Loving it

Abbie helping in her Easter dress

I've had quite a few people ask me if we're liking Arizona.  The short answer is: yes!

The long answer is:  Are you kidding me??  We freaking LOVE it!  So far, we love EVERYTHING about it!  Granted it's not 120 degrees yet - our feelings might change a little bit mid-July, but then again, maybe not!

Living here is amazing!  Everything just seems easier here.  We know where everything is, and if we don't, we can easily look it up online.  And everything is SO CLOSE!  We've never lived this close to all this shopping and it is so convenient.  Within a 5 mile radius is Kohl's, Joann's, Tuesday Morning, Wal-Mart, Lowe's, JC Penneys, Target, Michaels, Best Buy, Pier 1, Ross, Barnes and Noble, Old Navy, Babies R Us, Marshalls, TX Maxx. Homegoods, etc, and that's forgetting a few and not including any of the smaller stores.  I could WALK to Target in about 10 mins.  There are about 40  - 50 restaurants within 10 mins (and they're not all Italian!!!!!) and gas stations, grocery stores, banks, churches and Abbie's preschool (plus the other one we want to send her to).  There are nice parks, SIDEWALKS (didn't have those in Italy near us) and even bike lanes throughout our neighborhood.  We have a great yard for the kids to play in and we can just turn them out there and let them go and they have a great time.

I think the main reason we are loving AZ so much, and the reason we disliked Italy so much, was because of our houses.  We hated our house in Italy.  It was too small for the 4 of us and 2 dogs, to start with.  It was always cluttered because there was no storage.  It wasn't big enough to get away from the kids ever and with Abbie not being the best sleeper in the world, it made it difficult.  This house in AZ is obviously a lot better.  It's over twice as big, so we're not on top of each other.  We can put the kids to bed upstairs and enjoy our "free time" downstairs, watching TV or studying or whatever.  We can make popcorn after Abbie goes to bed without her being able to immediately smell it and start yelling, "Are you making some pa-corn??",  "Will you save some for me?", etc.  The kitchen is ginormous compared to the one we had in Italy and I don't have to keep my pots and pans on the stove because they don't fit in the cabinets.  Our master closet is 2-3x bigger than our master bath in Italy and our master bath here is bigger than our bedroom was in Italy.  We are a bit spoiled here with all this space, but it's another reason we are loving it.

The dogs don't drag as much stuff in because it's dry here, not wet 70% of the time.  The dogs drug SO much stuff into the house in Italy.  Dachshunds don't have much clearance, so they drag tons of stuff in on their bellies and paws.  I had to sweep the floor every single time they came in in Italy since they brought half the yard in with them.  And since it was muddy, they left paw prints everywhere also.  Have you ever tried to clean up wet dog poop?  Even cleaning up dog poop is about 300 times easier in AZ.

I miss my friends in Italy, and I miss living by the mountains and the travel opportunities we had there.  But we are surrounded by pretty decent hills/ mountains here and we're excited to do some hiking around them.  And we have some great travel opportunities here also that we're excited about.  Not traveling around Europe exciting, but exciting none-the-less - and cheaper!

I loved having the experience of living overseas, and someday, I wouldn't mind living overseas again - when the kids are older and more independent.  But for now, at this point in our lives, we are SO happy to be back in the States.  Now if we could just get the house done so we're not in the constant state of renovations....

I am so sick of painting!!!  Three more bedrooms and a hallway to go!

Mark installing our new backsplash!  We love the way it turned out!

The impossible task, made even more impossible.

Our main shipment that came from Italy

Anyone who has moved knows that it's not exactly easy.  I love moving, especially since the military does a good portion of the work with packing and loading, but the unpacking and organizing part gets a little (or a lot) tedious at times.  We are allowed 14500lbs for our move, between the 3 shipments, and we were RIGHT at that when they took off 10% for all the packing materials.  Good thing they took 10% off for packing materials or we would have been over our limit.

Me trying to check off all the boxes, which are all numbered, to see if we had everything.

The Italian's way of numbering the boxes and organizing everything was a complete joke, not surprisingly.  They took EVERYTHING apart.  If they could take it apart, they did.  So all of our patio furniture, office chairs, beds, tables, etc - everything was taken apart.  And instead of keeping the hardware with all of the furniture that it belonged to, they decided to wrap it all up and put it all together in one box.  Great fun...  We still don't have all of our furniture back together, and one of the feet for our couch seems to have run off.  I noticed it was missing in Italy when they took them off, I asked them where the 4th one was and they didn't know what they did with it.  We still haven't found it.

My kitchen has looked like this since we moved in and it stresses me out.  I'm still trying to find places for everything and the kitchen counter always seems to be the catch-all for everything you don't know what to do with anyway.  I need to find a more hidden place to put things.

Abbie's room - it is more put together now

Living out of suitcases for a month isn't fun, but we have dressers now!

The formal living room/dining room looks much better now, but it was like this for a good 2 weeks.

Our 2nd shipment came from my parents house.  We shipped stuff to them when we moved to Italy for them to store for us.  I left a plastic container of clothes with them that Abbie outgrew while we lived with them during the summer of 2011, and they sold the washer and dryer that they were storing for us since this house came with a washer and dryer.  So we should have shipped less weight back than we originally shipped to them, right?  Wrong.  They sent a good 500-600lbs more back to us than we shipped to them, and that's without the washer and dryer.  My parents have had my baby grand piano that they bought for me when I was 16.  They have always said it's mine (and still do) and that when I got space for it, I could have it.  So I have been asking them for it back now that I have room for it and I would like Abbie to start piano lessons soon, but they won't give it to me.  They live in an almost 6000 sq ft house and they have a "piano room" and want to have the piano for their decoration basically.  Neither of them play it, ever, but they want it for that room.  My mom actually told me she wants it because they might have a dinner party and they want to have "sing-alongs by the piano".    So basically I'm not ever getting my piano back until I inherit it.  I'm not happy.

So what was all that extra weight shipped from my parents house?  It was JUNK!  I absolutely cannot believe the stuff they shipped to me, and to say I'm quite pissed about it is a vast understatement.  My mom has had these horrible ugly towels since the 70's and I've been telling her for YEARS to get rid of them.  Guess where they are now?  In my garage.  She shipped me an entire BOX of disposable dinnerware.  A whole box that she's been saving for years.  Now in my garage.  They shipped me all of the artwork of mine that they'd been keeping since I was little, because, you know, I want it all....  They shipped me my baby book AND my sisters.  They shipped me cleaning supplies that they had from our house in E. Dubuque that we moved out of in 1996....  They shipped me a tricycle that Abbie and my sisters kids used at their house - that I didn't ask for since we already have one.  They shipped me gifts that I'd given them that they apparently don't want anymore...  Tacky?!  They shipped me old family photos of my cousins and sister.  They shipped me boxes of stuff that they don't even know what is, and neither do I!  I am SO annoyed by it all.  I've called them ranting way more than once and they tell me they want me to figure out what to do with it.  Their house is almost TWICE as big as ours is for TWO of them.  They have a full basement and 3 rooms that are guest rooms, all with large walk-in closets.  THEY DON'T MOVE EVERY 3 YEARS!!!!  So now I have all of this junk from them that I have to figure out what to do with, or I have to throw it all out.  As if I don't have enough to do with caring for 2 little kids, trying to paint this entire house and put away all of our stuff that was shipped to us and we still have one more shipment to receive. We are not happy about this stuff at all, and I honestly have no clue what to do with it all.  I feel like they basically shipped me everything that they didn't want in their basement so I got all this junk that I don't know what to do with.  My grandpa made me a pretty good sized doll house when I was Abbie's age, along with all of the furniture to go with it.  I remember playing with it for hours at their house, but we just don't have room for it now and I don't think Abbie will play with it much.  The furniture is all pretty fragile so I wouldn't really want her to play with that anyway, since she'd break it, but I have no clue what to do with it.  I don't really have any place to store it.

So we have been in this house for almost 3 weeks.  We still can't even fit one of our cars in our 3 car garage because of the amount of stuff in it.  At the rate we're going, we'll have everything in it's place right about the time we're supposed to PCS again.  Standard.

We own a house!

 We got in to Phoenix on Friday, March 8th.  Stayed in a hotel Friday night, moved to base TLF's on Saturday and stayed there Saturday - Wednesday.  My parents got to Phoenix on Sunday evening, and we closed on our first house on Monday!  Here's the grand - pre-renovations - tour.  It already looks a lot different, but here's what we bought.

The entry way, formal living room and formal dining room

The kitchen with eat-in area behind the island

Staircase to the upstairs

Downstairs guest bedroom

Downstairs/guest bathroom

Family room

Master bedroom

Part of master bathroom (door on the right is the toilet room)

Other part of the master bathroom  (2nd vanity not pictured)

Half of the master closet
(This closet is about 4 times bigger than our bathroom was in Italy)

Upstairs hallway
Master bedroom is right to the right (not seen), hall closet, Ben's room is next to the closet, Abbie's room is straight back, the play room is right next to Abbie's room and the upstairs bathroom is next to the playroom/across from the closet

The playroom

Upstairs bathroom

Ben's room and walk in closet

Abbie's room and walk in closet

Part of the back yard

Our pool!!!  Who's coming to visit?!

Built-in grill that's hooked up to the house gas.  (My stove is also gas.)

Not pictured is the 3 car garage with a whole bunch of built-in cabinets and shelving, under stairs closet with lots of shelving, side yard with more trees and my raised garden with sprinkler system already installed, and the rest of the porch that has ceiling fans and shades that roll up and down.  The previous owner also gave us a less than year old lawn mower.  The house included all the kitchen appliances and also fairly new washer and dryer set.  This house has a lot of great features, one of which is a built-in sound system in the living room and master bedroom.  We are really happy with it.

That being said, it also needs a LOT of work to get it updated.  We put carpet in all of the upstairs bedrooms and hallway (which were originally tiled - pics on what it looks like now coming later) and replaced the carpet in the family room and living/dining room and stairs so they all matched.  We've repainted most of the first floor and we will eventually repaint most of the second floor also.  In our repainting, we discovered that the original wall color was this horrid PINK color.  Gross.  All of the door handles, bathroom faucets and light fixtures and drawer/cabinet pulls are gold and silver, so we plan on eventually replacing all of that as we get the money for it.  We discovered on one of our 28 trips to Lowe's in the past week that interior door handles are $20-40 EACH and we have about 15 of them to replace.  Yay.  We're going to replace the ceiling fans on the 2nd floor also since they are pretty dated.  We're putting a back splash up in the kitchen and I've already ripped down the vertical blinds and have plans to put sheer curtains up in their place - once I get my sewing machine, that is.  We're still debating painting the kitchen cabinets white, but right now we're all painted out and we still have the entire stairwell and upstairs to paint so if we do redo the cabinets, it won't be any time soon.

We're loving being able to call this place our own, although we've spent a scary amount of money at Lowe's already and we haven't even owned the house for 2 weeks!

I'll get more pictures up of the renovations as soon as possible.  Please come visit us!!!  We'd love to have guests!

Back in the US of A!

Our trip back to the States was pretty darn good, all things considered.  Ben did REALLY well the whole trip and only had a minor meltdown on our very last flight in to Phoenix.  I think he was entitled to that one though, and he only fussed for a little while and then fell asleep.

On Thursday, we flew from Aviano to Ramstein, and had a couple hour layover there.  During that layover, our friend, Brenda and her kids met us for a few minutes.  I wish we had had more time to sit and chat with them, but they only gave us an hour before we had to be back through security, which was dumb since then we sat back there for another hour.  Then we had an 8 hour flight from Ramstein to Baltimore.  Abbie had a meltdown or 2 on that flight, but other than that it went pretty well.

We were pretty nervous about how we were going to get the 4 of us, 2 dogs in their crates, 2 carseats, the double stroller and 14 pieces of luggage to the hotel with just the 2 of us, but we managed to get it done.  We put the kids in the stroller and each wore on of the huge car seats on our backs and then managed to stack all the other suitcases on 2 luggage carts and the dogs on a 3rd cart.  People were more than willing to help us with everything, even though Mark and I could have managed to drag everything to the shuttles if we'd needed to.

 On Friday we flew from BWI to ATL to Phoenix.  We were all up early anyway thanks to jet lag, so we left the hotel by 7am and got the dogs and all our stuff checked in with two hours to spare before our flight took off.  We got a little over zealous in our packing though since we decided we didn't want to drag a bunch of stuff through the airports with us so we condensed all our carry-ons to one carry on sized suitcase and our 2 back packs.  When we checked in all our suitcases, we accidentally checked the carry-on suitcase we wanted to keep with us (that had all the kids snacks and diapers in it).  Oops.  Luckily I had put 3-4 of Ben's diapers and a few wipes in my back pack so that got us through the day of traveling.

If you want to get people's attention while walking through an airport, try pushing a giant double stroller.  We had the double BOB with us and I don't know how many people commented on it, or asked us about it, and plenty more just stared as we went by.  People were very interested as to why we were traveling with it and where we were going.  It was fun hearing their stories about traveling with young kids also.  The double BOB is nice, in ways, to travel with since the kids both fit in it, it's SUPER easy to push and we can put other stuff on it, but the thing really is huge, and the case we have for it is even bigger.  People were calling it the "Cadillac of strollers" and it really is.  Next time I'll bring our single BOB though.

Our final challenge was getting all of the our stuff to fit into our rental SUV.  Considering it took us a station wagon and an SUV to get our stuff to the terminal in Aviano, we were fully prepared to have to rent another car for a few hours to get our stuff to our hotel.  However, Mark and I managed to put our expert packing skills to good use and we got it all to fit into the Pathfinder we rented.  We even had a little bit of room to spare in the very back.  Go us!!

I'm way behind in my blogging.  Eventually I'll get caught up, but it'll take a while as we are really busy since we just got our HHG's (household goods) today, and new carpet yesterday.  Tomorrow we're picking out paint colors to start painting the downstairs, which will most likely take forever to do.  The sample colors are up on the wall so we'll see.

Happy weekend!