Life in February

I know March is over but life has been busy and I am behind...not a big shock is it?  So this was what we were up to in February.

February started off with a trip up to Minnesota to go visit family, meet Randi's new little baby girl Clara, and have fun at the Mall of America.  It was a wonderful weekend!

Baby Clara...SO ADORABLE!!

We also decided to schedule Tally's appointment to be spayed.  When picking her up they told me she needed to be "quiet" for 21 days!!!  How do you keep a puppy from jumping, running, and playing for 21 days.  Poor Tally spent a lot of time in her little hallway nook so she wouldn't jump up on the counters or (a terrible, annoying things she does) or up on the couch. 

We hosted our annual winter game night.  Once again it was a blast!  

Elsie went bowling for the first time!  We had a little get together with all the daycare families on a Sunday night.  It was a lot of fun to get together and for Elsie to try out bowling.  She loved it!  

Valentine's Day 2014

Our Valentine's Day was pretty low key this year.  We just ordered pizza and had a "Pizza Picnic" that night.  We got Elsie this gigantic card card and she loved it!  She also got a few little items such as a new Valentine's book, Dora band-aids (why do kids like bandaids so much?) and a Dora puzzle.  

In February we went to watch Emma and Olivia's basketball game, their first grade music program, and they participated in a half time show for the high school which was broadcast live on the computer.  So that one we watched from the comfort of our bed :)  Elsie loved seeing her cousins on the computer screen.  

Mission Starfish 5k

On February 15th I ran my first race of the season.  It was a beautiful 10 degrees out with some gusty wind and snow that started right as we began.  This race was pretty grassroots put on by a local high school girl who was raising money for Haiti.  There was maybe 100 runners.  It wasn't timed but I did run the whole thing in my Yaktrax because it was pretty slick out.  

Heidi, Sue, and Me at the end of the 5k.  

On February 20th we had our first thunderstorm of the year with thunder, lightning, and some small hail.  Following the thunder snow we got some snow too.  They were forecasting a major blizzard for us but it didn't turn out to be much.  

Unlike Cinder, Tally was not phased at all by the thunderstorm.  

Elsie LOVED the big snowflakes and thought it was so funny that my hair was all white from the snow.  

And of course we had to play outside in the snow and make snow angels.  

Where is Elsie?  Oh here I am!!  She LOVES to play hide and seek these days.

The weather wasn't especially beautiful this month but I had signed up for a 10k that was taking place in the middle of March.  So, despite the fact that it was a balmy eight degrees out I bundled up and hit the trails.  My goal was to make it three miles.  It ended up being a GREAT run and I made it just shy of five miles-which is the farthest I ever had run and it gave me confidence that I could make the 6.2 miles in March.  

Some Random Pics

You can't really tell in the picture but the sun was reflecting on the steps to create a "rainbow" effect on the stairs.  Elsie came down the stairs and exclaimed "Mommy, there's a rainbow on the stairs!"  She was really excited.  

Elsie with Daddy in a fort under the Dining Room table.  

She found her winter gear that I bought for next year-she really wanted to go outside.  

Of course, a lot of our month looked a lot like this-packing boxes!  

Elsie is REALLY into her babies.  She had to "brush" baby's hair before leaving for the day :) 

And finally, we ended the month like this:   

Snuggling together on our last night in the house on 17th Street

Closing on our house!  

(you can check out the moving post here.)

And the last night of February looked like this! 

Priority List

I had mentioned in previous posts about creating a priority list prior to moving in.  I made this list based on photos, what we saw during inspections and one of the many times we looked at the house before finally closing on it.  Here is our list-looks like we are going to be pretty busy :)

Living Room

• Pull up carpet and check for hardwood floors
• Refinish hardwood floors

Powder Room 

We are hoping down the road to totally change this space in some way, remove the shower/washer dryer area and add that space to the kitchen so we hope to not spend a lot of cash in this room.  

• Remove Wallpaper
• Paint Walls
• Paint Tile
• Remove carpet and replace with new flooring (we found some vinyl planks that look like wood that we are going to go with for this project)
• Change out vanity/sink 
• Change out bath fixtures (faucet, towel bars, and toilet paper holder)
• Change out light fixture.

Dining Room

• Remove wallpaper
• Texture/Repair walls and ceiling-we have someone working on this as we speak
• Paint Wall
• Paint Ceiling
• Spray paint light fixture-we purchased the paint this past weekend and am just waiting for it to get a bit warmer outside before spray painting it.  According to the forecast it sounds like that might be sooner than later :)  

Family Room

• Remove Wallpaper
• Paint Walls
• Add a desk to create a "command center" area.  

Main Floor Closets

• Add shelves to small broom closet to make pantry
• Add shelves and organization to hall closet to create coat closet
• Remove carpet from the floors

Master/Guest Bathroom

• Remove carpet 
• Add new flooring
• Fill holes in shower where door was removed.  

Kitchen

• Replace door knobs and pulls
• Remove Wallpaper
• Paint Walls
• Fix hardware on doors that are not working properly to keep doors shut
• Remove saloon doors
• Remove doors on the little window above the sink

Upstairs Bath

• Remove carpet from floors and replace with peel and stick vinyl tile planks
• Remove shower door and replace with shower curtain
• Add "S" arm to shower head to increase the height of the shower head
• Remove wallpaper
• Paint Walls
• Remove hardwater stains near drain in bathtub or refinish tub
• Re-grout the tile (there is a lot of loose grout in the bath tub area)

Elsie's Room

• Remove carpet from closets and replace with a new flooring (we didn't end up having to replace it because we discovered hardwood floors underneath the old carpet. 
• Add additional hanger bars and shelving in both of her closets

Our Room 

• Add a closet system to large closet.
• Remove old carpet from the large closet and add flooring. (There is no hardwood floors under this carpet).

Miscellaneous

• Replace thermostat with new programmable one
• Purchase and Install Carbon Monoxide and smoke detectors throughout the house (one in each sleeping area and in hallway and one set in the basement.  

Outdoors

• Rake Leaves-there are tons of them
• Powerwash Front Porch, Back Deck
• Stain and Seal Front Porch, Back Deck
• Tear out steel edging around flower beds (This scares me.  Super dangerous with a little kid running around.  Those corners are sharp!)
• Weed out the beds and figure out what the heck is our there.  It definitely needs to cleaned out! 

Second Annual Winter Game Night

Back on February 8th, John and I hosted our annual winter game night.  Last Year we had our first game night and we thought it was a blast.  One of my favorite get togethers ever!  This year was just as fun although, we did miss some of those that came the year before.

This year we ended up with 7 couples total with some that came last year (John and Tanya, Marc and Amber, Nick and Hillary, Jeff and Robbie) and a few new faces too (Kedra and Mathew, Heidi and Jason, Shanna and Mike).  It was fun.  For food I served shrimp cocktail, a taco dip, jalapeno popper dip and baguettes, meat and cheese, pickle wraps, and bacon wrapped smokies.  Some of the guests brought yummy food to share as well :)  We had more than enough food to go around.

I also decided to change up the way I did prizes this year.  Last year if you won, you got a prize right away-and I had more variety of prizes.  This year, if you won a game you got a scratch off and then your name went in a drawing for the prizes which were drawn at the end of the night.  The bigger prizes were a $25 BWW gift card (which was won by Shanna), a $15 iTunes gift card (won by Amber), a $10 Subway gift card (also won by Amber) and a $5 Starbucks gift card (won by Hillary).  I think I will probably do the prizes this way again next year.

For games, after reading back from last years were actually the exact same games and the same order as we played last year:  Left, Center Right, Crap on Your Neighbor, Spoons, and then Pictionary.  After pictionary all but Marc, Amber, Jeff and Robbie left and the guys played cribbage and Amber and I taught Robbie how to play PNA-oh does that game bring back memories from high school haha!

Here are some photos from the night!

Thanks again everyone for a wonderful night!  

Unpacking

Friday night, after we moved in, it was time to keep cleaning and unpack.  We had so much help throughout this whole process and would be nowhere as far along unpacking as we are with out everyone's help.  One of the first tasks was to get Elsie's room set up.  She LOVED helping John put her crib together (yes she is still in her crib and seems happy to be there so why rock the boat right?) Then we ordered pizza for dinner and had a "Pizza Picnic" on the floor of our family room.

Elsie helping Daddy put together her bed

 Elsie discovered this mirror that was left behind in my closet.  She spent quite a bit of time keeping herself busy making faces at herself :)

That night, Amber also came to help clean.  Amber and Bev kept working on the kitchen (there was a lot of work to be done in this one room alone).  It seemed like it took forever.  So those two worked on the kitchen while I worked on cleaning the upstairs bathroom.  I wanted to get one bathroom completely clean first so we could shower, brush teeth, etc.  Around 11:00 Amber (The night owl) was still going strong but I was exhausted so we called in a night.

Amber snapped this pic on Friday evening as it was snowing.
We got quite a few inches of snow over the weekend.

The next morning we were up and at it again.  My parents were coming down to help (They had planned to come on Friday evening but the snow delayed their plans).  They left bright and early and arrived safely by 10:00.  Bev and Dale came to help and Amber came again in the afternoon.  We got so much done but I was so overwhelmed.  I had so many people asking where this went, or where I wanted that and I had hardly had enough time to think about it.  I will be the first to admit the stress was getting to me.  I am SO thankful though we had so much help!!!!  Both parents prepared food for meals (which was awesome because it lasted into the early part of the week) and we could not have done it without them!

One of our new neighbors, Nanette brought over some delicious muffins on Saturday morning which was perfect because we could not find the box with the cereal/bread/toasted ya know...the important things.  The were soooo good!

On Sunday morning, John and my dad ripped out the carpet in the upstairs bathroom (this was at the top of our Priority List) and installed some new peel and stick tile for the time being.  All the bathrooms have carpet in them which I find is really gross!  We went with inexpensive peel and stick vinyl planks because at some point in the next couple of years we want to gut it and remodel and thought they would be a good temporary option.  My parents left late morning and we kind of chilled (as best we could) the rest of the day.  I think I rearranged the kitchen cupboards a few times.  Sunday evening we headed over to Lowes to get Rev-A-Shelf for our trash and recycling containers and smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors for all of our sleeping areas (I am paranoid about carbon monoxide).  We also checked out some closet options because most of the closets in the house (there are a lot of them-9 upstairs and 5 on the main level) just have a shelf and a hanging bar.  We also checked out thermostats but wanted to do some more research before buying one.  We were debating over just a plain old programmable one vs. a wifi enabled one that can be adjusted from a smartphone.

I also want to mention how well Elsie and Tally are adjusting to the new house.  First of all, Tally LOVES the fenced in back yard.  Elsie is also doing WONDERFUL!  I was shocked at how well she took to the new house.  She has been sleeping normally from night one and she loves all the extra room to run around in, the full flight of stairs to slide down, and the fact that her toys are all right there to play with thanks to the extra space in the family room.  I would say there was very little adjusting for this little girl.

Moving Day

Well we finally moved (over a week ago already).  The main move took place over two days-Feb 27th and the 28th.  However, the weekend before we were able to move some things into the attached garage which was wonderful.  John, Dale, Brandi and I unloaded the small enclosed trailer that was full of stuff we took out of the house when we put the house on the market, we loaded the trailer up with all the stuff from our garage, and then unloaded that into the new garage.  Then, we filled the trailer up with boxes and furniture and would wait to unload that until we got the keys the following Friday.  We picked up the Uhaul truck on Wednesday night and was ready to start loading it up on Thursday morning.  John and Ross spent the morning loading up the truck and Jeff came to help out with some the larger, heavier items that would require a little more manpower.  By 11:00 AM the majority of the house was cleared out and I was feel pretty good about our situation.  The new buyers scheduled the walk through for 7:00PM that night so I had a deadline but with John and I and an empty house I figured we would fly through the cleaning part of it all.

Elsie packing up her books:  She LOVED helping to pack
and wanted to be there right along with us to do everything. 

Boy was I wrong!  It was cold that day-temps were close to zero.  This became a problem when some of John's cows decided it would be a good day to have a calf.  With it being so cold, those poor little calves froze-almost to death.  So John was gone most of the afternoon dealing with that.  One calf ended up going to Iowa State University for 5 days because it's body temperature was so low (thankfully, that calf is doing well now).  So that threw a little kink in the plans.  Bev came over and helped cleaned which we wouldn't been ready for the walk through without her.  We worked hard until Elsie had to be picked up from daycare at 4:30 PM.  When we left we had the whole house clean-thoroughly cleaned.  I felt good at how we left the house.  The main thing that was left was to finish up with the garage and a few little things I was waiting on John to do inside the house.  Marc (our Realtor) told the buyer's Realtor about our situation and they were understanding about it all.  So after the walk through we headed back over to sweep out the garage and the last few items on our list.  Finally, we headed back to John's parents around 9:00 PM.  Just a little time to relax ;)  I must admit that when I walked through one last time I was a bit sad.  We had so many wonderful memories in this house and it was our first home.  The home we brought our sweet little Elsie home to.  But I know the new house would be a place to make new memories and hopefully we will someday be bringing a new baby or two home to this house.

2.26.14-The last night sleeping in our first home. 

On Friday morning, we had a few errands to do before heading over to our closing at 11:00 AM.  We had to drop Elsie off at JoJo's, get the cashier's check from our bank, do our final walk through at the new house and sign and fax some papers for our insurance company.  We got all this done with time to spare so we stopped at Panera for bagels and coffee.  At 10:15 John turned to me and said "Well let's go" and I said back "ummm we have 45 minutes still and it only takes 10 to get there." His response "Well we have so much to do I don't think I can just sit here anymore".  Typical John ;).  So we left and stopped at the store for a few more cleaning supplies and arrived the the bank early.  Which worked out because we got done with the closing early.  When we got there Marc made a comment that we were homeless.  Ha, which was true.  The new buyers closed on our old house at 9:00 AM so for two hours we were technically homeless.  Closing went smoothly and it wasn't long before we were off to our new home!

Jeff helping us with the heavy stuff

I got there first and while I wanted to wait for John so we could enter our new home together I knew we didn't have much time before the movers were to arrive at 1:00 PM.  So I got to work cleaning.  And boy was there a lot to do!  Let's just say that I feel REALLY good with how clean we left our house.  I snapped a few pics before any of our stuff was brought in and before I knew it the movers were there (along with John and Ross).  In two hours both the truck and trailer were unloaded and much of the stuff we had put in the garage was moved into the house!  I was AMAZED with how fast it all happened!  And I was still cleaning the kitchen.   I felt defeated because I hadn't even made it out of the one room I had started in.

The guys all left around 3:00.  At 4:00 I knew I had to go and get Elsie from JoJo's and when I went to pick her up I decided to stay and visit for a while with all the moms.  Every once in awhile the moms stay on Fridays to visit and hang out (FAD-Friday after Daycare).  Unfortunately, we had done such a wonderful job of getting Elsie excited about the new house that she was crying and whining about wanting to leave and go to the new house.  So around 5:00 we took off to our new home.