adventures of a new home

The thing about a new home is that it also means packing and moving.  Again.  We've done this 6 times in under 4 years, so you'd think we'd have it down to a science.  Well, we do have it down to a science, but I've never moved with 2 MOBILE children that can throw things out of boxes, move piles, rub dirty hands on newly cleaned walls and on and on faster than I can keep up with.  Luckily, they are pretty cute, so we made it through.

Blurry Brigs, but full of joy.  Nothing better to 2 babies than a big box.

Did I mention that they made messes faster than I can clean up?  Luckily I had packed the rest of the pans already.

Packing and cleaning non-stop makes for falling asleep while watching a show with the kiddos.  Please take note of Eden's band-aid.  She was in a SERIOUS phase.

I didn't get any pictures of the actual move.  What?!  How does that happen?  Regardless, I needed to remember some of our first memories here in our beautiful home.

Our first breakfast in our home.  Briggs is showing the sub floor well.

The kitchen when we moved in, with the yellow wall.

Painting of the wall.  Nate takes these things very seriously.

We painted the 2 days after moving in, but we figured it would be easier to get it done before we had our floor in.  We LOVE how it looks now.

Having a lawn means buying a lawn mower.  Nate was in his element.  Please note our neighbor's cotton tree and the lovely gifts bestowed on our yard.  He has since cut down said tree.  We are very grateful:)

The first fort in our new house.  The kids love having all the space to run around in.  (We're still waiting on the stair nose piece of flooring for our stairs so we don't have the baseboards up yet.) 

Eden made dinner all by herself for the first time.  She made us hot dogs (all her idea, I put them on the stove, but she did everything else.)  She cut the watermelon (with a butter knife after I cut off the rind), set the table all by herself, and got everything out of the fridge.  She was so proud of herself and I loved the help and positive attitude during dinner time. I could get used to this! 

Life is really rough when mom is getting Brigham out of his high chair and you climb on the table holding your full cup of milk and then fall off right onto the floor pouring the entire cup of milk on your head in the process.

So sorry for the dump truck of pictures.  My original plan of doing lots of posts to really document each thing wasn't happening, and I was falling further and further behind.  It's better to have a sentence to remember things by than nothing at all. 

Mother of 10

No, not me.  But it is someone that both my sister-in-laws know.  This woman has 10 kids and gets them all up at 6am to run with her. 

I've been really struggling finding a good time to exercise. Now that we've moved, my gym membership doesn't help and I have a goal to really work on my running, but Nate leaves at 5:45am each morning and Eden sleeps until 9am. By the time she's up, Brigs goes down for his first nap.  I would try to go at night, but something always came up so I wasn't very consistent. Mostly all of that was just excuses.  The second I heard about this exercise-is-my-priority mom I knew that I had no excuse.

I now wake the kids up at 7:45, give them each a piece of bread to eat in the stroller and head out the door.  It's been so good in many, many ways.  We take a different path each day and just explore our new neighborhood.  We've already found 2 jogging trails that I didn't know about, a shortcut to the elementary school (that only requires the kids to cross 1 road which happens to be the road our house is on and has next-to-no traffic) a duck pond about 1/2 mile away in the middle of a neighborhood (what the awesome!?) and a new park.  We've found some gems and it's only been 3 days since we began.

Eden also yells "faster Mom!" when I start slowing down from getting tired.  Sometimes that kicks me into gear and sometimes it doesn't, but it's appreciated all the same. I love that my kids are seeing me exercise.  I thank them each time for helping me exercise and I talk to Eden about how my goal is to be a fast runner. It's opened up the conversation about having to work really hard at something if you want it.  She encourages me and tells me I can do it.  I also think that there is probably no better way to train than to push about 65 pounds in front of you.  I went running by myself the other night and was amazed at how far I could run when I wasn't pushing anything.

So thank you; thank you Mother of 10.  Some would call you super woman-but I've been a mom long enough to realize that you have your struggles too.  Regardless, one of your strengths has helped push me to stop making excuses and get to work on something that really makes me happy.