Update

I've been feeling prompted to return to blogging for awhile now, but I always put it on the back-burner. I guess today I'm going to try to come back to blogging. I want my family to know what's going on in my life. I want to share things with them.

I guess this post will be an update on everything that has happened in the past couple months. We moved in with Mitchell's mom, Ellen, the beginning of April. Mitchell is taking this time to work on his art so that he can progress in his career.

I am 10 weeks pregnant with an "Oops!" baby; I had applied to attend BYU in January, but now I'm having a baby in November, so that's not happening. I was on a mood stabilizer for bipolar II disorder, but had to stop because of the pregnancy. I also can't take Xanax any longer. 

I am in the process of getting into the Mental Health system here so that I can get things figured out, but I've probably got a few more weeks before I get to see a psychiatrist. With all the moving and then medication changes, I've been struggling a bit with my mood and functioning and such. I'm just trying to take things slowly right now. 

Joseph is attending school at the "same" elementary school Mitchell went to; I used the quotation marks because it's a new building with none of the same teachers, but it has the same name, mascot, and location. He is doing pretty well. Some days are better than others, but that's how things always are.

That's the biggest stuff that's happened, and the basis of my life right now!

Craziness

Everything has been so crazy in our lives lately.

Last week, we decided to take one last trip to visit Mitchell's family in Virginia before our move to Texas. Late at night, smack-dab in the middle of Richmond, our car died. Thankfully, Mitchell's mom was driving through Richmond at the same time, so she was able to come pick the kids up. We were able to arrange with USAA to have the car towed to a nearby, reputable repair shop. There was a motel close enough for Mitchell and me to walk to and get a room for the night. In the morning, we found out that our engine was broken, rendering the car useless. So Mitchell's brothers, Grant and Ross, were able to pick us up and take us to their brother, Sam's, house where the kids were.

We arranged for my cousin, Amber, to overnight the title to our car so that we could sell it to a junkyard. And we were able to relax for a week in a small town in Virginia. The kids had the best time with their cousins, and spent hours outside every day. It was so great to kind of get away from all the stress of regular life. On Friday, Ross drove Mitchell back to Richmond, where Mitch was able to sell our poor, little car for $300. On Monday night, his mom took him to get a rental car, and we left very early Tuesday morning. We were able to use the car for less than 24 hours, which made it a lot cheaper, and the price was completely covered with the money we got from junking our car.

While in Virginia, we spent a lot of time pondering, praying, and discussing our situation. We came to the conclusion that Heavenly Father wants us in Georgia for a while longer, so we have decided not to move to Texas. Even though this seems like a very difficult path, as soon as we made the decision, my heart felt so light that I thought I would float away. I know that Heavenly Father is going to bless us to find a way to make things work.

Mitchell has already started applying to pretty much every job within walking distance. We walked to Walgreen's to get some milk and juice, which is 2-miles roundtrip. We have been working closely with several members of our ward, including the Bishop and members of both the Elder's Quorum and Relief Society. We are going to find ways to coordinate rides to grocery stores, places to do laundry, and maybe help getting a bike and/or wagon. We feel so blessed right now as we are learning to stand on our own feet for the first time ever.

Moving, Again.

We are moving again. My dad and Dena have graciously offered to get us a moving truck and let us live with them in Allen. This is a major blessing because we are totally out of money, the only reason we have money in our bank account right now is because we got birthday checks. And we've almost maxed out our credit card trying to stay in Atlanta to find work. It's going to be a big change for everyone, but we are excited to get to spend more time with my dad and family.

Our New Ward

Today was our second Sunday in our new ward. We are in the Kennesaw Mountain Ward, which is part of the Powder Springs Georgia Stake. I just checked, and our records have officially been transferred!

We've already been very active in the two weeks we've lived here. We've been to church twice, went to a "New Member" dinner with half the ward. I also went to a Relief Society activity and joined the ward choir.

This new ward is SO friendly. We were welcomed and greeted by so many people our first Sunday that I felt overwhelmed by names and couldn't remember most of them. I've been studying the program and paying close attention so that I can learn names quickly. And I've met several people in the ward that just seem...familiar, even though this is the first time I've met them. I always take that as a good sign because it usually means we'll become good friends.

I have really missed the Pioneer Park ward, though, and all the friends that I had there. I wonder how many Sundays will go by before I stop looking for Nicole or Kaydee to sit by in Relief Society. And it's weird when I think about needing someone to watch the kids, but realize that I can't just text Aja or Melissa. My hope is that I can make friends here that are as dear to my heart as those women are.

A Lot of Stuff

It has been a LONG time since I posted anything on my blog. I think I have pretty good excuses, though.

I noticed that the last date I posted was November 4th. Four days after that, I had my appendix out because it was enlarged.

Then, just when I had recovered, it was time for Mitchell's art show and we had family in town (the first week of December).

Mitchell graduated, Christmas came, and then everything was stressful while we tried to find work.

Mid-January, Mitchell got a job in Atlanta, and we had just under two weeks to move out to Georgia. Somehow we got packed fast enough, and we moved. We drove out in just three days. We stayed with Mitchell's dad for two weeks while we found our own place.

Now, we are renting a nice little house in downtown Marietta, Georgia. We are 16 miles from where Mitchell works, so a 20-40 minute drive, depending on traffic. We live a few blocks from historic Marietta and "the Square," which has tons of fun shops and restaurants. We have been here for two weeks now, but it's been a busy two weeks, so we are hardly moved in. We just got internet two days ago, and the gas was turned off for most of this week. It felt great to take a shower today!

Mitchell works long hours, and works pretty late, which may give me the chance to blog more often. I want to help all my family and friends keep up with this big change in our lives.

Busy and Tired

We have been so busy! We officially moved in on the 1st and then had until the 4th to finish our cleaning at Wymount. And since then, I've just been trying to unpack and organize as well as just get settled in. The only room that I've completely organized is the kitchen; everything else is still a wreck. and pretty difficult to maneuver around in sometimes. I've taken some pictures, but everything on and around my desk has been so messy that I kind of avoid my computer most of the time. We also have real cable for the first time in years, so I've been distracted by the TV. I've been watching a lot of the Olympics as well as enjoying having my favorite channel, HGTV.

The kids love having so much space to play in, so they are constantly running around. They've also been getting into a lot of trouble. We don't have any cabinet locks in the kitchen yet, so I'm constantly pulling them out of the cabinet under the sink (they like to pretend it's their car and they drive to places like Macey's and SmashBurger). They also like bringing all of their toys out to the living room and leaving them there, but they don't actually play with them. They like to be my helpers when it's time to load/unload the dishwasher or start a new load of laundry. Joseph loves watching the clothes "take a bath." The first couple naps/nights sleeping in their new room worried Annabelle a lot. She woke up after her first nap and was crying because she thought we left her. She would ask to go home whenever she got really tired, but now she's figured out that this is home.

I wanted to get pictures of the various stages of our moving in process, but that didn't happen at all. I could take pictures now, but it really just looks like we have a super messy house because most of the boxes are gone. I think I'm just going to wait to get pictures until we have everything set up. Some of the set up has to wait until the end of the month when we get our school loans in and can go get some bookshelves. Our Wymount apartment had built-in bookshelves, but this apartment doesn't, so we just have stacks of books laying all around the house. One of our bookshelves also fell apart during the moving process, so we have even less shelving than we were expecting to have. We also have no couch because they only way we could have gotten our old one into the apartment was to lift it over our 2nd floor balcony and bring it in through the sliding door. We decided we didn't want to do that for a $30 DI couch, so we are going to buy a more compact, but functional couch (it folds out into a full-size bed!) at IKEA.

All of this busy-ness has been very exciting and fun, but also very exhausting. I've been sleeping WAY longer at night because I keep getting so worn out, but I have been going (mostly) without naps, too. I think once things have settled down and I'm not doing so much organizing and unpacking, I won't be quite as tired. But it all could just be that I'm pregnant and I'll keep being tired for the next year or so...

Our New Apartment

On Saturday, after a good week of looking at apartments (we saw around 15 different places), we signed the lease for a new apartment. We are really excited! It's over 850 square feet and has an awesome living room. It's also cheaper than we would be paying if we had moved over to a 3 bedroom in Wymount, but it's SO much nicer! Our official move-in day is August 1st, but our landlord gave us permission to start moving some of our stuff over. Today we took a few loads of boxes that I had already packed. The kids loved playing around in all of the space and it's exciting for me to see our stuff going in. I took some pictures of it empty and I'll try to show the process of us moving in.

This is the first part of our living room (the lighting did not work for me). The sliding door leads to a wooden balcony/deck. Joseph is doing a little happy dance because he loves being there. 

 This is probably what would normally be the dining room portion of the living area, but we will be setting it up more like an office area. The white to the left is the fridge.

 This is my cute little kitchen. It's not large, but it's U-Shaped and is very functional. It has a dishwasher and the fridge is the side-by-side type with a water/ice dispenser. It's also red and that's the color I've always wanted my kitchen to be! And aren't the cabinets so cute?

 This is our bathroom. The bathtub is actually jetted and there is a timer on the wall for setting the jets when you want to use them. It's WAY deeper than any tub I've ever had in my life and I'm excited to take a bath in it.

This is going to be the "master" bedroom. It has the biggest closet and I like that it has a full length mirror, which we haven't had in about 3 years.

 And this will be the kids' room. In the closet, there is access to the attic where we will have tons of space to store things. 

I like that the apartment came with the cute curtains in all the rooms and it had a brand new A/C unit put in to replace the old swamp cooler. We also have a closet in the hallway with a full-size washer and dryer! Everything about this place is so great and it seems almost too good to be true that we will be living there for the next 9 months (at least). I can't wait to actually move in and start living there.

More to Come

I have so much I want to blog about. We took tons of 4th of July pictures and I've been taking other pictures of the kids for posts. But we are apartment shopping - again - and I'm SO tired (we looked at 5 different places today). So I will have to blog about everything later.

Update

I'm already worn out from the day and it's only 2! I've been doing laundry like crazy, trying to catch up. I also cleaned our very messy living room. Joseph and I went for a walk for about 30 minutes. And the heat index is 97 degrees today. I'm too tired to think of anything else to write. We have made a lot of progress on packing. And things are good.

Packing and Fun Pregnancy Stuff

Mitchell stayed home from work yesterday and we cleaned and packed most of our office. We have 6 packed boxes and 2 that are almost full. He also cleaned our living room carpet with a carpet cleaner we borrowed from a family at church. It had so many stains and it looked horrible even though it's only 3 or 4 months old. Now it looks beautiful again. Our place is back on the market. We haven't had anyone come look at it, but I'm not expecting us to. For some reason, the realtors don't like showing properties that have people living in them. Stupid, huh? I guess it's okay for now, because only the living room and dining/office look nice right now, the rest is a disaster.

I'm 22 weeks along now. And I'm dealing with lots of fun pregnancy symptoms like heartburn, leg cramps, weird skin issues, fatigue, memory loss, abdominal cramps (it's almost like having my period!)... not to mention (TMI alert!) the uti and yeast infections that I had at the same time. Yesterday, I said, "Why does being pregnant have to hurt so much?" Mitchell says, "Because that's what the Lord told Eve. There's a verse in the scriptures, do you want me to look it up and read it to you?" The last part was said a teasing/sarcastically. I love my husband, he's good at making me see the good/valuable side of things.

I can't believe it's been nearly a month since I've written anything. I think part of my problem is that I think this isn't a big enough priority, so I do other things instead. I haven't really been allowing myself very much computer time, lately. The thing is that blogging and journaling have always been therapeutic and relaxing for me. So I'm going to try harder to remember to post. But things are pretty busy right now.

We went to Georgia to visit Mitchell's dad and brother on the first weekend of the month. We had a really great time there, especially Joseph. I took a few pictures that I'll try to post eventually.

We have an apartment in Provo now. It's in the BYU student housing. We just paid the deposit on it this week.

I'm 20 weeks along in the pregnancy and this afternoon, we'll be finding out if the baby is a boy or a girl.

We should be leaving in about 4 weeks or so. I only packed my first box last night. But I've been cleaning out drawers and closets and posting things on craigslist.org. I'm probably going to try to organize a yard sale in a few weeks.

Liz will be getting here in a couple weeks to help me with packing and Joseph. She'll be driving halfway with us. We'll leave her in Texas and she'll fly back to Idaho from there. I know she's going to be a lot of help.

Joseph is moving from the sweet baby stage to the tantrum-throwing, trouble-making, picky, cranky toddler stage. He's also getting another molar this week, which is making it even worse. He's 18 months old today. We just got back from his appointment. He's still in the 3rd percentile, which is really worrying his doctor. We just have to keep trying to fatten him up.

Alright, I still have to finish eating and take a shower before my ultrasound. Life seems to be getting busier everyday. I can't wait for the trip out to Utah and I can't wait to see family and friends.