Speaking of the Romney house, part of what caused the chaos in our lives the past few months is that we bought a house! We love it, and it has been SO fantastic to live in our very own house for the first time. We love not having neighbors under us, so I no longer have to worry when I get out of the shower to find that Naomi has been practicing her "tap-dancing" on the kitchen floor for the past 30 minutes. We love living in a cute, safe neighborhood. We love having a big garage and flat driveway for the kids to ride their bikes on and color with sidewalk chalk. And we LOVE having a yard for the first time ever... and it's fenced! Extra bonus.
Sadly, although we moved in close to 3 months ago, we still haven't been able to take the obligatory "family in front of newly-bought-home" photo. Our move-in day was insane, due to the fact that we had to move up our move with less than 24 hours' notice... we were supposed to get a crazy snowstorm on the Saturday morning we had planned to move, so we moved on Friday night instead, which was made possible by our awesome packing skills (we had pretty much finished our packing four days early) and the amazing people who helped us from church! While I didn't get to do all the deep cleaning I had wanted to and we had to move all of the basement boxes and furniture into the garage instead of the house since the basement carpets were still soaking wet from the carpet cleaner, we did get everything moved in time. And as crazy as everything was, we were so grateful we made the decision to move a day early! The snowstorm on Saturday came, and it was as bad as we'd been warned... but it came hours earlier than they had expected. We were too tired on Friday night to drop the moving truck off when we finally finished moving everything, so we decided to get up early and drop it off first thing in the morning, before the snow started. But since the snow started at like 6:30 instead of after 9, we ended up taking the truck back in the thick of the storm, and I got into my very first accident on the way home! Thankfully, it was a minor accident, and it only involved our car and the curb, but it did enough damage to hurt our wallet quite a bit!
Another cause of the craziness of our past few months is that I got horribly sick less than 24 hours after we moved in with what we later found out was Mono! Mono sucks, you guys. Like really, seriously sucks. I had a good 10 days of fevers and nausea and body aches, and then a few weeks of one of the worst sore throats I've ever had, and I'm honestly not sure whether the fatigue has finished with me yet, even though it's been more than 2 1/2 months. I'll think I'm feeling good, and then I'll have a day where I push myself maybe a little too much, and then I'm totally exhausted for the next week. I still have days where I take crazy long naps (I'm talking like 3 or 4 hours...) and then still go to bed before Jacob because I'm just that tired. But most of the time I'm feeling pretty good, and we've finally been able to get some unpacking done this month! Yay! So hopefully we'll be ready to take some pictures of our cute new house soon.
One big change coming up for our family is that I am opening a home preschool this fall! That was actually the biggest factor in our decision to buy a house this year... teaching preschool classes has been something that I've been thinking about and wanting to do for a couple years now, but my largest obstacle was always that we didn't own a home. So Jacob & I decided to go for it and buy a house so I can teach preschool! I'm super excited and also completely terrified! I've been working hard the past couple months getting my website up & running, getting the house ready for all of the inspections, and trying to get the word out so parents know I'm here. It has been a little hard not to get discouraged lately--it has been harder than I anticipated to advertise and get the word out to people who might be interested, and there have been quite a few costly changes that we need to have done to the house in order to pass the necessary inspections, so that has been frustrating. But we are trying to stay positive and have faith that we can make it work out!
Naomi turned 6 last week, and she had her first "real" birthday party where she invited friends from school. She wanted the theme to be Jake and the Neverland Pirates so we had lots of fun pirate decor and accessories, pirate-themed food, a treasure hunt, and a pinata... although the pinata did not match the theme. I found a treasure chest pinata, which would have been perfect, but Naomi insisted she wanted the brightly-colored donkey pinata. So we had a pirate party with a donkey pinata, and Naomi loved it!
Naomi had part of this week off from school for Spring Break, so the girls and I had a fun couple days together at home! We dyed Easter eggs with one of Naomi's friends, had an Easter egg hunt in the house, painted our nails for Easter, had a movie day with popcorn and The Good Dinosaur, and today we spent a couple hours curling their hair and taking fun pictures in their Easter dresses.
Jacob has been working super hard lately at both of his jobs, which has been exhausting for him but helpful for us financially, especially since the costs of getting the house ready for preschool have been quite a bit more expensive than we expected. I've never had to hire plumbers, or contractors, or electricians before since we have always rented, so I've been having fun figuring all of that out! It's been kind of exciting, making me feel like a real homeowner and all... but I'm guessing that excitement will end as soon as I start getting the bills in the mail. :)
Well, I think I've covered all the major changes and updates in our lives! As we slowly get the house unpacked and decorated and looking pretty, I'll get some pictures posted! We're planning on painting the basement in the next few weeks so I can finally get all of the wall decor hung and get it looking pretty for the preschool. I'll definitely post some photos when we finish with that!
