Every fixer upper has one, right? I could probably wax philosophic here and start talking about how we are like this house and how God sees beyond the grossness to what we can be, but I’ll refrain. 😉

Here are a bunch of our “before” shots! I missed getting pictures of a few rooms before we started working on them. We’re still living with Mom and Dad while we do the bigger remodeling projects. 🙂

Our lovely kitchen. 😉 This is the room of the house that I pretty much despised the most. BUT, it has great space and one of the things that we wanted the most was a kitchen that was big enough to hold a lot of people, since our last house was so tiny.

 Another view. The high bar to the right is something that I both like and hate – I wanted a breakfast bar but not necessarily that tall of one.

The dining nook and a cute little guy helping us disinfect. 😉 This part I love – not the colors, but I love that it’s an eat-in kitchen and the nook is HUGE. We basically only had a corner of the kitchen for eating in our old house and all five us couldn’t fit around the table at the same time. We should all be able to fit here!

Directly off the kitchen is the family room. We are ripping up the tile first thing and putting down carpet so we can try and keep Parker’s head intact. 😉 There are these giant beams that go through the room, which I foresee a lot of goose eggs from those beams. And I’m not a fan of the orange stain through the whole house. But the beams are growing on me. 

Inside the closet doors. WEIRDEST space in the whole house. There’s another closet inside that closet. So odd.

More of the family room. Here are the beams. And see all the wires sticking out of the wall everywhere? There are seriously wires EVERYWHERE through this WHOLE house. It’s the weirdest thing ever.

The front living room. Such great space. Not sure what we will do with this yet. But we love that we have two living areas so we can someday have a kid space and an adult space for community groups from church or when we have friends over. 🙂

Dining room. This whole house has every single window covered. There’s lots of natural light that is not being accessed here.

Here’s the staircase and the hallway. The kitchen is on the other side of that wall on the right, the front door is on the left. The carpet runner is my favorite and will probably stay. #nowayeverEVER

All of the bedrooms are upstairs. There are two good sized ones that we are going to put the kids in – the boys will share a room. And then there’s a smaller room that is obviously supposed to be an office that we will use for an office/guest room. And the master is up there too. I really like that all the bedrooms are on the same level. We are looking at replacing most, if not all, of the interior doors. Lots of holes. 🙁

 Here we go. This house is just leaking trash. It wasn’t a foreclosure, but it was in foreclosure shape. The whole house is disgusting. We put the kids down at Mom and Dad’s and drive over and clean. Every night. We’ve got through two huge bottles of cleaner mixed with bleach so far. My lungs and sinuses might be permanently damaged. 😉 Jon and I put on our masks and our grossest clothes and get to work every night at 8pm.

Bleaching even the high walls. Like I said, it’s all disgusting. There was huge pillows of dust mixed with grease and who knows what all over the landings.

Oh friends. My heart just stopped on this night. We thought we could clean the kitchen in one night (bless our hearts). We opened this drawer that was under the cabinet (who ever thought that was a good place for extra drawers was not the brightest) and there was just tons of candy wrappers and mice droppings. And then we started finding the mice droppings throughout the house. Under the master vanity. In the master closet. ALL through the kitchen.

There are precious few things in this life that I CANNOT stand, but mice are at the very top of that list. I do NOT DO MICE. We left that night after finding this drawer and I just cried the whole way back to Mom and Dad’s.

Big decisions ahead. We knew we were going to have to remodel the kitchen at some point, but we just didn’t think it would be this soon. Ugh.

LOTS of prayers for financial wisdom happening now.

The big day is finally here!!

Neither Jon nor I slept at ALL last night and my stomach was in knots the entire morning. Ugh. So much prayer going into today!

We dropped the boys off with Aunt Nicole and took Eisley with us to the closing, first thing in the morning. Here’s what she did the entire time we were there:

Sweet baby girl. Everyone kept commenting on how quiet she was. 😉

Leaving the title company, papers in hand. OH MY GOODNESS. We were a mess. Like, total, complete mess. I think I cried out of sheer panic.

We picked up the boys and went to go waste time at the best place to waste time at while waiting for funding to go through on a fixer upper – Lowes. 😉 I’m not sure who taught these people planking, but they thought it was hilarious.

Making them earn their keep. 😉 We loaded up on a few essentials that we knew we would need and then we got THE CALL.

The funding went through! The house is officially ours!

So, obviously, we skipped naps and went straight there.

Welcome home, little family. 🙂 I walked through the whole house and just prayed in each room. I am so excited to see what God has for us here. We pray that it’s a house that holds lots of laughter, love and precious friends and family. So thankful for it!

Here we go!!

I just CANNOT.

Eisley loves to be held, loves to be surrounded by her brothers, loves to nurse and loves to snuggle. 🙂 She is so smiley and so laid back almost all of the time, but when she decides she’s mad, she is MAD. 😉 She is loving getting to eat food like a big girl!

She is still super tiny and still wearing mostly 0-3 month clothes. I finally moved her up to some 3-6 just so we could wear the summer outfits before it’s not summer anymore! She’s just a joy and we could not love her more. We adore our precious girl!

Time needs to seriously slow down. At least, as soon as we get into our house. 😉

This was, quite possibly, the slowest week of our whole summer. And when you consider that we just did a road trip with kids who were contaminated with HFMD, that says a lot.

Nathan’s baseball team had their end of the year party complete with a water fight. 😉 He and Parker had the best time!

Soaking wet, eating chocolate cake, pizza and the Holy Grail of All Drinks (Capri Sun) – this child was in heaven. My Parker Bear doesn’t especially love desserts (weirdo) and he will always pick fruit over dessert of any kind. Notice he ate the cake and left the frosting. 😉

Little Miss was very content to just hang with Mom.

 So proud. He had so much fun this year! It’s so fun to watch how he grows and changes each year – he has become a good little player. 🙂

Three little peanuts up bright and early to help me make a Father’s Day feast for Pops and Dad. 🙂

I found this picture of me and my dad in the depths of the picture albums at Mom and Dad’s house. Love this. Love my dad.

Love their dad too. 😉 Happy Father’s Day, sweetheart.

We went to California Pizza Kitchen that night for dinner and someone was extra smiley there! I think those sweet cheeks grow by the minute. 😉

A boy and his daddy. Such a sweet picture of these two.

This is how breakfast looks lately. I’ve been getting up around 5, working on my deadline and then calculating costs of the new house while picking out paint colors over breakfast. Once the kids are up, nothing productive happens on either house plans or the deadline. 😉

Sweet friends. Junie is so adorable with Eisley. 🙂 And Eisley loves her friend!

And now we are here! Tomorrow is the big day! And so we made ourselves some dessert to celebrate our last night of rest before we close on our fixer upper tomorrow. We look all relaxed and smiling right here but this is really how we are feeling:

Ha! My stomach is SO nervous about everything!! I can hardly stand it. Praying that God just goes before us in this new house. We are so excited and so blessed to even have the opportunity to have this house. We can’t wait to make it ours. 🙂

TOMORROW.

We got back to Albuquerque and moved in with Gammy and Pops in their new house. 🙂 These two immediately went to work getting the backyard kid friendly. 😉

Relaxing with Dad after they cut the lawn. 🙂

The whole first week or so that we lived with them, we were CONSTANTLY telling Parker he needed to wait for one of us to go down the stairs since he just had never lived in a house with stairs before and he made me nervous. Apparently, his little dogs had the same rule. 😉

His first Sunday school craft and he was SO excited. 🙂

This little peanut LOVES her daddy. She just snuggles with him all the time. It’s the cutest thing – she has Jon completely wrapped.

 We had an unseasonably cooler day and it was of course the same day we told the kids they could go play in the sprinklers and set up the little pool. So, they waited here patiently so they could get in the pool and immediately freeze to death.

We have reached the worm-like state. 😉

The wood floors throughout the house just carry sound like crazy (particularly yelling from little boys), so we do our best to keep the boys quiet and try to have them stay in their rooms until it is a halfway decent time to wake up all the adults here. I walked in one morning to find them both snuggled in Nathan’s bed watching Wild Kratts together.

We met the Beechems at Dions. 🙂 Love this – when Eryn and I first met, we were both pregnant with Nathan and Evie. We’ve grown a bit. Lots of little blessings walking across that parking lot.

Her wrinkled nose smile is my FAVORITE.

Gammy and Pops’ new house is right by the river and they are on an acre of perfect bike riding property. So, Nathan and Parker pretty much live outside and in their bike helmets. Because the house is so close to the river, it attracts all kinds of toads. Nathan was freaked out at first, but then, he became a toad catching machine. He was catching frogs by the dozens and sticking them in this little aquarium. This particular dude is Tuba.

We finally told Nathan that he needed to release the frogs in the drainage ditch that runs behind Gammy and Pops’ property because he was going to cook the frogs in the outdoor aquarium. I looked out and he was following Jon to the ditch, head down, like he was going to the guillotine.

When he got back, I asked if he released the frogs and he said, “I put my friend Tuba in the ditch!”

I said, “Good job, Nathan.”

He immediately burst into tears and said, “But Mom, ditches are DEADLY!”

I hugged him after I laughed for a little bit. 😉

Jon and I took Evie and Junie to CFA for dinner one night when Eryn had Gracie at urgent care. A really cute older couple stopped us and told us, “You have such a beautiful family!” We were quick to tell them they weren’t all ours. But we would definitely claim them. 😉

Nathan went “camping” on the floor of his room one night. Not sure how he managed to sleep on the hardwood floor all night, but he did. He was a grouchy mess the next day though, so he was banned from camping the next night. 😉

Oh my heart. I love this baby. She is just sunshine in tiny girl form!

Two weeks down!! One week from today, we will (God willing) close on our new house!! I’m so excited and so nervous! It’s one thing to watch fixer upper shows – it’s another to actually buy one ourselves. 😉

By bounce, I mean Parker. 😉 He went from sick sick sick and just sleeping and laying around all day to literally bouncing off the walls in a week. Hand Foot Mouth is a funny thing, my friends.

I think we seriously ate at In-N-Out about 14 times during this trip. There isn’t one in Albuquerque and we weren’t sure when we would be back to California, so best to soak it all up (meaning the grease), while we could! 😉

Look who we found on our way back home!! Yay! We were SO excited to see Uncle Caleb, Aunt Nicole and Aunt Cayce after sitting in L.A. traffic for about six years! 😉 Parker had reached Blur Status and not just in pictures at this point – after finally feeling better and finally getting out of the car, he basically ran from one side of their living room, bounced off the kitchen counter and ran back over to the living room for about an hour alongside Caleb and Nicole’s golden retriever, Maverick (wish I was joking). Just proved my point that Jon could have avoided a lot of grief and just brought a golden puppy with him to California and introduced the puppy as Parker for the family reunion. 😉

Okay, guys. Eisley LOVES Hudson. Like, she thinks he is the coolest, most amazing thing EVER on the planet. And Hudson is all, “Eh. Hey Eisley. If I have to acknowledge you at all.” Ha! It will be so fun to watch all the cousin dynamics as these guys grow up. Hudson is a cutie head and I adore him!

All the baby-swapping, all the time. We had the BEST (very short) time with our sweet family. We loved seeing their beautiful home and the fun life they lead there. And I’m pretty sure Parker terrified poor Hudson with his blurry-ness. Sorry about that, bud. You have to watch out for those middle children. 😉

Aunt Nicole sent us out the next day with a whole grocery sack of snacks for us to eat on our looooong drive home. Those incredible cookies? Didn’t make it out of the front seat. 😉 Sorry, kids.

Such a fun way to end our California Adventure!!

We made it to Nonnie and Papa O’s right before it was time for everyone to head to the Family Reunion/Rehearsal Dinner for Jon’s cousin’s wedding. Since the kids were basically Petri dishes, I stayed back with them at Nonnie’s house. We did showers for all and then we all were in bed by 8, I’m pretty sure. Which is only 7pm at home. 😉

The next morning was yet another family reunion, but this time it was for Nonnie’s entire extended family. So, Papa O was super sweet and volunteered to stay home with the boys so Jon, Eisley (she didn’t have any symptoms of HFMD, so we assumed she was in the clear) and myself could go to the reunion. So fun to visit! We loved seeing Jon’s cousins and their kids and his aunts and uncles! We spent most of the time with Heather and Tommy, Jon’s brother and our sister-in-law. Love them.

 Heather and Tommy decided that since Lily and Josh had already had HFMD before, they were willing to risk getting it again and brought the cousins over to play. 🙂 The boys had so much fun. Since we had our wedding clothes with us, we dressed up and took a group picture just so we had at least one halfway decent one of everyone. 😉

Then everyone left for the wedding and it was me and the kids again. 😉 The boys decided we needed to do a movie night, so they gathered all the friends at Nonnie and Papa O’s house and got everyone all situated for the movie. See the Elsa doll on the left? The thing is taller than Parker and scared me to DEATH when I walked back out into the living room after getting the kids to bed and found her standing (STANDING) in the hallway.

My company for the evening. 🙂 I could do worse. And Elsa was locked in Nonnie and Papa O’s room by this point because NO MA’AM.

Some Uncle Allen love in the morning. 🙂

In-N-Out shakes and movies on Kindles while snuggled on a blanket in Nonnie’s house just makes everything so much better.

Yay!! We hit the turn for the better on this day and since they were still considered contagious and housebound, Nonnie and Papa O set up the swimming pool for them in the backyard and blew up water balloons. 🙂

Grandma H and Grandpa H risked the disease and came to see us and meet sweet little Eisley. Love this of my girl and her great-grandma.

Uncle John and Aunt Karen came for dinner and after the kids were showered and jammied, he took his guitar in their room and sang and told them stories until they were both asleep. The boys asked for Uncle John every night for a week after that. 😉

Nonnie and Eisley soaking up some early morning coolness in Nonnie’s unbelievably beautiful backyard garden.

The visit went so slowly in some respects, because we didn’t do very much with our sickly children, which ended up being WONDERFUL after our insane last few weeks of packing and moving and transitions. So often, I feel like we cram so much into such a short few days there that we miss out on a lot of quality time, so it was so nice to just have time to sit and visit and hear about everyone’s lives. We loved seeing our family and being there with them. We hate living so far away. 🙁

Time to pack back up the car and head back to our homeless existence. I’m pretty sure Jon and I both had some small panic attacks as we started back out. 😉

There were many times during this week where Jon and I would hold each other tight and say “Okay, if we can make it through this, we can make it through anything.” “Okay, never mind. If we can make it through THIS, we can make it through anything.” And then again, “Okay, scratch it again. If we can make it through THIS, we can make it through anything!” Ha! Sick kids, 24 hours in the car (one way!), homelessness, the looming remodel coming our way and all the joys and sorrows of life can take their toll. But I’m so thankful that we have Jesus and that He gives us the strength for it all. I’m thankful that He gave me Jon to share this life with and these sweet kids to snuggle. And I’m so excited for this new chapter in a new house coming up!

I think that wherever stories are told, this is one that will forever be shared in hushed, reverent tones like when sharing something of sheer terror.

We closed the front door of our sweet little home and found out directly afterward that Mom and Dad’s house had not funded before the title company closed and we were literally homeless. All of our stuff was split between a huge moving van, a storage unit, our two cars and Dad’s truck.

Mom and Dad were also homeless, so we all went to Bryant and Nicole’s and they dried our tears and held our babies and stuffed us with pizza and marble squares and inflated beds in their living room. And it was all okay. We all barely slept and we woke up hoping for good news and it came in the form of Aunt Nicole cooking yet again and making us a gourmet breakfast.

My sweet girl. She was up so early and I just snuggled with her in the bed and we figured out how to handle the day before she fell back asleep. It’s exhausting to worry over the family this much. 😉

Side note, we LOVE the Aunt Nicoles in our family. God blessed us exceedingly with those girls. I hate to brag, but my sisters-in-law are the best. No competition. I was an exhausted, emotional mess and my kids were even worse and Nicole just hopped right in and took over. Love her.

At one o’clock, Mom and Dad’s lenders finally funded and we got the keys to their house house. Mom and Dad walked in and the place was a mess. Nothing had been cleaned, all the bathrooms were disgusting. It was just so sad. And something none of us really had the emotional bandwith to handle that day. But, we put babies down for naps, plugged in vacuums and went to work.

At 1:30am, we finally had things cleaned and had moved in enough that we could at least get kids down for the night and we had a place to sleep. I fell into my mattress on the floor and we woke up at 5:30 with kids who didn’t know where they were, so we headed downstairs and got back to work.

Since we don’t close our our new house for another three weeks, Mom and Dad were gracious enough to let us live with them for the time being. So thankful for that! Even with all the insanity, it was so nice knowing that we at least had a place to be.

We unloaded our moving van into Mom and Dad’s garage that morning, Jon returned the van and picked up a rental car (which ended up being the BIGGEST blessing that week – we were on the fence about renting and Jon decided to just go for it and didn’t rent a van like we’d planned, but a giant Expedition EL. God was totally in that decision!), we loaded up clothes in laundry baskets since all our suitcases were missing in action. And then we started on THE TRIP to California about three in the afternoon.

Yes. We are INSANE.

The Trip started out well enough.

Note the smiles, the happy faces.

About eight o’clock, we stopped at some random gas station in Arizona and changed in the kids into their pajamas, hoping we could get a couple more hours of driving in while they slept. Jon’s cousin was getting married on Saturday and we were hoping to get there in time for the rehearsal dinner/family reunion the night before.

Jon changed Parker and said the words that would start it all… “Erynn, I think Parker feels a little warm.”

Thankfully, I had packed the thermometer in one of our tubs, so I pulled it out, took his temperature and it was 101.5. We both started praying, I gave him Motrin and we got back on the road. I remembered Eryn telling me that Junie had been running a fever the day before, so I texted her to find out how long she’d ran it and how bad the virus was. She wrote back, “Oh, it isn’t so good. Junie has Hand Food Mouth Disease.”

I think Jon and I both honest-to-goodness heard the music along the road. DUM DUM DUM DUUUUM. I started praying out loud.

We checked into a hotel in Kingman and none of us slept. Parker was up off and on all night. When he wasn’t up, Eisley was up. And when they were both semi-asleep, Nathan was up. We finally got up for breakfast and by that time, Parker had been moaning/screaming/fussing for about an hour and I finally got up the nerve to look into his mouth.

And we were greeted by the angriest looking blisters I’ve ever seen.

I think I cried right along with him.

I forced Motrin down his throat, we went down to breakfast, cleared the room very quickly with all our screaming and tired, grouchy kids and I was just sitting down to eat after getting everyone’s food, when Parker climbed into my lap, while screaming, and then threw up all over me. I mean, I have seen throw up and I have seen THROW UP. This was the second. We are talking, soaked-into-my-undies type of thing. My shoes squished it out when I stood up.

I grabbed Parker, Jon grabbed a few towels off a nearby housekeeping cart, I wrapped us both up and took us straight upstairs to the room. I stripped us both down, put us both in the shower and started scrubbing us off. We were almost done when Nathan came running into the bathroom after helping Jon clean up down in the lobby and started yelling, “Oh NO! I have DIARRHEA!”

There are only so many moments in your life when you can’t tell if you are laughing or crying, but this was one of them for me. I started laughing so hard I cried right there in that disgusting hotel bathroom. We dried off, debated whether we should just turn around and drive home and ended up deciding that we were halfway there, we might as well go the rest of the way.

Nathan fell asleep about ten in the morning and by noon, he was running a fever and had sores all over his mouth too.

And then Eisley pooped out everywhere.

And Jon and I self-medicated the only way you can on a road trip with three kids who are all sobbing with a contagious, painful disease on a road trip that will never ever EVER end:

#yes. Please notice I look like death.

We managed to get a smile coaxed out of them when we happened to catch that perfect combo of a cold milkshake on sore mouths right when the Motrin was at it’s highest peak. I seriously had an alarm on my phone and it would buzz and we would pull out the medication and load everyone up.

We made it to Nonnie and Papa O’s house and normally, I don’t know who is happier to see them – us or the kids, but this time, Jon and I basically leaped into their arms and cried sweet tears of joy that we were FINALLY OUT OF THE CAR.

Welcome to Infamy, Trip.