It's my blog...

And I'll whine if I want to. You've been warned... I just need to get this out.


I went and looked at a few rentals this morning. What I really wanted was something with w/d hookups and a yard the kids could play in. Oh, and to be in a place that I felt safe enough to be there alone with the kids at night.

I looked at two this morning and they were both aweful! So I took the keys back to the rental place and asked if I could see the more expencive house on the list. It still has someone in it, so I couldn't see it, but the lady told me to drive by and if I wanted she would let us have it without showing anyone else. Yeah... drove by it and thought "no way do I want to pay that much for that place!" It was in a not great area, and just looked icky!!

So, I don't know what we're going to do. I'm really trying to stay positive, but it's getting HARD! I'm so sick of moving! I'm so tired of being in a place that we know we're not going to stay in for very long. I'm so sick of fixer uppers, I don't want to buy a dump that we will have to fix, but I know that's what will most likely happen.

It just feels like we're so much further behind than we were. We're loosing a ton of money on this house, and there are 3 houses in our price range here to pick from (all BIG TIME fixers).

So, here's what I want: A nice house, not huge and fancy, but nice. Someplace that we can be for a long time. A nice, family friendly neighborhood where I feel safe... And with a yard that the kids can play in. Is that too much to ask for?

2 Posts In 1 Day!

Just because I have pictures. :)

First off... I took this one this afternoon from my back patio. This is what our whole sky looks like. You can't see any blue sky at all no matter what direction you look. It's insane how smoky it is here! The lightning from the other day lit over 130 fires in our county and the one to the west of us. There are over 400 fires burning from Sacramento north to the border. It's just nasty out. They're saying not to go out unless you have to.

These were taken before the lightning and fire last week... I love the action!


And here's M swimming on her last day of lessons, she's starting to get the hang of it!

And because my post would not be complete without the latest LO, here ya go. The very last page in my Disney book... (no, I'm not done with it, I'm just going out of order).

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2 Speed Scraps This Week!

Andrea of Andilynne Designs (who I CT for) is hoasting two speed scraps this week at ScrapMatters!

For those of you who don’t know what a speed scrap is–everyone meets at the ScrapMatters forum thread at the designated time. They will receive an instruction at the start time and then a new instruction every ten minutes for a total of seven instructions/prompts. After the last prompt is given you have one hour to complete your LO and get it uploaded to the ScrapMatters gallery and posted to the thread.

Why would people be crazy enough to scrap under pressure like this? Because it’s so much fun!!! And there are prizes, great prizes just for participating. And a prize for the winner–this week there will be a $5 gift code to the shop for one lucky random participant at each speed scrap.

The times of the scraps will be Tuesday 7pm (Pacific time) and Thursday at 10 am (Pacific time).

These will be two totally different speed scraps with two totally different sets of rules.

Click the link above to see the fun prizes!

I'm going to try to make the Tuesday one. We'll be over on the coast Wednesday through Sunday, so I wont' make the Thursday morning scrap. These are SO much fun!!

And another LO... I do still take pictures, I think I have a few from the last day of swim lessons that I need to pull off the camera. lol

This one took me forever to do. I first tried to do a 2 page LO with the other pictures from his birthday that were taken when we went out to lunch, and it just kept getting too busy! I still need to scrap the other half, but I'm not sure I will give it a pirate theme. Anyway, I'm happy with the way this came out after redoing it 3 times. lol

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Welcome Summer (with a bang!)

We had a HUGE lightning and thunder storm today. I could hear thunder at 7 when Matthew got up with the kids and it didn't stop until after 2pm. It was almost non-stop that whole time too. Very crazy!!

I just bought 20 Giants tickets today... we're going with a bunch of Matthew's family in a couple weeks. I cannot wait!! Crossing my fingers that ANYONE other than Zito is pitching! lol I'll be watching the site for probable pitchers very closely!! They're playing the Dodgers, so it should be a fun game to go to, those games always have so much energy!


Here are a few LOs from the last few days. I've been scrapping totally out of order and just doing what I want. Now that I'm dating all my pages I'm not so worried about going in order.

I reached way back into my 2006 photos for this LO, done with Andilynn Designs new kit Little Lovebirds. Look how little my baby girl was!! She wasn't even 3 yet!


And here's a two pager I did with Britt-ish Designs new 2 pager templates (and a bunch of her princess products... full credits here and here)

That's about it for today... we did a little packing, not as much as we should have done, but we got the bookshelf and most of the walls cleared off, so it's a start. We'll be on the coast later next week/weekend, and I have a few rentals I want to look at, hopefully one of them will work for us! I can't believe how soon we're going to be moving!

Better Star Packing!

I haven't found a place for us to live yet (if anyone sees a good rental over there please let me know!), but I realized today that with two out of town weddings and needing to spend some extra time on the coast to find said place to live we're only going to be here 9 or 10 more days before we move!! Matthew keeps saying that "we" can get this place packed up in a day, but I don't think "we" want to do that.
I pulled out three boxes the other day (SO glad we held onto that moving kit we bought from Costco last time!!) and finally got around to putting them together today. I was planning on packing up the big bookshelf (and then leaving the boxes in the middle of the floor for Matthew to move later lol), but one of the boxes was already labeled "kids books" so I let the kids fill that one with their books. Yeah... my living room is COVERED in books now. Those kids have a ton of books! ...and I'm about to buy more... (I want to start reading the Ramona books to M pretty soon). So, I got a little over half of the books packed up maybe. I need to go through their box, but M somehow (??) managed to push that box into a corner and I can't move it back out, so I need to have Matthew move it for me first.

Tomorrow is the last day of swim lessons. It seems things have switched from last year. M is loving it and doing really well, but R hates it now. :( I really think he doesn't like his teacher, because he has no problem playing in the water, he just cries if I make him stay in his class. Truthfully, I don't blame him, I don't like his teacher much either. She just doesn't look like she's having fun, and I've never heard her say anything like "good job" when the kids do something that should get a comment like that.
I ended up canceling the bubbles of fun camp that they were going to go to next week. It was just too much, and I realized that we needed to be gone part of the week, so they'd be missing half of it anyway. I'm bummed that I won't get my kid free time, but they'll both be going to school in August, so I won't have to wait too much longer.

Once again, I'll leave you with a few recently scrapped pages. :)

This one was done for the Tuesday Template Challenge over at ScrapMatters

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And I just did this one tonight for the speed scrap. Those are SO much fun!!

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Happy Father's Day!

I hope all the Daddies out there had a great day yesterday!

Matthew really didn't have anything he wanted, so we did a big red bag of red stuff (his FAVORITE color is red). He got a big thing of his favorite candy, RED vines, and some other random red things. The kids had fun picking out different things. We went into Target to look and M asked where the red section was. lol

We went out to the lake on actual Father's Day. It's pretty sad, all the lakes around here are already lower than they get at the end of the season some years. We drove way out to get to the water, and we were actually driving on what is normally the bottom of the lake. Pretty crazy.
We were out there for our niece's 16th birthday party, and they rented a Wave Runner for the day. We took the kids out on it and they loved it while we were in the no wake zone, but they didn't like going fast. Here's a picture of us on it...

Here's a cute one of R too. I was hoping he might nod off if he had his bobi (yeah, right!), then he grabbed daddy's sun glasses and I thought he looked so cute!

Funny story... R is potty trained now, so all day long I was telling him how if he needed to go pee he could just go when he was in the water. We talked about how a lake is different than a swimming pool, how he can't pee in the pool, but it's okay in the lake. Well, later in the day he decided he needed to go, so my BIL went out with him, and we turn around to see half of R's butt sticking up out of the water. He had pulled his shorts down to pee. It was pretty funny! I was quick enough to snap a picture of it, and will file it away for his wife to see someday.

It was a fun day at the lake, and quite nice that we had less than a 30 minute drive to get home last night!


I'm still addicted to those hanging picture LOs... here's two more that I did (at least I'm not scrapping in order, so they'll be scattered all over the book anyway)

I just HAD to do a hanging page for these pics!!

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I just did this one today. It's not really hanging, but kind of the same idea...

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It's Official!

Look at that nice little sign up there! I was so excited to see that we got one of those. This is the 3rd house we've sold, and we've never even gotten a sold sign before. After almost 3 months of having this house on the market it sure it nice to see that!!

It's pretty warm out today. I think after nap time I'm going to set the pool up for the kids, they better enjoy it all the can now, because they hate being cold in the water and I'm sure they're not going to want to swim once we move!

I brought some boxes in this morning so I could start packing up the bookshelf and other things we don't use very often and R started asking me a bunch of questions... "where are we going?" "why are you packing up all our stuff"... I haven't even put anything in the boxes yet. Poor guy. He's just not quite old enough to really get it. Last time we moved was so hard on both of them, this time at least M is able to understand a lot better, and she knows we're going back to what we had before we moved here. R was too little to remember much about how things were before we moved, so it's harder to explain it to him. At least we shouldn't end up in limbo like the last time, so hopefully that will make it easier on all of us!

My first CT LO

I finally had the time to look through all the fabulous stuff by Andilynn Designs and start scrapping. Here's my first LO as a member of her CT. :) I'm really having fun playing with all of her stuff!

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We Have 30 Days

To get out of our house!
Escrow opened today, so as long as things go smoothly with it we'll be done with this house by mid July.
I'm glad we're in escrow, but it's just such a bummer that we are loosing so much money on it. The worst part is that the market is not down on the coast like it is here. Last week at Church the pastor spoke on God moving mountains, and I have to say that us getting a house that's livable is definitely a HUGE mountain right now. I have faith that God will provide for us, but when I start to think about it too much I start freaking out. I don't think there's anything over there (livable or not) that we can afford... *sigh*
Anyway... We're done with this house, we going to rent over there while we look, so I'm not going to think about that right now. Time to start packing...


Here's a fun LO I did last night for the speed crop at SM

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And here's the second page to "Picture Perfect"

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Thanks to Britt's Hang 'em High templates and fun hanging clips in her new kits I'm now slightly obsessed with hanging my pictures. The last 4 LOs I've done all have hanging pictures. I think I need to try something else next time. lol

And another update...

So, here's where we stand. It sounds like they're probably going to take our counter IF we give them our fridge, washer, and dryer. Matthew said we would without asking me. I guess that's okay, we'll get new stuff, but we might as well just meet them in the middle if we're going to do that, that's money we'll be out either way. We're going to write the counter offer up tonight, and it sounds like they'll be signing it tomorrow and then we'll open escrow. Now we just need to pray that we can make it through that without any problems!!

Never Mind

I told you before, every time I think I know something it changes by the time I tell anyone. lol

Matthew talked to the relater this morning and decided to just go ahead and write up another counter offer for 2k less than our last one. Really, what's 2k? It's just a big dumb game that we're playing at this point. I really hope they just take it and we can get on with it already!


While I'm posting, here's a few pages I scrapped yesterday. I still have some of '07 that I want to redo, and a handfull of Disney pages left to do, but I went ahead and started doing '08 anyway. lol

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Small Update

We got the counter offer to our counter offer (no, they didn't except it), and it was 10k less than our counter (that's 19k less than asking price, and 29k less than original asking price). We talked about it and decided to just tell them our last offer was as low as we are willing to go. If we're going to sell it we need to come away with enough to buy SOMETHING on the coast, and if we go any lower that will not happen. We completely understand that they may very well say no and walk away, but I think we're at the point where we're okay with that. If that happens we will just take it off the market and look into renting it instead of waiting until July. Either way, it will all be over soon and a decision will be made. I'm excited about that! lol

I've been tagged

My friend Christie tagged me.


So... let's see...

1. I will have been married for 8 years in August and after this next move we will have lived 9 places.

2. I first kissed Matthew almost a year before we started dating.

3. I like some nuts, but only on their own, I hate it when they're in cookies, chocolate, or anything like that.

4. I went to France and Italy when I was 14. I didn't like any of the food (except the bread) in France, but couldn't stop eating everything in Italy.

5. I had purple carpet put in our first house (it really wasn't as bad as it sounds).

6. Matthew and I were at the Giants game that Barry Bonds hit #600 in (and I was 9 weeks pregnant with M at the time).

7. I love Disney more as an adult than I did as a kid.


Yeah... I might want to tag some people, hu? lol

1. Darby
2. Rachael
3. Amanda
4. A
5. Anna

Christie already tagged the other blog people I know. lol

We got an offer

Yesterday we had a second showing and were told that they were looking at our house and one other one and then they were going to make an offer that day. It was at 9am, and we didn't hear anything all day, so we figured they made an offer on the other house. This afternoon we finally heard from our relater, and they had made an offer on our house.
It was REALLY low though. Over 30k less than our (already dropped) asking price. We countered back with something much closer to our asking price, and hopefully they'll either take that or counter with something a bit more in the ballpark.
I was shocked at how low it was, but at least they're interested and hopefully we can agree on something that will work for everyone.
I'll post an update when I have one.

WooHoo!!

LOOK at what I got of M today!! I'm so excited! She hardly ever looks at the camera, keeps her eyes open, and gives me a real smile anymore, and I can never get her eyes in focus and with catchlights in them only (and not all over her glasses) when she has her glasses on. I cannot wait to get this one printed HUGE!

Here's a few more from our mini shoot this morning. M doing her "Hannah Montana" pose, and R being a total goof (this is so them!)
...ick, this is looking a little cool on here, I'll have to fix the color before I print!

This pose was their idea. lol

I just signed them up for a bunch of fun stuff this summer too. They're going to do two weeks of afternoon swim lessons starting next week, and then the week after that they're both going to a Bubbles of Fun camp for preschoolers. I'm so excited, I will have 2 hours a morning, 4 days in a row to MYSELF!! I don't know what I'm going to do with myself! (anyone want a photo shoot?)
It was a little pricey to sign them up for all of that, but it was still less than what we were paying every month for M's preschool, so I don't feel so bad about it.

Exciting (scrapbooking) news!

I just found out I won another challenge over at ScrapMatters. It was for my Pluto LO which can be seen a few posts down.

Also, I was asked to CT for Andilynne Designs!! She has some really cute stuff that can be seen here. I'm very excited to be part of her team!

I ended up scrapping another page last night... Well, not really a page, just a little title to go in the window on the front of my Disney album. It's just a 4x4 size. I think it turned out cute though...

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(I just have to say that I'm LOVING those tabby dates by Britt-ish Designs, they are so versatile!!!)