Same Ole Thang

More of the same here--trying hard not to kill each other as we stew around in the guest house for God-knows-how-much-longer.

Someone is coming today to buy our '58 ragtop. *sniffle* I hate to see this go, but at the same time I'm elated. It's been sitting in our possession doing NOTHING, (or rather, we do nothing to it!), for almost 4 years now. It's a beautiful specimen...perfect mix between original and modified so that it LOOKS the way we would want our bug to, but DRIVES the way we'd want a bigger car to. Here's a picture to commemorate the last of our project cars, (at least those on our property, teehee)

I'm elated because now we will have room in the garage to put our crap while we get the floors done. We were told to choose what we wanted done with the last of the money from the budget. I told them we need the floors done! They are so nasty. Here's a picture of how nasty they are. I literally CAN'T mop them or the wood will be ruined. Besides, my mother-in-law once tried to mop them and she went over them FIVE times before she decided to give up because they'd NEVER come clean. Turns out she was mopping the finish off. I've probably droned on about this before, but suffice it to say that I will be ecstatic to have beautiful hardwood floors that my children can actually crawl and play on!

P.S. Allan pulled all that carpet up in anticipation of getting the floors refinished. I don't know if you can tell from that picture, but it looks SO MUCH BIGGER now! Carpets really do suck.

Then we have the bathroom which is done except for the paint touch ups and the big holes in the wall and cabinet from the plumbing. Oh yeah, and it has to be sealed or we're tards, I forgot. Oh well, it's almost done. And it's gonna look awesome :D



Here is a picture of the most god-awful window I've ever seen in my life. This is what we are getting on both of the back bedrooms. I loved these windows, they were long and beautiful and now they are hideous. I'm glad we decided to stay in the front bedroom! I know, I know--will she ever be happy with anything? I'm not going to complain to the builders because-hey!-they were free, but OMG this is awful. It makes me tear up when I look out of the guest house at the big house. Blah.And now, a photo montage of the lovely little girl we are trying to wean from breastmilk to formula, (yeah, I gave in cuz I'm a jerk and it turns out I'm probably not making enough milk to support a growing 9 month old, afterall. God works in funny ways, huh?)
"Hey mom, you got something good for me? I'm a lil' hungry!"

"what in the sam-hell was THAT you just tried to put in my mouth? Certainly not the nectar of the gods I've been drinking for entirity of my life on this earth!"
"get this NASTY thing out of my mouth! UGH, PUKE!"

Okay, so that's probably as much drama as one blog post can handle, so signing off, this is Tara.

Goodday.

Photos for the Weary

For those of you weary of my whining, here are some photos. I'm too tired to even whine today.

I will say, though, that Allan FINALLY got the money from the insurance company 2 days ago. Last night he bought a 1989 Toyota 4Runner. He's pretty excited about it. It's big--it's ugly--it's totally Allan. The best part about the 4Runner? (Yepp, I said it before and I'll say it again!) There was money leftover. Soo...we went to eat at Chili's last night, (we've had literally NO cash this week, so I've been cooking crap from the freezer that's probably been there a year. The plus side? Now I can defrost the freezer for the first time in 2 years because I can see the bottom!), and went to WalMart and GraceAnne got a new pony and Allan got a new camera because he sat on his old one and killed it.

We tried to get a memory card for my phone, but AT&T is super cool and made sure we couldn't buy one at a normal store. Luckily it fits in Allan's phone because you can't return opened electronics, so now he has a brand-spankin' new 2GB memory card for his phone that he can put 400 songs on. But there is hope for me yet! I get a new haircut and color today. At this point I could care less about the cut and the color, but the time away from the kids sounds positively DIVINE!

So here's the house from the street with new windows. Pretty snazzy, eh? It's taking them longer than they thought because they are having to reframe every single window. But the front is all new and in a few minutes the north-face will be all new, too.
Here's the rear of the house. You can see them working on the north-face.
Here's my bottle-drinkin' baby, thinkin' she's cute. (she's right, but don't tell her or she might get a fat head!) I actually think I'll just give her sippy cups because I'd rather not get her on a bottle habit now only to break her of it in 3 months. Plus bottles are evil and I re-realized why last night--the freakin' things leak! I had a big old wet spot on my bed and I was NOT happy at 5:30 this morning. Boobs do not leak past the first month, so I've been spoiled. Blah.
And here she is again excited that she can throw her milk around and drag it with her. She is wearing my all-time favorite Violet shirt from Old Navy. I told Allan when she outgrows it I'm going to cut the patch out and someday I'll make her a patchwork purse with that on it and lots of different violet color fabrics. You can't tell from the picture, but it's textured and just way too cute.

Okay, so I can't manage to make it through even one post without whining, but in my 26 years I've come to realize that I'm FUNNY when I complain and people like me when I'm funny, so...maybe I ought to just roll with it. Besides, somedays I have nothing to say if I can't whine. Hmmmmmmmmmm...

Love and miss you all!

**Edited to add: here is the after shot. I got my hair colored and trimmed. It's grown a lot more than I thought it had since I had Violet and the color is WONDERFUL! What's that you say? I actually look my age again? Why, thank you. Gray is NOT the new brown after all!

The End of an Era

This morning I was bitten by a tiny bird for the 3rd and final time. Suffice it to say I was bitten in a not-so-fun area and nursing is no longer an activity that I will be participating in. This makes me really sad and I'm very disappointed. Yes, I'll blow the dust off of my big pump and still try to pump milk for Violet, (I did this for GraceAnne for 6 months), but it's not the same, it's annoying and it's a pain in the butt. Then again, at least it's not a pain in the "nibble!" UGH.

Pray I make it to 1 year with the pump. That was my goal to begin with for nursing, so hopefully I can do it and I'll never have to buy a can of formula.

blah blah blah.

P.S. A friend once told me that she was told that if the baby bites you, pull them in closer to you so that they can't breathe for a second and it scares them so they let go and don't bite again. If any of you have A) stubborn children like mine or B) crappy luck like mine DO NOT TRY THIS! I might not have lost blood or gotten teeth marks had I not tried this. *cry*

Pictures as Demanded

I had some peeps insist that my bathroom is not actually tiled until I post pictures of it. So I uploaded some pix and had a few minutes in between my phone calls to get fund raising leads, (does ANYONE know of a place that needs some fund raising? I'll do one for you!) so I figured I'd load some.

Allan laid this tile yesterday. I don't think I posted any pictures of the progress, but first he had to rip out the old tile, (2 inch hexagonal tiles), pull up the old hard wood flooring underneath, lay a new sub floor in the form of a 3/4" sheet of plywood, prime that with some bright red waterproof stuff and then lay the tiles. It went so quickly I was amazed. My hubby is so smart! I LOVE LOVE LOVE this new tile, by the way. It looks GREAT! We still have to do the grout and then seal it. My Sister-in-Law says if we don't seal it we're tards, so I think we'll seal it.
Here is the door Allan framed. We have a few more to go. The space above the frame is where we have grand plans of putting a transom made my my Sister-in-Law. She is a VERY talented stained glass artist.
Here is the new window from the inside. We have 5 new windows, none of which is really too different except this one. You can see on the left side of the fireplace what the old windows looked like, so this is a HUGE improvement! I really hate those glass blocks. I don't need any privacy in my library! There will be so much more light now.
And just because no blog post is complete without pictures of my babies...here they are! Violet thinks GraceAnne is the greatest playmate on earth! Blogger won't let me post below the last pic, so I'll tell about it up here. Vi ALWAYS has her tongue sticking out like that! I'm not sure if it's because she's teething, (she got one on Christmas eve and the other on 1/11), or just cuz she's silly, but it's SO CUTE! And that thing is LOOOONG!

Quick Report

I've totally been lacking with my blog lately, and I apologize. There has been lots going on here and I'm trying very hard to be a new person this year, not only with the house and kids, but also with my business. I went to Leadership Conference in Denver and got all psyched up for the coming year. They've given us a new career plan and raises and now our focus is supposed to be on building our teams instead of just selling. I was nervous about this because I thought I'd be pushy or creepy, but really, who doesn't like to be offered a job because they're outgoing? Who couldn't use a little extra money. So...I'm hiring. If you'd like to make a few hundred extra dollars and a couple nights out a month, let me know. This is probably the first thing I've done in my life, (other than being a mom), that I've liked for longer than a couple months. I'm having a great time and really determined to make this work for us. Plus, I'm TOTALLY going to Disney World with PC! I'll do whatever it takes now ;)

GraceAnne had a blast in Denver. She got to see geese, snow and a fox. This was all in downtown! The place is truly amazing and she said she is going to live there someday. I think even Allan would like to live there...we'll see where his job takes us. She's super happy to be back in school, though, I think she was going stir-crazy. Yesterday she told me about a small tiff she got into with a friend at school. I asked her, "why do you have to argue with everyone?" She looked at me and said serious-as-a-heart-attack, "because they're WRONG!" Wow...her face is all daddy, but her mouth is ALL MOM!

Violet is getting SO BIG! She's been saying 'hi' for a while now and calling GraceAnne 'guh' but while we were in Denver she told daddy she wanted 'breakfass' and the next morning she told me she wanted a 'dye-per' and her 'bucket' The following morning we were waving to mommy and Violet in the mirror and she waved and said, 'hi Vi-yet, hi Mom!' This is totally foreign to me. GraceAnne said her first word, "fishie" when she was 11 months old. 8.5 is a bit early to me. She's starting to stand on her own for a few seconds before she falls and Allan said he saw her stand up from sitting the other day. It's so amazing to watch them learn. What a little treasure!

Allan is back in school now and it's been a little bit of a stress with his car gone. They totalled it out and we're waiting on the check so he can go buy a vehicle. It's too cold to ride the scooter right now, so in the garage it sits and he's been taking my car. This gets me out walking more, but it's so cold I don't want to. I had to wrap Violet in a fuzzy fleece blanket on top of her hat and coat yesterday to walk GraceAnne to school. It was not much above freezing. That's not bad where I come from, but to these little Texan girls, it was pretty darned nippy! We're so glad this is his last semester, though, and if I had to walk every day for the rest of his 4 months I would. **Please Lord, don't test me on that, because you know I WILL complain every step!**

I would post pictures, but Allan's camera broke. We have my big professional Nikon, but for excuses of lack of portability and difficulty uploading, (there's no slot on his laptop for my memory card), it might be a while before I have some pictures to put up. Hopefully no one gets too bored just reading type. Love and miss you all!

A Warm Start

Please excuse the discombobulation, blogger is being a punk and I can't figure it out. Since this is our last day with Rhiya, I'd rather spend time with her than spend time on this, so....here is a backward story for you. Here are the girls at the late hour of 10pm last night. We stayed up later last night than we did on New Year's Eve. The girls were having a blast together.

Here is GraceAnne outside the train depot. At the mall in Dallas, there is a set-up every year to benefit the Ronald McDonald house at Children's. Allan loves trains, so we went to see. We all had a good time even though it was PACKED. At first I wondered why they had the AC on full blast, but I learned why pretty quickly.

Here are the girls at "Mt Rushmore." Rhiya was pretty excited about getting her picture taken in front of MR. She actually orchestrated the whole thing.

This year is starting off like our last 3 have--warm. January is so beautiful in Texas. I'm not sure what that's about...it gets cold for February, but I really do enjoy it. So we had some other kids over and we played outside all day long. Violet was having a grand old time playing in the dirt and managed to dig up one of the squirrel's pecans. I didn't realize she had it in her mouth until I grabbed the camera to snap a shot and she grinned so huge that I saw it in there.

If you can't tell, the above pictures and text are the ones that wouldn't copy/paste or work with me in anyway, so I hope you can deal with that. Hope you're having a great year so far! We love and miss you all...