Since I turned 18 and moved out of my house I have lived somewhere new probably every year.  WOW! That is a lot of different places.  I have moved to several different states, Indiana, Florida, Nevada, back to Florida and now Virginia.  I think the longest place I lived was like 18 months.  Shortest was only a couple months. 

I am so tired of moving.  Finding a place, dishing out all that money on deposits, moving trucks, gas and everything that goes a long with moving it’s exhausting and expensive.  Now that we have a family of 6 it can only be that much more difficult. 

I don’t want to move again.   Tony works about an hour and ten minutes from home and there is this little town  that he travels through along the way.  It’s called Middleburg…very lovely town.  It has a lot of large homes, seems very upscale.  One of those towns where everyone knows everyone.  Lil ice cream parlor, lil clothing shops and restaurants, very cute.  Well Tony took a trip around the town the other day and he said there were a ton of houses for rent and for sale.  OMG I would love to live there.  I DON’T want to move though.

I have settled in my head that we will stay here, for a decent amount of time.  I mean if I can make it through 11 mice, I can handle living in this house.  We have amazing landlords.  When something goes wrong they are here pretty quick to fix it.  They thank us all the time for being great tenants and say they hope we stay for a long time.  They want to sell the home to us one day but I certainly don’t think we will do that.  It’s not my dream home.  It’s old and needs work, time and money I don’t think we would be willing to put in to this place. 

We do however need to make the house more accommodating for our large family. We also need to make it a little more kid friendly.  Lil Tony likes to go upstairs and play and I wouldn’t mind so much if he couldn’t have access to our bedroom and the bathroom.  Since we live in an old house we have old door knobs, we could replace them but it would be out of place to just replace one or two.

So in order to be able to lock the doors and keep the lil ones out we put some locks on the door.

Kind of cheesy but so far it has served it’s purpose.  LOL, only been a couple days.  The other project we took on the other day was building some shelves.  We have a hall closet upstairs that we use for storage and for the lil ones clothes.  Their room doesn’t have a closet.  It’s convenient for me to have it all in there.  The problem is there was only a small bookshelf that I had all the clothes on and with 3 kids, that was certainly not enough.  So we built some shelves, when I say we I mean Tony.  LOL!  We decided to just get some cheap wood but Tony really did an amazing job.  He made me some “L” shaped corner shelves and I painted them white.  I really think they look pretty good.

We have several other projects we want to do.  Tony LOVES to build things and it is usually cheaper than buying something.  He is going to use our existing kitchen table and make a bigger one.  We need more table top.  He is also going to build a wood toy box and a wood frame for Nicki’s bed in her new room.  I am really excited.  Now if only we could find a place in the kitchen to install a dishwasher, we would be in good shape.  LOL!

The snow is melting and it is all muddy and slushy outside.  Not a good combo, when we went to the store last night the kids feet were muddy and wet and it got all over the car seats.  YUCK!  Now that Christmas is over the snow can certainly melt and not come back this season. 

All I really wanted was a white Christmas and I got just that.  When the winter storm came last week it made me very nervous that Tony had to drive in it.  There were lots of accidents and people getting stuck in the snow.  I am sure half the people out there don’t half whole life insurance.   As I get older I realize I have 4 children and need to make sure they are taken care of if something were to ever happen to Tony or I.  We have no insurance or savings of any sort to make sure they are taken care of.  Tony is our sole provider and if anything were to ever happen to him we would be in a world of trouble.  The problem is I never want to think that something will happen…..oh no it couldn’t happen to me.  I would be lost without Tony and it feels scary to make those kind of plans or arrangements.  I do realize it’s necessary and Tony and I do need to start talking about it and getting some quotes.

Now that the holidays are over I need to plan how I want the kids rooms set up.  I already put away the tree, I know bah humbug…..well my kids kept touching it and half my ornaments were broken so I didn’t need the headache any longer.  While the tree was up I had the kids toys in the room that will be Nicki’s.  So I will need to get all the toys out.
The next step will be to patch her walls and get the room painted.  I bought her a bedding set for Christmas.  I am not sure if I want to coordinate the wall color with the bed spread or not.  The colors are pink, white and black and the pink is pretty bright.  I might just want to paint the walls white and put decorations on the walls that will match.  I also want to get some matching rugs.  One to go in the attached bathroom and one to go in her room.  She has tile floor in there so a nice rug will make it more comfy. 

 I need to get her a mattress and make the bed frame.  The other rooms will need to be arranged, Lil Tony is going in Nicki’s old room which will need to be painted a different color.  It is currently pink.  LOL!  I will also need to do something to the room Isabel will be in. 

I will be so happy to have all the kids in their new rooms.  We plan on staying in this house for several years and we need to utilize all the space we have.

TOO FUNNY!!!

A little late in the day but MERRY CHRISTMAS to all!  Today was a great day.  My kids slept in, well Isabel and Lil Tony did.  Nicki was up pretty early but watched TV until the rest of us woke up.

We woke up around 8:30am and came downstairs.  The lil ones saw their tricycles and immediately hopped on and rode around the house.  We began opening the gifts and both kids would open one gift and stop and play with it.  It took them forever to get thru their toys.

After gifts I made breakfast.  We eat homemade breakfast all the time so it was nothing out of the norm or a special meal, just some eggs, country potatoes, sausage, toast, oatmeal and fruit smoothies.  It was delicious. 

After breakfast Tony and I relaxed watching TV and playing on the computer, the kids played with all their new toys and Nicki put away all her new clothes.

In the afternoon one of our friends came over, and shortly thereafter Tony’s dad and family came over.  It was a great day.  Very relaxing and a great day with the family.   We ended with a ham dinner and some leftovers from last night.  It was delicious.  I am so thankful that Tony had the day off, if we were still in Florida he would have been working. 

So I say again, MERRY CHRISTMAS!  Hope you all had a fantastic day!

When we moved to Virginia back in June, everyone around said that they rarely get snow.  They said some flurries maybe but never anything substantial.  Well in the middle of last week we started hearing that we may get some snow.  The news was telling us to prepare by getting bread, milk, cat litter (to put under tires for traction) and other items.  Well we didn’t really take them serious but we had food in the house so we weren’t that concerned.

In the middle of the week they said 6-12″ of snow would start overnight in to Saturday.  Well when Friday evening actually came they started saying 12-18″ and possibly more.  Around 10pm in started snowing and it kept snowing and snowing and snowing.  LOL!  By 10am we already had 9″ and it was still coming down.  It didn’t stop until late Saturday night. 

I am not sure how much we ended up getting but it was a lot.  My dog wouldn’t even go outside to use the bathroom.  We had to park on the street because there was so much snow and by the time Tony got home from work it was pretty late and dark to be shoveling. 

Saturday morning when it had only been snowing for about 7 hrs, Tony had to go to work….it usually takes him just over an hour to get to work and it took him just over 2 hrs to get there.  The weather and streets had gotten so bad that his store actually closed at 4pm (it’s usually open 24hrs) and it wasn’t going to reopen until 10am Sunday morning.  On his way home he got stuck going up a hill (very hilly in Virginia) but he made it out ok.  It still took him over 2 hrs to get home.  I was happy when he was home safe.

I am really not sure what the total inches of snow that fell but some places got 16″ and others got more than that.

Here are some pics:

I wish I wasn’t pregnant this Christmas because I would have so totally loved to decorate the outside of the house.  Well I wish I had the money to do so as well.  We don’t really have any decorations except ones for the tree.  Maybe next year I will be able to decorate the outside of my house like this:

Or maybe this one: