DeMarr's Series of Unfortunate and Some Fortunate Events

We have gone through some times here... the past couple of weeks have been quite challenging and stressful.
Moving in itself is challenging and stressful enough. We thought we were quite organized and had a good handle on everything. Of course we were busy packing last minute while the truck was being loaded, and still had a little packing to do on the morning of the move. It was pretty challenging getting packed with the two little ones. I was really limited to how much I could get done with no one else around. I think Mike ended up doing most of the packing. He would pack about 10 boxes to my 2.
Anyway, so the actual packing, loading and 8-hour road trip was a little overwhelming.
Imagine the dismay when we finally arrived at our destination to find a house that was very much not ready for occupancy. I don't even know where to start with that. As soon as we got there, I went up to the door, opened it and saw tons of junk still laying around in the front room. I just closed the door and lit up a cigarette.
The lady we were renting from had done very little to the place since we had looked at it (almost 3 weeks before the move). She had painted most of it, and had carpeted the 2 downstairs rooms and one of the upstairs rooms. She had not touched the kitchen, bathroom or the dining room. They were all disaster areas. I can't even describe how filthy the kitchen and bathroom were. Of course we had no alternatives at that point, so we unloaded the truck. I guess we didn't quite realize exactly how filthy the place was until we started to clean. I guess even if we had, we wouldn't have had much of a choice because the family members we paid to help us move were in a big hurry to get us unloaded and leave.
We ended up staying in a motel for 5 days. The place was so filthy that we didn't even want to eat there or sleep there, let alone use the bathroom. The first couple of days we spent trying to clean the bathroom and kitchen. Mike spent hours cleaning the bathtub... more hours cleaning the rest of the bathroom... we had thought the walls were yellow – turned out they were white. I spent at least an hour on one cabinet in the kitchen. After 2 or 3 days of cleaning we called the Lutheran church in town to see if they had anyone who could come help me out as Mike was going to have to start work.
For some reason the landlady had poured some kind of cleaner or deodorizer in the place. In trying to figure out where the smell was coming from, Mike checked out the basement and noticed the walls were full of black mold... So when the people from the church came over we had a discussion with them and they agreed with us, that we just had to find someplace else to live. It wasn't worth us cleaning the place – especially with the black mold.
We called people all over town to see if anyone had a house to rent. No one had anything. We left messages for a few people. Finally someone called back and said that they had a tenant who'd just given his 30 days notice, but he'd probably be out in a couple of weeks... which we didn't have a couple of weeks... she called back a couple of hours later and said that he'd already moved out! So we got really lucky and got to start moving in right away. The lady was so nice! And completely sane :) The landlady for the first house had offered to take $100 off the rent for our having to clean. The new landlady gave us half a month off rent for cleaning (and the place was not even dirty!!). She came in and shampooed the carpets, painted and stained some shelves and even said she had a trailer we could use for moving!! She has been extremely helpful and just wonderful! And she even brought me some daffodils! And the next day made a special trip to bring me a little jug to put them in.
We have been so appreciative of the help we have received from the community here. The people who came over from the Lutheran church helped us bring a few loads over to the new house one day last week. Unfortunately they were all out of town this past weekend, otherwise they certainly would have helped move the rest of our stuff over. But they helped us out quite a bit. I wouldn't have been able to get much over by myself. And they have offered much emotional support during this difficult situation.
This has all been the short version of a long and trying few weeks we've had... but now we have all of our stuff moved into the new house, and so begins the process of unloading!

Packed in...

Amazingly, we have had several productive packing days! We probably have about 70 boxes packed. Most of the important stuff is ready to go. We just have to pack a couple more boxes of important stuff and then go through some of the junk that's left ;) The kitchen is full of boxes!

This is how Duncan relaxes after a long day of packing
Beatrice chilled out by watching a little Wallace and Grommet

It's hard to believe that we've been here almost two years. It seems like longer. It seems like forever ago we were trekking that U-Haul up here from Iowa. And it seems like so long ago that we were moving into this house. I was looking for pics of the kids from when we moved up here, but of course we packed up the desktop already - and that's where most of my pics are... but I did find one on the family photo site of the kids from our first night in this house. It will be sad leaving.

It's unbelievable how much these two have grown since we moved in here.

Hopefully this move goes a lot better than the one here from Iowa!!

Exhaustion...

We're all still a tad under the weather here... Duncan is still pretty whiney ;) which makes for a really long day! at least he's been taking his naps and going to bed at night good.

Luckily it didn't hit Maria too hard. She didn't feel well for maybe a day or so, and she must not have felt that bad since she still ate seconds at dinner. It's kind of crazy how people all over got this strange strain of the flu. She spent a large part of the weekend practicing her saxaphone. Probably to avoid packing :) she's got quite a bit done though. And she's gotten really good at the sax! The good thing about that is the new school will be having solo performances in April! They weren't doing any solo performances here. I'm so happy that we will be living about 7 blocks from the school! She won't be riding the bus for 2 1/2 hours a day. And she'll be able to do some after school activities.

With being sick we've all been pretty tired lately. Caught Beatrice in some pretty funny sleeping positions today! Here she is sleeping this afternoon with one of her legs up in the air. How can she sleep like that? This morning was the best though... She fell asleep bent over in her swing! Of course I laid her down in the basinette after I took pictures. I don't know how she fell asleep like that!



Here she is playing in her swing. She was really digging the rabbit slippers, and kept trying to get them to chew on the ears. She's probably getting close to teething - she wants to chomp on everything! She's been eating veggies for about a month now. Loves sweet potatoes and carrots. Still not too sure about the peas though. I'll probably try some squash tomorrow. She loves her fruit! Tonight I fed her before we all sat down to dinner, but she still was smacking her lips the whole time we ate!

Duncan pulling his trike backwards... is that kit-kat all over his face? Man does he need a haircut! The ladies at the grocery store thought he was a girl today. Even though he had a camoflauge coat on...

Now who does this remind you of? Notice he's taken one bite out of each piece of meat?

Reminds me of mom and donuts!
Beatrice playing in her bouncy seat
Just had to throw in some pics of boxes to prove that we've actually done some packing!
8 days and counting!!

More about Moving (imagine that)

Just wanted to post quick to let y'all know that Mike posted pictures of the house we're renting on his blog.
We spent most of the day packing and we're actually making some headway :) Unfortunately it was a little slow going since we're all still a little under the weather... Duncan was especially whiney today :( hopefully tomorrow is better.
We did our grocery shopping on Friday and decided to get just really easy food so we could concentrate on packing instead of cooking... I felt really guilty at the checkout since we had a bunch of tv dinners and frozen pizzas :) I think everything we got was easy frozen stuff... anyway, I felt like I needed to explain to the checkout lady that I was only shopping this way because we were busy packing to move. She probably thought I was doubly nuts then.
Anyway, we are all getting pretty excited about the move!

New Pictures

Finally eh? I've been really consumed with trying to find a place for us to rent... so I haven't been keeping up on other things lately. And really, I probably won't post too many new blogs between now and after we get settled in Iowa! I have to concentrate on packing now that we know where we're moving to!

Sadly, I will have to change the name of this blog... any suggestions?

What a ham!

Duncan is not only a mockingbird, but also a big copycat these days! :) got to try out everything baby sissy is doing! If I say "oops, she spit-up," next thing I know there's Duncan spitting! He thinks he's so funny these days. His new phrase is "is it funny?" I hear that one thousands of times a day, and I wish I was exaggerating. It was especially annoying on our extremely long car rides last weekend... everything was "is it funny?" until he smashed his fingers in a drawer at the motel and said "No, not funny"
Oreo fest in the motel we were stranded in
Can you tell how much of a bed-hog Duncan is? Poor Maria!
Check out these icicles! Must have been pretty windy huh? Found these on a convenience store in Traer.
Duncan lounging on the couch

Blizzard!

So here we are stuck in Independence, IA... Thankfully the motel is fairly decent - there's room to move ;) For the moment all the kids are sleeping.

Of course, of all weekends for there to be a huge blizzard - it would be the one weekend we have to go look at houses to rent in Iowa. Once we heard of the impending storm, we decided to drive down early, look at the house we were set on renting and drive right back - or at least get as far north as we could to try to get out of the blizzard area. Nothing ever goes according to plan. The house we looked at was not great. The pictures online were awesome! It looked like a brand new house! It looked like it had just been resided and completely redone on the inside. Pictures can be so deceiving and I am so glad we decided to come down and look for ourselves. The siding had been repainted, probably several years ago. And the remodels on the inside were cheaply done. The worst part though was the fact that there was a huge crack in the foundation and the house appeared to be slanting... we were very disappointed.
We decided that since we were there we should at least look at a house in another town that we may have considered renting. It was beyond horrible. For an accurately hysterical description, visit Mike's blog! (there's a link for it on the sidebar). I can't top his description ;)
Needless to say, we spent much more time looking around small towns surrounding Tama than we had anticipated. It was almost 7pm when we started heading for home. By this time we'd been in the car for almost twelve hours - the kids were pretty close to being done. Beatrice was having horrendous screaming fits, so we pretty much had to just call it quits and stay over within the blizzard area... Our trip finally ended around 8:30pm. Luckily I had packed enough clothes, diapers and baby food - so we were prepared in that respect to get stuck in a hotel somewhere. Sadly, I hadn't quite prepared myself on the financial level, so had to make a desperate call to mom so we could stay in the motel for the second night... I assumed they would take a check... bad assumption on my part :( Thankfully mom could help us out there. We really need to pay off our one credit card for situations like this.
Anyway, baby is waking up, will post more later. Really, go check out Mike's blog for more about the houses we looked at! :)

Closing out January

It seems like the month just flew by! Last thing I remember it was Christmas ;) It's been a pretty eventful month.

The kids are all doing really great :) It's so amazing how fast they grow! Baby Beatrice just keeps getting bigger and doing more and more. She's rolling over and scooting around like crazy. You lay her down somewhere and 2 seconds later she's somewhere else ;) She's been eating solids now. She loves her rice cereal and we've also been giving her applesauce, bananas and just started pears last night. She loves her fruit ;) Veggies are next. Actually, I tried some peas last week. She did not like them at all. She actually gagged! Guess we'll wait a while longer for peas. Duncan loved his peas when he was that age.

Duncan is expanding his vocabulary daily. He is still completely into the movie "Cars," and still not eating a damn thing :) ok, he does love his puddin and yogurt. Anything else is a crap shoot. Likes it somedays, other days not so much.

Maria is doing great too. We got her progress report last week and it was all A's!!! I think 2 were A-'s but they're still all A's! We're very proud of her! She's been practicing on her Saxaphone and doing a good job with it. We let her get a myspace page and downloaded the myspace instant messanger for her, so she's been messanging everyone :) we have to make her come down to spend time with the family :)

Anyway--- here's some of our latest pics :)

Baby Beatrice digging her gym :) What an adorable outfit ;)
Yes, we actually caught Maria reading Duncan his bedtime story! :)

Beatrice sitting up :)