Rodeo Snow

This week was Rodeo Break. Here in Tucson instead of getting President's Day off, the schools all get two days off for Rodeo Break when the Rodeo is in town the last full week of February. Having lived here all my school years and then some, I've never been to the rodeo. Every year I say maybe next year. And really, maybe we will make it next year. If it doesn't snow.

Tuesday at preschool they had a rodeo day. Here's cowgirl Rachel with her horse she made at preschool:

Notice how everyone is in short sleeves. It was up at or near 70 degrees Tuesday.

Wednesday we got this:

An Arizona blizzard. Or what most of the country would call snow flurries. Rachel had a blast. Annie liked the snow on the ground, but not falling into her face. While the snow was actually coming down she mostly just wanted me to hold her.

 

They let the kids at the school behind our house out to run around in the snow, figuring, I'm sure, that there was no point in trying to keep their attention on anything school-related with white stuff falling from the sky. Besides, you never know how long snow will last here. This snow was melted within a couple hours of it falling.

Annie liked seeing the snow splat on the cement.

 

Later in the afternoon the snow started falling again, so after dinner the girls headed back out to play some more. Rachel made a snow man.

Since we live in Arizona and the snow only sticks once every 3 or 4 years, we don't really have snow gear. Every time the girls came in they were soaked. Though after the first time we did start wrapping their shoes in plastic. I didn't think they'd appreciate Saran Wrapped legs and arms, so we left it with the feet. It kept their feet dry, and we just went through all their pants in two days instead of two weeks.

Luckily we do have a sled. Um. I mean a laundry basket. It worked just fine for "sledding" in our flat backyard. Ryan and Annie both got a kick out of it. Rachel was too busy building her snowman to worry about such things.

 

 

It snowed some in the night, as well, so the girls woke up and headed back out for some more fun.
 

It was much warmer on Thursday, though it still took a while for the snow to melt. The snow in our garden, which is completely shaded at this time of year, lasted well into the afternoon. It's always nice to get a good snow. And nice that it doesn't stick around too long, too. Just one reason I love Arizona.

And apparently our new blog tradition is to include at least on picture of Ryan practicing his climbing skillz. 

I suppose they kind of look like brother and sister, huh? :)

Sickies, snow, and Valentine's Day

Last week a cold spell came back to Tucson. Annie took the opportunity to steal Rachel's boots. It was so funny to see her trying to walk in them. Feet apart, waddling like a penguin.

Rachel had been sick over the weekend with a fever but no other symptoms, except a tummy ache when the fever would spike. Monday afternoon it started snowing, and since that happens so rarely in Tucson--maybe once a year--we bundled up and headed outside. The girls had fun trying to catch some snowflakes on their tongues. The snow only lasted a few minutes, then we were back inside to warm up and treat Rachel like a sickie that needed rest, not running around out in the cold.

That night Rachel and I, and a little later Annie, too, all decided we had to get rid of everything we'd eaten that day. Thank goodness for Jacob. He took care of the girls puking all night and let me lay in peace and throw up in peace throughout the night. By morning we were all exhausted, but our stomachs had calmed a bit, thankfully. We spent most of the day watching movies, or playing on the iPad. A true sick day for all. :)

At lunch time I got everyone some mild food, then went and put Annie and Ryan down for a nap. A little later I thought I ought to go check on Rachel. I walked through the house twice and couldn't find her anywhere and she didn't respond to me calling out to her. I kind of got a little worried there for a minute. Until I remembered hearing a sigh in the kitchen a little while before that I thought had come through the baby monitor. Turns out it was Rachel. She was too tired to finish her lunch, I guess.

 That made twice in 4 days that she had taken a nap, which she hasn't done since she was 3. That's when you know she's really sick. Luckily that was the last day of sickness for everyone for a while.

Valentine's day came and the girls were really excited to get cups that lit up and their own heart balloons.
 

The best thing, though, was Ryan's light spinner thing that he got. The girls loved playing with it, and whenever Ryan sees the lights he says "ooooooh." You can see his little lips puckering to say it in this picture:

 

And one more Ryan climbing picture. He's following in his sisters' footsteps realizing how fun this little table can be to climb and play on.

 

More of Ryan

Hard to believe, but Ryan will be 11 months old on Monday. That means he's just a month away from turning 1. Though anytime Annie meets someone she tells them, "I Annie. I am two. Rachel's five. And Ryan's one." Close enough. He's getting braver about taking steps on his own, but still doesn't put too many together before he falls over and goes back to his faster mode of movement: crawling.

He likes climbing and has no fear of falling. At the park he crawls as fast as he can to the slide and dives head-first down with a huge smile on his face. Here are a few pics of our little climber. 

Gotta love the pose there.

He's a smiley kid.

 

As soon as the dishwasher opens Ryan beelines it for the dishwasher. If we forget to close it when he's in another room and he comes in and notices it, this is what we find:

 

Today the kids were outside playing while I was making dinner. We had watered the plants, then I left them out there because they were playing nicely and Ryan wasn't even trying to eat the dirt. I kept peeking out to make sure Ryan was staying away from the garden where he finds his favorite dirt to eat, and he was. But one time when I peeked out I noticed Annie close to him with a stick rubbing on his hair. When I went to investigate further I found that she had been using the stick to dig up some mud, then decorate Ryan with it. And he liked it.

"Huh?"

"Ooh, a camera! Let me get my grubby paws on that thing!"

Dinner prep was put on hold while both Annie and Ryan got an early bath. At least they were playing nicely together for a little while. A nice change from Annie's constant torturing of the poor boy.

Rachel's camcorder

Here is a selection of some of the less blurry pictures Rachel has taken since she was gifted with our old camcorder.

She really enjoyed the fact that the viewfinder turned around so she could see herself. She has MANY videos taken of herself with that cool feature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are LOTS of random shots. The ones with people in them are in the minority. Most are like the blurry picture of Ryans walking toy above, or of some of Rachel's favorite toys (like Shasta, the dog, or the My Little Pony).

Rachel has a TON of videos of herself and her animals and even movies that she was watching. Here are a few to see the budding actress/filmmaker.

She captures the "important" stuff. I'm sure we'll be glad in 15 years to have these to look back at and laugh.

Ryan

One of Ryan's new favorite hangouts: the cupboard. Perfect size for him.
 

The house hunt

So, here's the story of our house hunt. The week before Christmas my little brother, Todd, and I were chatting about our house and Todd ended up offering to help us with a down payment for a new house so we wouldn't have to wait another year or so to find a new house that would fit us better. Merry Christmas to us. I had our realtor who had helped us buy this house come by that week and go over what we could do to get our house ready to sale. Mostly this included de-cluttering and moving some big pieces of furniture out so or house would look bigger. We also decided to do some painting and get new carpet since ours was well used and couldn't get all the way clean. And Annie decided to pour an entire bottle of white out all over the carpet in her room. Good thing we were replacing the carpet anyway. :)

So the day after Christmas I started packing away lots of toys and books and junk. We quickly filled our garage and I think in the course of the next month I rearranged the garage 3 times to fit all the boxes I was packing up. We got all the painting and re-carpeting done the week after Christmas when my parents were visiting Todd and Savannah in Seattle, so we got to stay at their house while our house was getting fixed up. I learned that the fastest way to clean out a house is to paint inside and put down new carpet because then you have to take everything off the walls and out of the bedrooms. Instead of putting everything back in it's place after it's done, I just put it in boxes and out in the garage.

The next week Jake's parents came to visit, and Janet helped clean our house really well, so the week after they left I just had a few last things to do, then we moved the extra furniture and a lot of the boxes into a friend's parent's garage--they just bought the house in January, but won't be moving in until this summer, and in the meantime the friend's sister is living there, so there was plenty of room for storage in the garage. At that point we were ready to list the house. Less than 4 weeks after finding out we were going to sale. It sure was a whirlwind month.

We listed our house on a Wednesday, and on Saturday night we got an offer. We had been out to look at houses a few times and nothing was jumping out at us. There was a house I had liked from the start, but Jacob wasn't sold on it, so we were a little wary about accepting an offer when it looked like nothing was out there for us. So we didn't accept or counter the offer. But we did go out and look at a few houses again on Tuesday and found two that we both liked and felt good about. So we put in our counter-offer a few days after the deadline had passed, knowing that our buyer was still interested in our house. I was expecting a quick response because I knew she had a deadline before she had to head back to DC and she wanted to get the house stuff taken care of before that. As time passed and we didn't hear anything I began to get a bit anxious. She didn't respond by our deadline, and I was sure that by us waiting we had spoiled everything and given her a chance to look and find another house she liked better. I started worrying that our house would be on the market for months and that her offer ($10,000 below our asking price) was as good as it would get. I finally accepted that maybe it wasn't meant to be with this buyer and that things would work out how they were supposed to, and within a half hour of my change of heart we got the phone call that the buyer was going to accept our counter offer (of what we originally listed it for and $1,000 in closing costs), but just hadn't had a chance to meet with her realtor to sign the papers. Phew! So the next day (Monday) we got the signed paperwork and our house was officially under contract.

With our house sold (barring any issues with the inspection, appraisal, etc.) it was time to buy our new house. We put our offer in on Tuesday, got a counter offer back the next day and accepted their counter offer. So by Thursday we were officially going to be buying this house:

We will close on our new house on March 8th. Since our buyer isn't moving here from DC until April we set that closing date as March 27th. So we'll have almost 3 weeks to get most of the rooms inside painted, then move, then clean the old house. Hopefully it's plenty of time.

And now that we have a house to buy we've had tons of papers to read and sign. Such a pain. I am so excited for this all to be done and not have to move ever again (hopefully). The new house has 4 bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs, so we'll have an official guest room for visitors to use. Though it may be a while before there's anything besides a blow-up mattress to sleep on. This new house is double the square feet of our current house, so we'll have lots of empty space for a while as we slowly acquire furniture for all the extra rooms. The kids will have a blast running around in all the empty space. And on the stairs. Rachel was very insistent on getting a house with stairs. Any time we looked at a one-story house she automatically didn't like it just because there were no stairs. :) Hello baby gates... And hello boxes. Time to start packing.

Playing catch up

It's been a busy few weeks and kind of feels like real life has been put on hold while we go through the craziness of buying and selling a house. But life does go on. Just with less frequent blogging. Here is some of what we've been up to lately. 

In our preparations to put our house on the market we cleaned out a lot of junk and clutter. Annie noticed that the shelves in our walk-in closet were a lot more bare as I had packed away about half of my clothes that I could do without for a few months. The bottom shelf became Annie's bed. She'd knock whatever pants were there onto the floor, unless they were conveniently placed for a pillow.

When I would take the kids with me house shopping Annie would frequently find an empty closet or cupboard to climb in. Rachel liked to join in the fun, too. Apparently laying on empty shelves is tons of fun.

One of Rachel's favorite developments that came as we cleared out the junk and clutter was that we found our old camcorder that had been lost in the back corner of a shelf on our desk. It wouldn't keep a charge very well, so we hadn't used it since Annie was a baby. I figured since we hadn't used it in two years and Rachel has been asking and asking for her own camera, she could have it. She has LOVED having her own camera. It takes pictures and videos and she'll spend hours on end looking back at things she's recorded already. I'll have do do a separate post sharing some of her work.

 

Ryan is getting more and more adventurous. And must be growing some because he's finally too big for the 6-9 month clothes. It must be all that extra nutrition he gets from the garden.

The boy loves dirt and rocks. He's getting around pretty well, and finally took his first solo steps last Sunday at 10 1/2 months old. We were hoping he would be slower than his sisters in walking, and so far so good as he's a month behind the girls in first steps. If he goes according to their schedule he still has about 2 months before he's walking well without falling down often.

 

He does love to climb what he can. We took our eyes off of him last week for 15 seconds and came in to see him standing on the dishwasher door holding on to the top rack with a big smile on his face. Rachel, unfortunately, likes to help him get to where he can't quite reach. We've got to keep a close eye on the little guy. So far we have no major injuries to report.

And of course all the kids like treating us like jungle gyms. 

 

Jacob "fell asleep" when the girls were attacking. They got locked in his arms and thought it was so funny. 

Their most favorite game is "Get me." They run around yelling "Get me, Dad!" while he chases them like a monster, tickling them when he catches them. Occasionally the tables will turn and they will chase Jake for a minute while he screams like a little girl. Fun times. :) Ryan always thinks it's hilarious and runs after them in a crawl trying to join in the fun.