Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Hanging on

I’ve managed to write 5 blogs this year, this will be my 6th.  2014 has been so crazy, so it’s time for an update.

I have been SO busy with my new job and I love it.  I have helped a few people find rentals already and have built relationships with a few clients which has been fun.  It is a fun job and I do like it, I’m just having issues balancing my mom/wife duties and trying to keep up a house and also figure out this real estate thing.  I was a bit down right off the bat when I had close friends tell me they didn’t want to use me because they didn’t want to mix friendship and business and I was thinking if I can even get good friends to use me, then what’s the point?  If anything you would think you’d work even harder to make things happen for someone you know personally and are friends with, but obviously not everyone views it the same way I do.  I’ve spent hours showing people rental homes only to have them look at one other house with one other agent and then go with that house, and that was disappointing also.  But I’m getting on my feet now.  I’m taking classes.  I’m networking.  My friends here have been SO supportive and encouraging and it’s been fun.  I had a client stop by my house yesterday because she was out and about and wanted to look at a rental in my neighborhood and it was fun.  I was in a t-shirt and yoga pants when she called (from 5 mins away) so it was a bit of a scramble to look presentable and I was going to have to take my kiddos along because Mark wasn’t home from work.  Luckily he got home right after she got here and he wanted her 2 kids also while we walked the neighborhood to look at homes.  So I’m getting things figured out and I’m learning this business and I’m excited for what 2014 will bring for me on a professional level.

I haven’t even mentioned our poopy on here.  I call him the poopy, because just in the past few days his poop as FINALLY gotten somewhat solid.  (TMI, I know, but you try cleaning up runny dog poop for almost 2 months and keep your kids out of it in the meantime… NOT fun.)  Anyway, Sampson, or Sammer, as I call him, is now 15 weeks old and a huge moose of a dog.  He’s put more holes in Abbie’s clothes than I can count and he loves to take anything he can get ahold of out into the yard and chew on it.  He’s pretty much my 3rd child, but I’m so excited to have a big dog again.

 

The kiddos are doing great.  Abbie is at such a fun age.  She asks some of the craziest questions sometimes and it makes me wonder what’s going on in that little mind of hers.  Today at breakfast she asked why Mark and I share a drink when we’re out of the house but never at home.  I need to do another “Abbie-isms” post in the near future because I have a year and a half of those jotted down.

Benj is at my favorite age now (read as much sarcasm as possible into that statement as you can).  He screams for EVERYTHING.  A piece of food falls off his fork and he screams like someone just cut off his leg.  He doesn’t get his way – he screams.  You don’t let him take 5 mins to get into his car seat by himself – he screams.  He throws a toy in the car and decides he wants it after he throws it – he screams.  It drives me insane.  I do not handle the screaming very well and I hope to God this is a short lived stage.  And he’s a world class whiner too.  Usually when he’s not screaming he’s whining about something and I’m not sure which bothers me more.  But he still flashes grins frequently (in between screaming and whining) and he’s learning to talk quite well even though screaming and whining is always his first choice.  The joys of having young kids.  Despite them driving me nuts sometimes (most of the time), I wouldn’t trade them for the world and I’m so thankful they’re mine.  Some days I just have to remind myself of that more than others.

Mark is doing well too.  He’s busy with his job, but I am reminded on a daily basis of why I love that man so much.  I truly couldn’t ask for a better partner in life.  He’s really been helping me a ton and picking up my slack around the house and with the kids without ever saying a word about it.  I had crud practice 2-4 times a week all of January, plus squadron coffees and bunco and now I’m part of a bible study and that means I’m gone sometimes as much as 4 times during the week nights and he feeds the kids and puts them to bed and picks up the house and never says anything about being tired of it or not wanting to do it.  I can’t even express how much I love him and how glad I am that he’s mine.

I’ve had a few people ask about Emily, the exchange student we had.  Things just didn’t work out for us so she went to live with a couple that doesn’t have kids at home.  She is getting a lot more attention than she did here and they can focus on her 100% so she seems to be much happier with them.  And I think I am happier too that I don’t have the pressure of trying to make sure she’s happy also, especially with how busy we are right now.  I think she’d be miserable here right now and that would have made me more stressed also.  So she’s still in the area, but we don’t really ever see her, but I think she’s doing well and is happier with her new family.

 

In a nutshell, that’s what’s been going on.  One of these days I’ll actually get the photos from December and January edited and on the blog.  I just don’t have a lot of free time these days, which is okay.  We are doing well and enjoying this 75 degree weather Phoenix is giving us right now!

Monday, February 3, 2014

Thanksgiving 2013

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For Thanksgiving we had a couple of our friends from here over for dinner.  Jessica and I prepared all of the food, except for the turkey, and Chris and Mark took care of that.  It was fun to spend time with some friends and have them over to our house, and actually have enough space to have people over to our house!

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It was nice to finally be back in the States to celebrate Thanksgiving and it was fun to spend it with some good friends.

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The day after Thanksgiving we went to get our Christmas tree.  We chose to get a real one (our first real one in a long time!!).  Back in IL we would go to the Christmas tree farms and cut our tree down ourselves, but they don’t have any of those around here because apparently Christmas trees don’t grow well in the desert…  So they ship them in from the NW and you go pick them out.  Not many people were at the Christmas tree lot when we were there, so we had a pretty good

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We had an Elf on the Shelf this year that the kids (Abbie) named Jingle.  Both of the kids LOVED coming downstairs and looking for Jingle every morning.  And Mark had fun finding places to put him every night.  Ben would come downstairs and say “OHHHH!!!!  Dere’s Jingle!!!  Daddy MEER!!  See Jingle!”  Definitely glad we got him.  Now if I can just remember where we hid him when he flew away to be with Santa for the rest of the year next year….  That’s the problem with hiding things from kids is that I usually end up hiding them from myself also…

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