Without Further Aduei...

I know I've been promising pictures of our new home for what seems like forever, but I always make good on my promises (well most of the time ;)).  Well it has taken me quite a while to get things just the way I wanted them but I finally did it and I finally took some pictures.  I tried to take pictures with as much detail as possible but the reality is that you don't get the full effect unless you see it in person.  Am I inviting all of you to come visit? Abso-freakin-lutely! Come on!!!  We love guests, probably because we really don't get them that often.  So here we go... (and remember if you want to see larger photos just click on them and they will open in a full screen)

Y's Room

 

Nothing really changed in here except that it's larger and the curtains.  In her old room it was one of those tie-up shades but long story short this time I went with panel curtains but I like it slightly better now because it allows in more light.

Y's/Guest Bathroom

 

The camera didn't do a good job of capturing the colors here, probably because there is zero natural light in here...oh well, it's green and brown.

Master Suite

Yes, it's a closet.  Yes, it is messy.  No, I do not have any immediate plans to change that.  As you can see the closet also has a section which is a linen closet (among other things).

Living Room

Both the Living Room and the Bedroom have door walls that lead to the balcony (which we have yet to use).

Dining Room

Entry/Foyer

Didn't focus much attention here because it is a work-in-progress, I'm still unsure of what I will put down here but I do have something of a vision for it.  It is a bit deeper (in length) than the photo shows, the railing cut it off.

Kitchen

The kitchen is another work-in-progress.  I want to find something to hang on the wall you see here in the background as well as finding other decorations to go atop the cabinets.

Laundry Room/Way to Garage

Behind that door is another set of stairs which will take you downstairs to the garage.  The folding doors on the left house the furnace, hot water heater, etc.

That is the grand tour in photos, but you should really come for a visit and see it for yourself!

Yep...She's Mine!

Y has done certain things throughout her life to assure me that she is definitely my child (look at her as an infant and you'll know why I say that, haha).  Ever since birth she has had this way of scrunching up her forehead and giving people this look like she's asking them, "what in the heck is wrong with you?"  Well ladies and gentlemen, that is the exact same expression I make when I am wondering, "what the heck is wrong with you?"  Now some would think that she just learned this from me, but I assure you this is not the case!  She was doing that her very first day on this earth, and I and everyone who was around me, knew that was my "look."

Now I've always had some fairly odd preferences when it comes to food, I can admit it.  I do not know another person who takes a flour tortilla out of the fridge and just eats it...plain and cold.  And yes, I prefer it that way!  Well last week, Y asks for a "lla" (ya, think tortiLLA) at lunch time.  So I open the fridge and take out the tortillas and cheese to make her a quesadilla.  I take out one tortilla and she immediately grabs it and just starts eating it...plain and cold.  I then realized that when she wants a quesadilla she says "dilla" and not just "lla".

When I was in elementary school...junior high...high school...college (you get the picture) I would come home and want a snack.  Well, my snack of choice was typically bread.  Yet again, plain old bread out of the loaf from the store.  My mom (and the rest of my family) thought it was weird but I didn't care...I LOVED bread.  Now I must say that I haven't done that in some years, so it's not like Y has been alive to see me eat it like that.  Now I typically only eat loaf bread with something like cheese or as part of a sandwich.  So on this particular day she asked for a "sammich" for lunch and I opened the bread to take a piece out and again, she immediately grabs it and just starts eating it like it's a delicious sandwich!  So yeah...she's definitely mine!

Shoes

Y has had no shortage of shoes either during her short 2 year life.  And no, this is not including her current shoes!  Not to mention she still needs tennis shoes and boots for this winter.  We're setting a bad precedence.  If she grows up to have a shoe fetish, in the words of my mom, "she got it honest!"

Space Bags=Space Saver!

It's no big secret that Y has had a lot of clothing in her 2 short years on earth.  It's also no big secret that we haven't had a lot of extra space during those 2 short years of life.  Now I know that there are many people who have had many more children in much smaller places than our apartment was (1000sqft).  I, honestly, take my hat off to them because I just don't know how they do/did it!  I was going absolutely insane in our apartment, probably partially because I was ready to own something, but also because my living room was doubling as a play room and I was quickly running out of places to store/hide things.  One big issue was Y's closet!  I dunno if it could have handled one more season worth of clothes. 

Now she has a closet that rivals the size of her bedroom in our apartment (ok, that might be a slight exaggeration...SLIGHT!  It's probably close to half the size though).  So I was able to fit more stuff, unfortunately most of the stuff I wanted to fit in there was large stuff (this is where a basement would come in handy, but you make due with what you have, right?).  Her infant swing is in there, the headboard of her crib is in there (and it needs space because if it gets scratched I might have a coronary), her jumperoo, all of her current clothes, diaper bags, her infant bathtub, I could seriously go on and on.  needless to say I wanted more space so all those bags and bags of clothing (8 large trash bags to be exact) had to go.  But there was no way I was getting rid of the clothing so a friend suggested Space Bags.  After reading reviews online I was seriously torn.  So many people complained of the bags tearing or not staying deflated once filled.  The stupid bags are not cheap either so I didn't wanna invest a ton of money on something that didn't work.  Finally I just started asking people I knew, whose opinions I trusted and everyone of them had been extremely satisfied so I decided to give it a shot...I was not disappointed!

This was taken after I had already done 2 of the bags.  I went to Walmart and purchased a box of 2 large bags for $10 in order to try it before buying more.  I intended to take a picture of the closet before I started but completely forgot until I already had these 2 done.  I think went online to see if I could find them cheaper.  I found a box of 3 large at Target.com for $13 and since it was free shipping and I could use my AAA discount I purchased 2 boxes there.  They have the imitation ones cheaper on eBay but I didn't want to take a risk and they tear or something.

This is the pile of bags that I needed to condense.  While I was at it I decided to include all the blankets she used as an infant.  i should also add that I ended up adding more clothes to this pile after I took this picture.  I ended up pulling out more 18 month clothes which she has outgrown, so it was even substantially more than this picture depicts.

All the clothes/blankets/bibs/etc. are in the bags ready for the air to be vacuumed out.

The end result.  It was time for dinner and completely forgot to add an "after" picture but it is much nicer and much more organized!  Maybe I'll go take another picture tomorrow and add it.

Silly Girl!

New...To Us

A friend from church who has five daughters has been great at passing down toys that her children have outgrown to Y.  It has really come in handy because we have been able to take many of them to her Nana & Grandpa's house in Canada so that she can have toys to play with while we visit them there.  It's great because we don't have to constantly take toys back and forth.  A few of the items we have kept here though, one is this wooden rocking horse that one of their neighbors made specifically for their daughters.  At first Y was a little afraid of it but now that she has gotten older she loves to jump on the horse and pretend she is riding on it.  She also likes to point out all the features of the horse's face: eyes, mouth, ears, hair, etc.

Well one day at church this Sister asked me if I wanted a Little Tykes slide for Y.  At first I wasn't really sure because we don't really have a yard here in the condo that is specifically ours.  She said that actually they bought it to teach their first daughter to climb stairs because they lived in an apartment and didn't have stairs and that they actually used it completely indoors.  So after considering it for a bit I totally agreed because, well, Y loves to slide! I went to pick it up the next day and just left it in our garage for a few days until I had the time (and motivation) to clean it.  After we got back from her birthday dinner and outing I decided that while B gave her a bath I would just go out and clean it.  It wasn't extremely dirty but being that it was coming inside I wanted to make sure it was extremely clean.  So I diluted Clorox in some water and set at it, after the Clorox wash I did another bath with detergent and water and finally I rinsed it all down with plain water and dried it up.  We had to figure out how to reassemble it while simultaneously realizing that, in my thorough cleaning of it, water ended up inside it and was leaking out on the carpet.  We put a few towels down to catch the water and Y couldn't wait to jump on it and start playing.

She loves that slide and if you really want to be entertained, ask her to send Elmo down the slide!  She thinks it is absolutely hilarious to send her little Elmo's down the slide and to listen to her laugh at it is hysterical.  She has the funniest and cutest laugh...I love her!  She also sends balls and other miscellaneous items down the slide but nothing gets a laugh out of her like Elmo!

Birthday Celebration

Since Y's Uncle T was going to be moving into his new dorm room (it's his first year at college) the weekend of Y's birthday, we moved it up a few days and celebrated with a few family members and friends.  It was a really good day and Y had a lot of fun, except she was extremely tired and somewhat cranky.  Here are a few pictures from that day.



She is REALLY into Nemo right now. In fact she watches Nemo at least once each day, sometimes twice. It never fails, even though she has seen the movie many times whenever it gets to a point where something might happen to Nemo, Marlin (Nemo's Dad), or Dori she gets very upset and distraught until I reassure her that that particular fish is going to be okay!



To me it looks like she is doing a Michael Jackson impersonation here and I am just waiting for her to throw that hat off at any moment.



She opened each present very carefully and wouldn't move on to the next until every single piece of paper was off the gift.



She LOVES this Elmo!  It is called Elmo's Greatest Hits (or something like that) but it has a microphone which allows her to sing along to whichever song she happens to choose.  Most of the time she just talks (or breathes loudly) into it.  I saw this at Walmart while in NC browsing through the toy section and immediately knew she would love it so when her Nana & Grandpa asked what to get her for her birthday...it was super easy!



My niece in NC had this drum set and Y just loved playing with it so we decided to get her one for her birthday.  You can see from the first picture that she already had some drumming experience.  And with the vast number of musical toys she has, hopefully she will have some sort of musical abilities...if not then I want my money back!

This arrived after the little party but before her birthday.  She has recently really gotten into Dora the Explorer (when we're not watching Nemo, we're probably watching Dora).  We thought that maybe if we got her a sheet set for her toddler bed then it would be easier to get her to sleep in her bed without such a huge hassle...not sure if it was the sheet set or not but she has gotten much better at sleeping in her bed.  She typically only wakes up once per night and I just return her to her room.  We really wanted to find an Elmo sheet set but I was really disappointed with the options.  First there apparently is no sheet set with strictly Elmo and the only Sesame Street one I was able to find was some sort of construction/sports theme which was very boyish, so we settled for Dora instead!

On her Birthday we had a very relaxed day.  We took her out to eat at Red Robin where they sang a birthday song to her and gave her a free ice cream dessert.  She LOVED being sang to.  When they came over clapping their hands and started singing to her she got the biggest smile on her face and started clapping along with them, she probably would have sang too but didn't know the words to the song they were singing.  After dinner we took her to the park to play for a bit but it was pretty cold that day (I think it was like 65°F and very windy) so even she tired of the cold pretty quickly.  We asked her if she wanted to go home and she was adamant that she didn't want to go there yet...she would rather freeze in the park.  So I suggested that we go somewhere inside, like a mall.  That worked perfectly because she loves to ride on elevators and escalators as of late.  In fact anytime we say we're going bye-bye she requests elevators and escalators, though she doesn't differentiate between the two.  We really wanted to take her swimming, her first love, but as I mentioned it was too cold for that.  We ended up buying her some new shoes to wear to church when it gets a little colder out since we'll be putting away her sandals!



 

Toddler Bed

As I have mentioned before, we converted Y's bed into a toddler bed after we returned from vacation.  She quickly learned to climb out of it after we moved and so we found ourselves quickly needing to remedy the situation.  The new found freedom was more of a curse for us than a blessing because I had many nights of walking her back to her room only to have her running back to ours 5 minutes later.  I am happy to say that, for the most part, that is all in the past!  She now goes to sleep in her bed at bedtime without a big fuss, she goes down for her nap now without a fight as well, and she is only waking (on average) once per night!  I am breathing a sigh of relief but know that we are not truly out of the woods yet, nor will we be until she is sleeping completely through the night and doing so for at least a month or more.  The good news is that we will not be going on any extended trips to places she is unfamiliar with so it'll give her time to adjust.

The Best 2 Years

I have just completed the best 2 years of my life thus far.  I say thus far because I am sure that I will say this many more times in my lifetime.

Y is now a 2 year old, it is so very hard to imagine that my precious baby is now a toddler.  She has added so much to my life and has given us the greatest joy.  I can never think of her birth day without getting teary eyed and it's not because of all the grueling hours of labor, or the frustration of having a C-Section, or any of those things.  It makes me so emotional because I can look back and see how much our lives have changed since her birth, how much our lives have improved just because she makes our day brighter.  I never knew that a heart could hold so much love and adoration for one person and each day it expands and grows as we watch her grow and realize that she is being raised by two parents who not only adore her but also adore each other.  I truly believe that the greatest gift we give our children is a happy, healthy family environment where they know without a shadow of a doubt that they are loved beyond compare.

We've had our trials throughout the last 2 years.  Being a new mom, or just a mom in general, has been the hardest experience of my life but it is also my most rewarding experience.  Motherhood gave me a whole new perspective on life and a new set of priorities.  Not a single decision is made without first considering how it would affect her, I have learned a whole new definition for selflessness.  It is amazing how one little person can motivate you to do things that you should have been doing all along.  Things that will only benefit you in the long run but that you never really felt you had the time to do before, nor did you want to make the effort to make the time to do them.  And why do you do them now?  because you know that by making the sacrifice to do those things you are being a better example to her and guiding her down a better path in life.

In short, I love being Y's mommy and all the joy it brings me.  My heart and life are so full and so enriched.

As for Y she still loves to go to the pool and play in any amount of water no matter how big or small, she loves all things Elmo.  Recently she has discovered Nemo and Dora the Explorer but Elmo is still numero uno!  She loves to give hugs and kisses, mostly to mommy and daddy but with a little coercion she'll give them to others as well.  Her favorite animal right now is a monkey, she would wear her monkey pajamas all day, every day if I allowed her to.  She loves the color green; anytime she sees it she will grab my hand and want to go see it.  Her vocabulary is amazing and for the most part she speaks extremely clear (for a 2 year old).  Her memory, well it's nothing short of amazing as well.  She remembers the smallest details with ease and I am often left wondering, "how on earth did she remember that?"  She is very polite and can always be heard saying, "excuse me" when she needs to get by or "you're welcome" after you thank her for doing something.  She calls everyone Sweetie and I still find it hilarious how she says, "hi, sweetie" whenever someone enters a room.  She loves to sing and walks around the house all day asking for either songs or susic (music).  She is a HUGE daddy's girl and I absolutely LOVE to watch her face light up as she realizes he is walking through the door.  She thinks that any man with full facial hair is Jesus (we're working on that one).  And she loves to sit at the computer all day and look at pictures and videos of herself, many of the videos she can quote word for word.  She would rather sit and watch herself than watch cartoons or anything else that may be on TV.  She is TONS of FUN!!!

These are A Few of My Favorite Things

With the exception of a box full of shoes we are officially unpacked!  I, however, still have not hung a single picture on the wall so once I do that I will snap a few photos and share them with you.  For now though, I decided to take some quick pictures of my favorite elements of our new home. 

Some of you may be accustomed to many of these things but my family was always one of very simple means and so these things are things which I have never had the luxury of having before in my parents house growing up or even in an apartment which I lived in.  So you'll have to excuse me if I get excited and caught up in what some may deem as the "simple" things in life! 

Here goes:

This is a picture of a remote.  But this remote controls the living room ceiling fan, so if I get hot...I don't have to move.  Unless of course the remote is across the room from where ever I happen to be.  It totally promotes laziness but with 15 foot ceilings it is also a huge necessity since we don't have anyone living with us who is the size of Shaq.

We can pretend that we are in an episode of Seinfeld with our buzzer/intercom.  Someone rings/buzzes the doorbell and I don't have to run downstairs to see who it is, I just press the talk/listen button!  Thus far we haven't had too much use for this because we haven't had any unexpected visitors.  What I really need is for some unwanted solicitors to come to my door so that I can put it to good use...I'm thinking a hard-of-hearing, elderly, Asian woman might live here all of a sudden!

Cabinets that have shelves which slide in and out...a woman must've thought of this.  It is ingenious!!!

An ice maker!!!  It's not one of those that is on the outside of the freezer door, nor does it offer crushed ice but who cares?!?!  It's an ice maker!!!  I don't mind opening the stupid door for my ice and after the amount of crushed ice I had during labor I am happy to live without it now!

Water at the push of a button!  Again it's inside the fridge, not outside if the door but who cares!!  No more refilling the Brita pitcher or buying the filters, I just press a blue button!!!

A food pantry!  Do you know how much space this opens up in my cabinets?  Let's just say I only have one visible appliance on my countertop and that is a toaster oven.  It's not huge but as you can see it holds more than enough food for 2½ people.

A gas fireplace.  I don't have to chop down any trees (I just have to learn to light a pilot which for me may be just as hard).  I can foresee what that this year's Christmas Cards will have a picture of this (in use) with a Christmas Tree to the right of it and a happy family poised in front.