Back to Life

Well, it is time to get back to life I suppose. This last week and a half have been pretty much unequivocally the crappiest of my life. Thank goodness for an awesome husband who takes such good care of me and for a sweeter than sweet Mother-in-law that also takes good care of me and props to some sweet drugs to get me through. My initial thought process in preparing for my recovery was that Nate's Mom would come and I would be all better and she would have nothing to do. Boy, was I ever delusional. Now, in complete fairness to my delusional state of mind I must say that surgeon was partly to blame for my delusions. He seemed to think that this surgery would be a lot easier on me than my previous lower jaw surgery. His line of thinking was that I would be able to open my mouth and move it around much sooner than when my lower jaw was done and he also thought there would be less swelling. Respectively he was correct about the lower jaw feeling much better and moving around. Last time I couldn't even open my mouth far enough to get an empty spoon in there and it was always feeling like it could just snap off from my skull and fall onto the ground at any moment. That is rather nice to not be feeling that this time I must say, however, the amount of swelling and pain far surpass what I felt last time. I finally feel like I don't look like some sort of deformed chipmunk now and pretty much resemble my former self. My upper lip is still pretty swollen and I can't quite get it to move like it should and there is a little bit of swelling left in my checks. I was feeling pretty good that I was able to get make-up on today. I had to try because we were going to look at a house with a Realtor.
Yep, you read it right, we went and looked at a house. I don't know if it will work out or not, but we would not only like to get into a bigger house but we would like to put in a swimming pool in the house we would want to live in for a very long time. We got drawn in by a 4711 sq ft house that needed some work. I spent nights awake dreaming of the renovations and how I would feel about moving the kids to a different school and ward. I asked the kids what they thought and they are totally excited at the thought. Emma said, cool I can make a whole bunch of new friends while keeping my old ones. What a stealer attitude. Jared doesn't give a flying rip nor do the 2 little ones. The thought of leaving my girls behind in my ward, I'm the 1st counselor in YW, makes my heart ache. I really love those girls and I'm having an absolute ball, on the other hand I am thrilled to get my kids into the Rio Rancho school district and there aren't really any bad Wards on this side of town, so we can't go too wrong there. I have spent nights dreaming of what I need to do to get this house ready to sell in a buyers market. The prospect is a bit scary with the amount of homes on the market, but I have a plan. My restless nights do produce results. We are going to sell our homes with only the help of a broker (I think that's what they are called). We will pay a flat fee for the paperwork of selling a house and then I will list the house with a selling agent bonus of a couple thousand dollars, and all my watching of Designed to Sell are going to pay off. I think that with the selling bonus to entice the foot traffic, maybe a website (Oh Shayla....) and my ability to properly stage the house, I don't think it should take too long and we can hopefully get what we want for the house. So all this planning and dreaming happened before I even stepped foot in the house. Anyway they are selling This bright pink monstrosity for practically nothing, however when we actually got to go inside and asses the amount of work we realized that it was not worth it. :( Everything in the house was crap! Every detail every everything total crap. So we decided to go see one of Nate's patients that builds houses and has been wanting to show us his model home and some plans. This builder and his wife were on a trip to CA looking for floor plans and immediately thought of us when they saw this particular floor plan. Long story short, we met with him yesterday (Friday) and I fell in love with his designs. We picked out a lot and we are going to meet with him next week to go over some designs to start the process. I didn't think that going the custom home route was going to be affordable with the prices of land being so expensive right now. But after we met with him and got a pretty good estimate of the cost of the house we want to build with him we came home and crunched the numbers and it will totally work. He showed us all of his "standard" features by going thru the 3 homes and what the price per square foot to build with those features are. His standards are amazing. Granite counter tops and awesome tile in bathrooms, the carpet the flooring the cabinets, light fixtures, faucet fixtures, all Bosch stainless steel appliances, the railing for the stairs, etc... I mean you name it and it's standard. Plus he includes the landscaping for the front and back yard and the fence. There should be no surprises when it comes to the final cost of the house. I don't really see a need to upgrade anything. I can actually afford my dream home. It will be on a half acre and he said that he would throw in the pool if we let him build the house. The market is pretty slow for the custom builders too right now. We got to walk through 3 of his houses and he does amazing detail work. I will actually have a pretty house. Very exciting. Anyway, that means I've got to get into the mode of getting my house ready to sell. It helps me keep my mind off how crappy I feel. I think I veered way off topic........anway.....Back to life.

Projects

I recently came to the conclusion that my happiness depends largely on my ability to have a project of some sort. I really love the creative process and the buying of the materials ( I should have included on my favorite list going to Lowes and Home Depot). I could just wander around for hours if I didn't have other things keeping me from doing that. Anyway, the bliss continues when I arrive home with all of my material to make my masterpiece and then a bit of panic creeps in when I realize how deep I got myself committed to my latest renovation. I am the kind of person that cannot stop in the middle of a project. I will go like crazy and about kill myself trying to complete my project in the shortest amount of time as possible. I blame this crazy obsession on my mother. Her quest for perfection left her with every project unfinished, so I have a must complete my task fervor that keeps me going until I'm done. The fact that my house gets completely torn apart compounded by the no time to clean up after the kids while I am working leaves me crazed. I can't stand it when my house is a mess. I also usually pick the most stressful times in my life to decide that I HAVE to do some sort of project. Like this week. I am having surgery on my Jaw next Tuesday and my week is literally filled with Drs appts and volunteering at school and YW and about a million other things and I decided that I had to put shelves in my playroom closet THIS WEEK. I know, I'm crazy, but there is always a good amount of logic to my craziness. You see, we are having this gynormous sectional delivered for the playroom around the beginning of October. This couch is going to take up the majority of the room upstairs so a complete overhaul of the playroom is required. Now, I couldn't be sure that I could take on such a massive project in the midst of my recovery and you now know that I cannot live in chaos with stuff everywhere to get the couch in there so........it had to be done! The couch I must say is 11 feet by 11 feet of microfiber reclining heaven! Yes, squishy let your body melt down in and form concrete reclining heaven! When the couch arrives I want to plop down on it with a couple of great movies and never get up. Anyone want to come and watch movies with me in October? Anyway I thought I would put up a picture of my closet and my girls rooms that I just did. I know that anyone that is reading this already saw the girls rooms, but it is part of my project craziness so I thought I would include it here.

The closet looks boring in comparison, but I look at it and it just makes breathing easier. I have wanted to put shelves in that closet since we decided to build the house and just never made it a priority. We had an inefficient storage system in there and still a lot of toys out in the room. I can put tons and tons of stuff in the closet now and it just makes me deeply happy. The girls rooms were more of a creative fun and a joy that I was able to give them something fun. Next I need to put shelves in the end of my oldest daughter's closet. Again something that no one will ever see, but the fact that everything can have a place to be brings on a sense of peace. OK now I have to get off to the million and a half things I should be doing right now. :)

Family Search Indexing

Just thought I would jot down a little something about my latest obsession. We had a YW night where a return Sister Missionary from Temple Square came and taught us about family history and the need the church has for indexing names. It looked fun and it was a good way for me to fill my time with some service and help others do their family history since I haven't started mine yet. Baby steps! Anyway I came home and signed up and downloaded the software and got rolling. My first batch of 50 names took the longest just because of the learning curve and trying to decipher handwriting. Most of them I can just roll through now and I can keep a pretty good rhythm when there is legible handwriting. I do slow down when I get drawn in by the potential story that is there. It ranges anywhere from girls getting married at 16 which most of those were black females to quite a few 30 year old single white males and females. Some families had all their adult kids in 20's and 30's still living at home and single. Some huge age differences again mostly in the black (I will not use African American because the race is technically black)race with 16 year old girls marrying 60 year old men. The census was also used to track number of children born to a mother and the number of living children. This one always gets me sad. There was almost always never the same amount born to living. One woman went from 11 to 3 and then there were quite a few couples that had been married for 20-30 years never having had any children. This last one I did was crazy. They were all immigrants from Japan to Montana or somewhere (I can't remember because I never had to type it). Anyway the "Head" of the household was a 26year old man and 49 other immigrants were "boarders" at the same address. There could have been more, but that was all that was on my page. That gets you wondering. The ages varied mostly in the teens and 20's with the occasional 50 year old. That gets the old imagination flowing wondering what they were doing there. Why such a large group had hooked up. Did they come over together, they must have because they all had only been in the states for 3 months, so what were there plans? What ended up happening to them? I also got to do some Land Warrants and Revolutionary War pensions from the 1700's and birth certificates from Salt Lake for 1900. The birth certificates fascinated me because a good portion of the births were done by a physician in a hospital and not as many were done by midwives in the home. I don't know when I thought the hospital birth was introduced, but I guess I didn't think it was in 1910.

So, does this have anyone interested? If so, go to http://www.familysearchindexing.com/ and sign up. The cool thing is is that anyone can do it and you don't have to worry about not being able to read the handwriting. You do the page of 50 names and someone else does that same page and then another person looks at the 2 and makes the final call, so there is really nothing to fear. I mean I guess you could get an email saying that you are so terrible at it that we want you to stop, but I'm not thinking it is possible to be that bad. I have indexed 718 names so far and I hope to make it to 1000 before my surgery. It is probably a long shot since my week is crazy busy, but I figure that I will aim high and see what happens. I figure with all 4 of the kids out of the house on Tues and Thurs morning it is a wise use of my time so that I don't take up shopping as a hobby. :)

A Very Ariel Birthday

Jordy just turned 3 on the 30th of August and I decided that this year we were just going to celebrate it as a family. Keep it small, keep it simple. Jordy is obsessed will all things Ariel and Hello Kitty. So we made the trip to good 'ole Wal Mart to pick out the cake. She saw Ariel and would think of nothing else so we put in the order. Well, my brain was apparently on feeding the cazillion family members that we have here so I ordered the 1/2 sheet cake. Holy huge for a family party. OOPS! The kids have had fun trying to devour the entire cake so not that terrible of a mistake. I had plans for cutting it up and delivering it to family members, but that required actual effort so....sorry! :) It was Nate's usual Thursday late night and so I decided to brave Chuck e Cheeze by myself. Jordy was talking about going all day and I wanted to have 1 celebration this year and not multipule ones like we usually end up doing, so we went with out Dad. It turned out fine and the kids had a ball. By the time we got home Dad was there and we opened presants and had cake.



Jordy lovingly looking at Ariel in this picture


Jordy all decked out in her Ariel dress and shoes, princess gloves and High School Musical microphone.
She wore this outfit for 2 days straight until the lace trim gave her a rash and the shoes made her feet bleed. She has to fight Emma and Ethan for the microphone because it has 2 of the High School Musical songs on it to sing along too. All in all I would say that this little princess had a pretty excellent birthday.