Moving Day!

Yesterday we moved out of the house where we have lived for the past three years.  It's a good move.  We're moving to the north end of the city where all our friends and family live.  We've felt a little isolated the past 3 years, living at the opposite end of the city, a 45 minute drive away, in good traffic, from family and friends.  It makes it hard to get together with people when we all have young children and bedtimes and naptimes to worry about, adding a 45 minute drive in there!  It's kept us from being in a small group and from many church activities too.  We are now just a 5-15 minute drive from pretty much all our friends and family and all our activities, except Jeff's work.  We like our new house.  It has beautiful hardwood floors and granite countertops in the kitchen and bathrooms.  And the backyard is HUGE and beautiful!  Exactly what we wanted for our boys! Plus, we have 2 great playgrounds in walking distance and we're just a few minutes from Bowness Park.
But, there was some sadness too.  Jeff and I built this house together before we were married.  A lot of time and stress went into that house!  Everything in it was chosen by us.  We custom-designed our kitchen, and man, I loved my kitchen!! (Even though being pregnant and having young children the whole time we lived there, I didn't spend as much time in it as you might have thought!)  The day after we moved into the house, we found out I was pregnant with Cole.  Our little miracle baby.  I thought it would be years before that happened, if it ever did at all.  We brought two babies home to that house.  I spent many, many nights sitting in our green Safari nursery, nursing babies who didn't want to sleep through the night. (The youngest one still doesn't!)  Last summer, we got to know our neighbors well, building a fence together and barbequing.  We were blessed with wonderful neighbors and we will really miss them.  In three relatively short years, we formed a lot of memories in that house.
I got to thinking about it too, and realized, 3 years is one of the longer periods I have spent living in the same house!  Like most MKs, I've moved around a lot.  I've said goodbye to more people than a lot of people have even met in 33 years.  You`d think it`d get easier, but it never does!  I guess deep down inside, there`s a longing to just be settled.  To not have to say goodbye anymore.  Of course, I know that`s not real life.  Life is made up of hellos and goodbyes.  Of new experiences, and changes.  But hopefully this move will mean the end of goodbyes for a while.  We plan to stay in this house for a long time.  We want our boys to be able to stay in the same school once they start, and to grow up together with the friends they are starting to make even now.   It`s hard to leave the house where we started out our lives together, but hey, we`re only 3 years in!  Our life as a family is just beginning and there will be many, many wonderful memories to be made in this new house.  I can`t wait to experience them!

Our life lately

Once again, it has been awhile since I have made a blog post!  So, this will just be a general update on our life the past little while.

We have sold our house and will be moving up to the north end of the city on May 28.  Under 3 weeks left! We're both excited about the move.  We moved down to this end of the city because I was working south of the city, but since I'm no longer working there and all our friends, family, and most of our activities are up in the north end, we've been thinking for awhile about moving back up there.  After talking about it for over a year, we decided to just bite the bullet and do it.  The neighborhood we're moving into is on the edge of the city, very close to our church and not far from my parents and sister.  Our house will be a little smaller than what we have now, but the trade off is that the back yard is huge!  The kids will be able to have a big playcentre, we'll have room to entertain, and they'll have lots of room to run.  Cole is quite excited about the big yard he is going to have!  Selling the house was quite the pain.  I won't go into detail, but it was stressful.  Jeff was very, very happy to be able to put that sold sign up!

Packing is coming along pretty well.  We've got most of the non-essential stuff packed and are pretty much down to things we will have to pack in the last week, like kitchen items and toilatries.  I think the boys have been sensing that something's up, because they've been a little unsettled and not sleeping so well at night.  Well, Zach hasn't been sleeping well for a while, I think because of teething, but Cole's been having a harder time falling asleep and has been waking at night too.  He knows we're moving and is excited, but I don't think he quite gets what it means, and I'm sure all the boxes and packing make him a bit anxious.  Hopefully he will adjust well to the move.

We welcomed a new niece to our family in early April.  Little Isabella is beautiful!  She is only the second girl on my side of the family, so we were very excited to have another baby girl!  We're looking forward to the addition of another member of the family any day now when my brother and sister-in-law have their first little one.  This one was shy, didn't like getting his or her picture taken, so the gender will be a surprise.  Which really, is the most fun anyways!

Cole and Zach continue to grow up too fast.  We have been fortunate to have a pretty healthy spring, with only some minor coughs.  Zach is 8 months already!  I can't believe how the time has flown.  He started sitting up at 5 months and is now crawling and starting to pull up on things!  Before I know it, he'll be walking!  Yikes!  He has his first tooth and his second is trying very hard to push through.  He's a little chatterbox.  He's still quite good natured, but I think he is going to be more introverted than Cole.  He doesn't seem to enjoy big groups of people the way Cole did, and still does.  He's very much mommy's little boy, and mommy loves her snuggles with him!
Cole continues to develop his speech really well and amaze and amuse us with the things he comes out with!  Yesterday, he was standing on a kitchen chair, which he is not supposed to do.  Jeff asked him if he was supposed to stand on the chair, and he said, "no."  Jeff said, "so what are you?" (I think he was maybe going to say what are you supposed to do?) and Cole said, "In trouble!"  We all cracked up, and he didn't end up getting in trouble! He shocked us a couple of weeks ago by counting to 12 for his grandparents!  We had no idea he could do that!  He can say his alphabet and is learning his colors too.  He enjoys singing and often, when he is supposed to be going to sleep, I can hear the sweet, off-key strains of  "Baby Bayuga" (Baby Baluga) coming from his room.  We've been struggling a bit lately because he has started to get a little aggressive with his baby brother - pushing him over and headbutting him with no provocation.  That has been our main issue of late.  We've been using time-outs, but they don't seem particularly effective, so I'm not real sure what to do about it.  If anyone has any suggestions, we're open to them!  Other than that though, he's a very affectionate, funny little guy.  He certainly has a mind of his own, and you can tell he's 2, but so far, the terrible twos haven't been too terrible! :)

On Saturday night, my cousins from Saskatoon were in town, so we all got together at her sister's house for a barbeque.  Unfortunately, the weather wasn't the greatest for it!  It was the first time we'd had all our little ones together at once, so we had to get a picture of them all.  I like to think our grandma and grandpa Hansen were looking down at all their great-grandchildren and smiling!

Well, I think that's about it.  I guess I should get started on some packing or cleaning!  Lots to do!

First bath together!

Now that Zach is sitting up so well, we decided that he was ready to try out his first bath in the big tub.  His big brother needed a bath too, so I decided to try giving them a bath together.  It was great!  For the first few minutes, Zach pretty much ignored Cole and was just busy chewing on a toy.  But then Cole splashed, and I said, "splash" and Zach thought that was great, and started splashing his own hands!  Then Cole started throwing toys and saying "splash" and Zach thought that was absolutely hilarious!  He was screaming with laughter!  It was so cute!  They are really starting to take an interest in one another now and interact with and play together.  It is so sweet to watch!
It's hard to get good pictures while I'm concentrating on making sure Zach stays upright and Cole doesn't land a flying arm or foot in his face, but here's one that came out pretty cute and doesn't show anything inappropriate!

Easter cookies

Holidays are so much fun now that Cole is old enough to start getting into the celebrations.  We made Easter sugar cookies on Monday.  It's quite a messy and time consuming pursuit with a toddler!  But so much fun.  Of course, the most fun part is how excited he gets about it.  And he loved his special time with mommy that little brother was too young to participate in. 

We had to lose the shirt, it got too much flour on it! Baby brother looking on.

Decorating a cookie.

Daddy helped out when he got home.

Big Boys!

Cole and Zach had their 2 year and 6 month check-ups today.  Both boys are doing great!  Cole is 27 lbs. 12 ounces and 35 3/4 inches tall.  He wasn't too thrilled to be at the doctor, but he did pretty well.  Although he wouldn't let the doctor look at his throat.  The doctor was quite impressed with his speech and the fact that he is putting 7-8 word sentences together already.   Zachary is 16 lbs. and 25 1/2 inches tall.  He has a little congestion in his chest from a cold, but otherwise, he's doing great.  He is still exclusively breastfed, because he does not want to eat solids!  We've tried oatmeal, which makes him sick, pears, peas, and sweet potatoes.  All of them get a turned up nose!  He's growing well and is a very happy little boy, so I guess there's no rush.  It's just quite a difference from Cole, who was so eager to eat solid foods!  He is sitting like a pro and getting more and more mobile.  It probably won't be too much longer before he's crawling!
I feel so very blessed to have two healthy little boys!

House hunting

A month after we got married, Jeff and I moved into our house in the south end of Calgary, a house that we had built together.  We had both lived up north, but because we were both working in the south end of the city - in fact, I was working 20 minutes south of the city, which from my house, was over an hour commute on a daily basis - so we decided moving south would be the best way to go.  If only we'd known that I'd get pregnant immediately and only work for another 8 months....  Since Cole was born, we've been talking about moving back up to the north end of the city.  Our Church is there, my family is up there, all our friends live up in the north end.  Although we love our house and have great neighbors here, who we will really miss, we have been feeling a bit isolated and disconnected down here.  When you have 2 young kids, the hour that it takes to drive home after an evening outing to visit family or friends can often be prohibitive, so we don't get to nearly as many things as we like.  And since most of our friends and family also have young children, it works both ways!  So, after talking about it for 2 years, and trying once in the past, but pulling our house off the market because of the financial crash, we have decided to go for it and move back up north.
So, we are currently trying to sell our house, and hunting for a new one.  It's been an adventure, to say the least!  We have looked at probably close to 50 houses already.  Turns out, we're rather demanding homebuyers!  Problem is, we have a house that we love.  Jeff has a garage that fits both our vehicles plus has room for all his tools, a very rare find in this city.  I have a big, beautiful kitchen, a huge ensuite, and a room all to myself for scrapbooking.  Our only regret is that we have a very tiny yard.  We'd love to have more room for the kids to play.  We're having a very hard time finding a house that compares,on a lot that we like, at least, in the range we're willing to pay!
Today, we thought we finally found the house.  It is a beautiful 4 bedroom house, with a good sized kitchen, a formal dining and living room, and a huge great room.  It has an undeveloped basement, which Jeff loves, because then we can do whatever we want with it.  And it had a great sized lot, with a very nice playcentre already on it. It's in a neighborhood we both like, with a community centre that has a splash park and playground, and where lots of our friends live already.   We both loved it.  But...we found out that the neighborhood it is in is what is called a "bare land condo development."  I'm not sure what exactly that is, but essentially, these large, expensive, single family detached homes, are subject to a condo board!  So, there are rules on what you can put on your property and where, rules on where you can plant trees, rules on where you can park....  It's quite ridiculous!  Whoever heard of a single family home being subject to a condo board?   There was even one rule in the agreement that said that owners shall not make or permit any disturbing smells in the unit.  I had to laugh, because with a toddler and an infant, there is no shortage of disturbing smells in my house!!  But seriously, does that mean that I might get fined if I cook ethnic food and you can smell it from the street?  Or if we barbeque in the back yard and a neighbor finds the smell of meat cooking disturbing?  Or it I plant a lilac bush (if I can even get that approved in the first place!)?   Aargh!  Jeff wants to put a shed or workshop on the property, which would have room for it, since the garage will not hold both our vehicles and all his tools.  But it looks like it's unlikely to get approved.  So, it looks unlikely that we'll be buying this house.  Very sad.
On a somewhat lighter note, we thought maybe yesterday we were going to look at our dream house.  We were browsing through foreclosures and found a bungalow on 2 acres of property in a very swanky area of the city, where most of the properties would be well over a million dollars.  And this one was under $800,000.00!  The pictures on MLS made it look like it could be a nice place.  Check it out, http://abmls.mlxchange.com/Pub/EmailView.asp?r=1169758620&s=ALB&t=ALB  not too bad, right? 
Well, the realtor was quite creative with the photography, and that blanket of snow covers a multitude of evils!  Oh my goodness, it was bad!!  The yard was overgrown and filled with dead trees, garbage, cigarrette butts, and crap, literally.  The house was very run down, dingy and "rustic" to put it politely.  It obviously had mice, and we're pretty sure it had had a grow-op in the garage!  I wish I would've taken pictures of what it was really like! You would've had to bulldoze everything and start all over again, and then a person could've maybe had their dream house.  But, the new ring road they are building here will be running right in front of it, so that's not ideal either.  It was not a challenge we wanted!  I was just eager to get out of there, I felt dirty afterwards!
So.... the house hunt continues.  It is hard not to get discouraged, when we look and look and nothing seems to quite meet our needs.  On the other hand, our house hasn't sold yet either, so that holds us back from making an offer anyways.  This is definitely an exercise in trusting God for his perfect timing!  Meanwhile, looking and dreaming is fun, trying to keep a house show-worthy with 2 small children is not!!
If you pray, your prayers that this will all work out and that we will not become too discouraged would be very much appreciated!

A couple more pictures of my boys

Just because it's been a few days since I've made a post! :)

I decided when I was pregnant with Zach that I wanted to try this babywearing thing.  I carried Cole around a lot, but figured, with a toddler who was going to need my attention, I was going to need my hands free once in a while.  So I got a couple of different baby carriers - a Cuddly wrap and a sling.  Actually, the sling was given to me by my aunt.  I really like using both of them, although I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I have only recently figured out how to wear the sling properly so that it doesn't cut into my shoulder!  Now that Zach is getting bigger, I'm really wanting to get an Ergo carrier, as I hear great things about them.  Just have to convince my husband it's a good investment!

Yesterday, I was tying on my wrap to put Zach, who was being a fussy muss into it, and Cole decided he wanted to be carried in it instead.  Cole thought it was pretty cool! 

Okay, my baby is not allowed to be doing this already!!  He's not pulling himself up, but his balance is amazing!  He'd better not start walking soon, or I am going to cry! ;)

Going after mommy's phone already!  I think big brother taught him that!