Halloween 2017

This was the first year Stella got to decide on the Halloween Theme... and once she did there was no changing her mind.  I tried! This was also the first year I didn't have my mom to help me with costumes.  Karen stepped in and did the more tricky sewing.  Lots of tears went into the stuff I sewed though.  Each stage seems to be just as hard as the one before,  Maybe next year when its not all firsts the pain will ease up.

Peter Pan and Tinkerbell 

Benson Turned 2!

Well it is true.  I have a two year old in the house.  He is so fun and so hard at the same time.  He is an amazing talker and you can hold the cutest little conversations with him.  Because Stella didn't talk almost at all when she turned two this is a huge difference. (She sure talks now though!) He is smart too.  He will sit with Stella and I when she does her online preschool and I cannot believe how many times he will shout out the answer before her.  He is also into EVERYTHING and never stops. He is always on the go.  He wants to live outside so I am very excited for next summer when my kids will finally have a kid prison...I mean a fenced in yard.  They will be able to live their best life outside and if i need to pee I won't have to drag them inside with me.  He really is the best! And in my opinion the cutest ever!

New Preschool

Because we are moving to North I chose to put Stella in a preschool closer to the new house.  So we drive three days a week.  It is a pain but will be worth in in a few months.  Benson and I have two and a half hours to kill those days but soon enough we will just get to drive home and nap...maybe both of us.  She love the new school and her parents love it too.

House Update

We moved home, to Utah, at the very end of March 2016.  We signed a year lease to rent a townhouse while we built our new home.  Our plan was to be living in it come April 2017...yeah if we live in it at all during 2017 we will be happy.

Really the hardest part was deciding on where we were going to put the house.  We finally decided on a beautiful lot in North Ogden. We knew what plan we wanted to start with but we made some very major changes.  Like the overall size of the house.  We pushed out the entire back the house a few feet and we did the same with one side of the entire house.  We then had to figure out where to put all the extra square footage.  Bathrooms got some widening, bedrooms were made bigger downstairs really was easy it was all added to living room space. We rearranged the complete layout of the kitchen to accommodate the type of fridge I wanted and that meant we had to rearrange the layout of the pantry, mudroom, and half bath,  We added a tub and changed the layout of the shower in the master.  We made all the kids closets into true walk in closets.  I then took space from the laundry room to add to the hallway to accommodate homework space desks so the kids would be able to access computers outside of their bedrooms...you know scary interest behind closed door problems. We changed the location of the fireplace because I hate when TVs are over fireplaces.  We added windows and made other windows larger.  I LOVE natural light.  I crave it actually.  After living two years in a basement apartment and terrible living spaces in our California homes (one just due to covered patio placement) I needed lots of natural light.  We decided to make our basement (which is pretty small only a little more than 1200 square feet) walls 10 feet tall.  Ten feet was required if Trevor wanted to put a golf simulator down there.  I wasn't keen on that idea but the basement has been poured and the walls are 10 feet. We also added a good size covered patio off the back.  It was going to be huge but our landscape architect noticed a mistake the architect made and we had to downsize it to fit on the property.  All this back and forth took a lot longer than we thought it would.  That meant that we couldn't get started until the ground thawed in the spring.

One good thing in the downtime was that we decided to hire the landscape architect to help plan the yard.  We are building on a pretty steep hill.  We had no idea what we needed to do.  Trevor's dad, our builder, knew where we had to add retaining walls in order to build the house but we really wanted a professional to help us plan and execute the plan in order to really get what we wanted.  We knew we wanted to put in a gas fire pit, and area for a playground (which he is going to custom design for us) and a golf green. Later we added the thought of a pool.  This is still up in the air but we have put out plumbing for the pool and possible pool house (shed/bathroom).  A pool scares me for my kids safety and the up keep seems like a nightmare but I know we would love it.  So we will see.

We'll we are finally started and its getting really exciting! I have been trying to really document the process.  Its been pretty stressing and a lot of the inside details are still being made. I cannot wait to move in and make it our forever(ish) home.

  Side Note: Pretty sure our back neighbor seen behind the kids hates us already or is about to hate us  He has tried to tell us and our excavator that our property doesn't go as close to his as it does.  It touches his.  There is a water easement between us but we own it so we are going to adda retaining wall between our houses and bring our fence three feet in from our property line but he thinks its about 20 feet... and he is going to have to move his beehive!

Drive In Movie

Not sure if a Drive In Movie was a good idea to take a four year old and her one year old brother who normally go to bed around 7:00 pm but sometimes we are fun parents so we tried it.  Probably won't try it again anytime soon.  We saw Cars 3 and it was cute enough but Stella was wired ad Benson just wanted to hand over the side of the truck in the hopes of cracking his head open I guess.  We got home at midnight and the kids slept in less than an hour longer than normal.  It was not a fun day the next day...but we let them stay up past 11:00 anyway. (BBQ with neighbors...getting its own post)

Dance Recital

Stella had her first two dance recitals in May.  I was very worried how they would go. Towards the end of class she kind of stopped participating.  She would just do a few moves and sit and watch.  Her teacher said it was fine and she seemed to still be having fun so I just kept letting her go.  The day of the recital she danced her little heart off to the two numbers.  I was pleasantly surprised and she looked SO DANG CUTE doing it!  We are taking during the summer but there won't be any kid of recital.

Graduation

I cannot believe Stella is old enough to have finished a year of preschool.  She sure loved her Miss Tammy.  She tells me she misses her.  I feel bad when she starts again in the Fall she won't be seeing her. She has grown so much in the past year.  It makes me sad and proud.