. They are such sweet kids! Today Hannah and Max walked to the bus stop holding hands!

I'll update more later! Hope everyone is doing well. We miss ya'll in Alabama!!!

The countdown is on! Well, it has been for awhile now but I'm finally posting about it. Here are some stats....

45 Cubic feet of toys packed (disgusting isn't it?)
4 Wardrobe boxes packed
41.5 Cubic feet of crafts packed (I miss them already and the boys beat me by one box!)
3 Trips to Goodwill (hopefully) today because I wussed out and didn't have a garage sale
1 Bathroom down, 1 bathroom to go...
2 Fish gone (I don't know where to exactly, but I told the boys that we gave them to Ellie)
1 Fish tank, empty (thanks Gail)
98 dollars counted by Coinstar from the boys piggy bank! I told them they could split the money - I honestly thought it would come out to $20, not $98!!!

And a hilarious (but I admit gross/weird) story about this...the boys' room is almost completely packed. I hadn't packed up their piggy bank, Tonka truck chair and a few toys that they have spread around the house. So, today they were playing with one of the few "toys" around...their piggy bank. I gave them each a bag and asked them to empty their bank told them we would take it to Coinstar later. They spent about an hour playing games with the money, counting some of it, etc. Then I heard a jingle-jingle-jingle, jumping and Nolen saying, "oh, mine fell out!" I was afraid of what I mind find. Any guesses here??? The boys were putting coins in their underpants and jumping around!!! I contained my laughter long enough to be horrified and told them that was not ok! That's one of those lines you never think you'll have to use, "It is not OK to put money in your underpants!"

Yeah, it would be pretty boring around here without those boys to entertain me! HA! Today I need to pack our suitcases for the trip, do up some laundry, empty and clean my bathroom...and mow the grass maybe? Tonight I'm going up to Montgomery to pick up Edward from the airport! Yay! I've really missed him! It will be so nice to have him back. I just wish we could have a day together relaxing as a family. Instead we'll be organizing the van and moving to the hotel tomorrow. The packers come Wednesday, they will load the truck on Thursday and we'll clean the house on Friday. On Saturday our renters are moving in, (Yay!) and we will roll out of Enterprise for good. I'll be sad to go. We've really made Enterprise our home this time. I'll miss the small town-ness and all of the wonderful friends we've made here. I'll miss the smell of roasting peanuts, the beautiful trees, the Boll Weevil (make fun of it if you want to, but I'm gonna miss it!), boiled p-nuts, our strawberry farm we like, Lake Tholocco, the pool, the big park, you know, all of our cool hangout spots!

But most of all, I will miss my Jazzer girls! Ya'll have been not only been great friends to me and to each other, but you really gave me a reason to get up and get going most mornings. Jazzercise with you guys gave me day structure and held me accountable. It kept me busy on days when I may have decided to stay on the couch being lazy. I have missed it so much these last few weeks. Sure, I was the instructor, but I don't workout by myself (as evidenced by the last month). You girls have been so faithful! We were a small but mighty group of Jazzers and I just want to say Thank You! It was wonderful to see you all each morning, catch up with you (my captive audience that had to listen to all my dumb stories and see every single thing I ever sewed!) I have joked that I will miss ya'll in MD when I can't remember the next move and Katie, and Kathy and Barbara and Kim aren't there to help me, but you guys know its more than that! Keep Jazzing girls!

Olympic Fever

Olympic Medal winners at NBC Olympics.com!

The Good News, The Bad News and The Bright Side...

So, what would you like to hear first? (It makes more sense if I start with the bad news, so here goes) We drove home from FL on Monday and got home around 7 o'clock. It was pretty warm in the house and at first, I thought the thermostat wasn't set right. I adjusted it, unpacked the car, vacuumed the family room, started some laundry and sweated! Wow, I didn't know I was working that hard! Well, I wasn't, the A/C was out. After some checking and consulting with my handyman (my Dad) it was decided that we needed to call the experts. Long story short, we had a very hot day of waiting on Tuesday and at 5 o'clock the experts determined we would need to replace the A/C.

Now for the good news...Edward has the best Aunt and Uncle in the world! I re-packed the car and we left here at 6 o'clock to stay at the lake house until the A/C was fixed. I honestly don't know how people lived here before A/C!!! It was miserable! We made it to the lake house at about 8:30 and the boys were already asleep so I carried them upstairs and relaxed in the A/C! We thoroughly enjoyed our 3 days at the lake! The boys are getting really good at swimming with their noodles. Yesterday I even convinced Nolen to let go of his noodle and count to five while he treaded water and he did it! Yay Nolen! Jasmine had a blast jumping in the lake to fetch sticks, and I was able to read another great book. Seriously, I don't think I would ever read if it weren't for the lake house. I read the book Mrs. Kimble in two days. I highly recommend it, I couldn't put it down! I love the lake house. We had a great time and thanks to Linda and Neil (again) for letting us stay there!

And now for the bright side. Thank goodness we hadn't rented our house already when the A/C went out. I think that would have been a mess! I even had the thought, while I was sweating on Tuesday, that if I was renting this house, I would be having a hissy fit to go this long without A/C. Funny, how its so different when you OWN the house...there is no one to blame, just zoloft to get you through it. ha!

So, now we're back home and getting back into a routine. Today will be super busy with chores and grocery shopping. Hopefully I can get some boxes and start packing on Monday. Oh! I almost forgot, that's the other news! We have a contract on a house in Leonardtown, Maryland! If everything goes as planned, we should be driving up there on August 16th and 17th so that Nolen can start school on August 20th at Leonardtown Elementary. We won't get to move into the house until the following week though.

And one last thing...Edward is sailing with some new friends in the Governor's Cup Race today! Its an overnight race from Annapolis to St. Mary's City. I hope he's having fun and maybe we'll get him to post something about it tomorrow!