The Most Wonderful Time!!

Christmas is MY FAVORITE!!!  Everything Christmas is just the best... Christmas carols, warm drinks, the smells of cinnamon, nutmeg and gingersnaps, shopping for gifts, decorating the tree, baking... lots of baking!
My parents were here over Thanksgiving and we went to a tree farm just outside of town and got our first real christmas tree as a married couple!!  (This is something I beg and plead with the husband about EVERY year and he always says when we get a house... well guess what sugar plum!  NO more excuses, we've got the house now we get the tree!!)  So you could say I'm a little fanatical about decorating the tree... I don't just wrap a string of lights around the tree and throw up some ornaments.  Every branch deserves it's own lights, so I wrap nearly every branch with lights until it is covered!  Our tree just shy of 7 ft which in my mind constitutes 1 strand of lights per every 2 feet = 3-4 strands right?  Well the husband took a little more convincing.  The first trip we bought 3 boxes which only got me a little over half way up the tree, so we went back and got one more box which technically was still not enough, but I got cut off, so I made it work (Next year we are SO getting another box!)  Nearly finished product (still needs some ornaments and ribbons!): 

These are a few of my favorite ornaments thus far:

Symbolic of our Hawaiian Christmas last year!

I LOVE to Bake!

The Husband's Favorite

My new favorite - "Our First Home"

We ended the weekend by putting up the front porch decorations:

The husband's contributions!

Finished!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

A few things I'm thankful for...

My Husband

Miss Bailey

My Family

Being done with Boards

(: Our NEW HOUSE :)

Our Life Group at Church

Friends

My Job

Our First Home-Cooked Meal at the New House

Holiday Baking

Christmas Shopping

Graduation in 2 weeks

What are you thankful for this holiday season...

Can we say BUSY!!

Wow have we been busy!  Today I'm going to back track just a bit!  In the last few weeks we have gotten A LOT accomplished on the house (ie - MOVE IN READY!!!!)  I've also taken  my last boards EVER(hopefully)!!!!! 

My parents were up 2 weeks ago to finally see the house!  I was so excited for them to come!  It was quite the whirlwind weekend, but we accomplished SO much.  They got here on Friday night around midnight because Jordan's football team won their championship game and were being recognized at half time of the HS Varsity game!  Go Jordan!!  We Dad and Nathan were up and at it by 6:00 am.  Nathan had already laid all of the backerboard so all that was left was the thin-set, tile and grout... quick and easy right?  NO!  We My dad, Nathan and my brother Jared worked on the tile ALL DAY/NIGHT... yes NIGHT!!  We were up until 4:00 in the morning on Saturday night!!  After about 4 hours of sleep Miss Bailey decided we'd had enough sleep and needed to get back to work.  So they were back at it by 8:00am.  Mom and I went and grabbed breakfast while they finished laying the last of the tile.  After breakfast dad started on the grout and Nathan began putting the toilets back on...  Oh yeah, did I mention that we didn't have toilets for ALL of Saturday and Saturday Night?!  Thankfully we have a toilet downstairs as well, the only thing is there isn't any sheet rock waist down...  Minor details, right?  Needless to say we heard a lot of  "I'M GOING TO THE BATHROOM EVERYONE!" throughout the day in hopes of not catching someone or getting caught yourself with your pants down!! :)  My mom and I ran errands for the guys and provided lunch/snacks/dinner!  Jordan was a big help too he helped the guys and watched Duke. 

{Oh yeah, Jared wanted to bring my parents dog Duke up...  Duke and Bailey - not the best of friends :(  {Bailey is still a little too rambunctious for the Duker!  So they had to be separated all weekend.}

Sorry Mom! :)

As you can see she was a 'BIG' help!

They also brought up our new appliances!  So once the tile was grouted and set, we moved the appliances all in later in the week.  In the end it was a GREAT weekend!  So much was accomplished and we now have a BEAUTIFUL kitchen!!  Thanks family!!

        

                            First Load of Laundry!!

The next weekend, I took my LAST BOARDS EVER (hopefully!!)  Now it is just a waiting game, scores come in Dec 27th, then I apply for State Liscence (another 3-4 weeks) then apply to insurance companies to be a participating provider (another few weeks), then I open my practice!!   So for now I'm taking it one step at a time, we moved in last weekend and I graduate in TWO weeks!  Then my blog can become A Guy, A Doctor and a Big Dog ;)  Hmmm... I like the sound of that!!

MOVING DAY!!

Sorry I've been gone for so long!  We've been super busy and now it is moving day!  

We've emptied the cupboards, packed our things and swept the floor, on to bigger and better things!!

Happy Hump Day!

Bailey and I are patiently anxiously awaiting the weekend!  Parents are coming and we are finishing the final project at the house - Tile and appliances!!  

Happy Hump Day to you!

PS - Nathan's Halloween story may have been a tiny bit more accurate... but it's just so exciting!

I love having our house!!

Happy Halloween...Part Duex

Hey ya'll (yes I said ya'll) Nate here. Not that I want to be the rephraser of stories but I would like to put my spin on things every now and then. First of all Abby can speak for herself when she says "My husband and I were so excited to get trick or treaters this year". I would say I was mildly ecstatic. Let me tell you how excited Abby gets for things like these! And speaking of always having the camera hand I really should have taken a picture of Abby on Halloween night. I don't think I have ever seen a 25 year old woman so jacked out of her mind for strange little boys and girls to come by parading in outfits late at night. Picture this......me.....cleaning wood trim with Old English caked on so thick on my hands it feels like I could wash my hands for 45 minutes and never get it off.....Abby sitting in front of the door.....not just sitting casually in a chair watching a television show while she pops popcorn in the background and the dog plays around on the floor.....we don't even have any furniture at the house! She was sitting Indian style on the floor 6 feet from the front door which every one could see in because it is an all glass door. Now also picture this..... little Halloween sounds are going off every 3 minutes because she found an app for her phone that every time you walk by the camera it sets off a new scary tone, all the while a loud "TRICK OR TREATERS ARE HERE NATHAN!!!!!!!" to which I politely said "Oh boy!" (this is wear I think the confusion of excitement came from). After every child, the little there were (pun intended) she would just run around the house saying "I love having trick or treaters! Needless to say it was pretty funny. I wish everyone could see the new level of excitement she has now that we have the house.

Speaking of house just to update everyone on the progress so far in the last 1.5 months we have

• installed a fence
• descaped the entire place (Linda descaped is a new word I made up for reverse landscaping which is when you tear out every living thing from your yard)
• prepped the floor for tile (backerboard)
• painted the entire house ceilings and walls
• new door handles
• new faucet
• new water heater
• and a bunch of little stuff that is not worth listing

Everything in the house is going just fine and we are excited to move in and start "real life" as we call it. We paid our first mortgage payment the other day and we just kinda looked at each other and said "wow.....here goes the next thirty years!"

Don't know who reads all of this but I won't be prying in too much on Abby's blog but every now and then I got to through something in like......maybe....a joke. Thats it rather than coming up with a sappy goodbye for now I will end with a joke. Here it goes:

Two olives are hanging out on top of a table discussing various things "how you do-en, how's ya mutha, etc..." one of the olives (god forbid) rolls over and falls off the table....... The other olive to his surprising dismay (because he is a talking olive) leans over the edge and says "hey......are you ok?" the other olive looks back at him and says "all-live"! 

Happy Halloween...

So this was supposed to be our first year to have actual Trick-Or-Treaters!!!  Everyone we talked to from the new neighborhood told us it was crazy busy and to expect hundreds of kids to be roaming the sidewalks in their cute little outfits!  So naturally the husband and I got pretty pumped up for the big night!  We even went to Costco and bought TWO of their HUGE bags of candy!

Well first off, on our entire street there were MAYBE 8 houses with their porch lights on... NOT A GOOD SIGN!!  To top it off it was a school night, as you all are aware...  Needless to say I think we had about 20 Trick-Or-Treaters come to our door... in other words, that candy I mentioned before - we still have over 3/4 left!

See looks the same as the previous picture!!

At 7:00, I knew it wasn't looking good, so I started letting the kids pick their own candy from the bag and they were very polite only taking one or two pieces each.  So then I was telling them to "Take a handful!"  one cute puppy looked at me with saucers for eyes and in the cutest little voice said, "HANDFULS?!?!"

Our friends Travis and Kelly brought their boys 'Mario and Luigi'  So cute!

So needless to say our first holiday in the new house was a bust, but their is always next year!!  On the flip side, Nathan's students have a LOT of motivation to get the answers right!

Mi Ranchito!

My Aunt Sara was in town this week for a work conference, so she was able to round up a few of us Eastern Kansas people for dinner!  Aunt Carol and her son Ryan were also able to join!  We went to Mi Ranchito (love the espinaca dip!)  Unfortunately I forgot to have our waiter take a picture :(  I at least took the camera with me... eventually I'll get better at taking pictures everywhere I go.  Oh well!

After dinner we went by Ryan's house as Sara and I hadn't ever seen it!  Very nice, LOVED the porch!  Then Sara and I decided to go back to her hotel for a drink and to catch up!  It was great seeing everyone, wish we all lived closer so we didn't have to 'catch up' all the time!

Paint, Paint and more paint!

This last week, Nathan and I have been working very hard to finish painting ceilings so Saturday we could have a painting party!  I finished the last ceiling on Friday night after board reviews (boo!)  Saturday morning I went back to board reviews :-( while Nathan, his parents and his sister and her boyfriend helped paint!  I got home around one with lunch and then we hit it hard again!  Thankfully, we managed to finish all the painting!  It is amazing what a few coats of paint can do to a house!  It really feels like a HOME now!

Randine, Trey and I painting one of the last rooms!!!

 Bill was by far the best trim painter of the group!

 Miss Bailey had to be included, but she was too curious about the paint to be running around!

 Our new 'Cricket' kitchen!

Thanks everyone for your hard work!!
Next project to tackle is tiling...

Progress...

So we've owned the house since Sept 14th, so I'm a little behind on the progress pictures!


Our first project was a fence for the mini-horse...  Easier said than done!  The husband and father-in-law worked so hard that first weekend!  Ends up the back corner of our lot is where basically every electrical wire, sewage pipe, telephone wire, etc converges for all the houses on our block.  This means fence post nightmare!!  They ended up having to hand dig about 5 holes in that one spot, and they made it without any hitches!  They rented a post-hole-digger for the rest of the yard and everything was going great until the 3rd to last hole...  we kinda forgot about the sprinkler system!  So $50 later, that was all patched up and we were moving on.

The next weekend my friend Sarah and her cousin so graciously volunteered to help me finish the fence while the Husband was at a conference!  We were able to finish the posts on one side of the fence before the rain started!  Then the Husband's friends came on Sunday to finish the other side of the fence...

Jordan and I hard at work!

Kyle & the Husband finishing the last section!

Troy resting after delivering the last 'Fat Stack' of pickets...

Never thought I would be calling a fence pretty!

The big 2-5

So my birthday was back in the beginning of August, but this year was the best ever!  We had been looking to buy a house for the last couple of months and then the week before my b-day the PERFECT house fell in our laps!!  So the day before the big 2-5 we put in an offer.  On the big day, we found out from our Realtor, Travis, that the bank had accepted!!  Best gift ever!!  Then the husband took me to the Melting Pot in KC, can we say AMAZING!!  We definitely rolled out of there!

Back to the house... it was a bank owned property, so we knew that it was going to be an as is sale.  We had the inspection on the house the next week and found out that the pipes were basically all burst... NOT good news!  So we messed with the budget and decided to go ahead we could handle it.  SURPRISE... the bank called Travis and told him they wanted to fix the pipes for us AND replace the sump pump in the basement!!  So now we can say best birthday MONTH ever!

Can you tell we are excited!?

That's all I've got for now, but believe me, there are many MANY more pictures to come!!

Scaredy Dog!

So I was cleaning today, the last thing I did was vacuum.  I was putting it away and realized I hadn't seen Bailey in a while.  {If you've been to our place, you know that is really hard to do... can we say TINY apartment!}  So I started calling her name and looking in all of our 2 rooms and still couldn't find her.  I was starting to get worried as our front door doesn't always latch and she could have gotten out!  Then I walk into the bathroom to find this...

Mind you she doesn't really like the bathroom, but she obviously likes it more than that scary vacuum!

She stayed in there for another 5 minutes or so every so often peeking around the corner to make sure I didn't have the vacuum again!

Mini Horse

So we've covered the Guy and the Girl - what about the Big Dog?  We've wanted a dog since the day we got married - however, we didn't want just any dog... we wanted a Mini Horse :)  Originally the plan was to wait until we were in a house and settled to get a dog, beings our place is TINY!!  Well, we started looking at houses this last spring, so I kinda jumped the gun and convinced the Husband to get one a little early!  We found Miss Bailey Rae from a Great Dane Breeder in Wichita, KS.  She is the SWEETEST dog ever and SO much fun to watch.  When we got her she was 9 weeks old and stood to just below my knee at 17lbs.

Just after we picked her up - I could actually hold her!

The car ride home from Wichita - it wore her out!

The bear she was smaller than... for a week - Also the only original toy she hasn't ripped apart!

Sleepy Time

She has the oddest sleeping positions!

Can I PLEASE have some?!  Pretty please with sugar on top??

Nap time with Mom

Pretty Girl

Now Miss Bailey is 7.5 months and she stands to my waist at 100lbs :)

Last month Miss Bailey was fixed and she was sent home with a collar... poor girl!  She HATED it!!  She sat her butt on the couch and didn't look at me or move for about 5 minutes. (And yes she is tall enough now to sit on the couch while her front feet support her!)

She finally moved around a bit but then sat and the collar started falling to the side so she started leaning and eventually she fell over, needless to say she was NOT happy with me!

 So if you can't tell by now, we kinda like our Miss Bailey!  She has definitely put a new spin on our lives that's for sure - but we wouldn't change a thing!