We have barely sat down in over a month. I think Jon and I are completely, one hundred percent exhausted. Every morning, Jon gets up and goes to the house and stays there until I join him after the kids go to bed. It’s been a long month, to say the least.

But the house is coming along! We had to delay our carpet install by a few weeks since we ended up having to redo way more than we thought we would.

A view from the front room into the dining room. I love all the windows in this house!

This is our family room – I stained those beams and we took the creepy closet doors off. My thought right now is that we will just leave it a cased opening like that and have it be a little playroom off the family room.

From the far side of the kitchen looking toward the family room. My clean cabinets!! I am so excited!

These two have just worked themselves to death. My dad is amazing. He’s just been so so helpful. We could NOT have done this without him!

This is from the breakfast nook to the pantry. I love seeing the transformation! I think we get so caught up on what still needs to happen that we forget to look at what we’ve already done. Because even just a few weeks ago, this is what the kitchen looked like:

Such a huge change already!!

Meanwhile, back at Gammy and Pops’ house… 😉 We splurged and got the kids Kindle Fires Kids Editions when they were on a major sale right before we moved and it has been the BEST thing ever for these insane days and our road trips. Love how they are watching their show after rest time here. Space bubbles are nonexistent for these two.

Jon took a break one afternoon and came home and rode bikes with the boys. They were SO excited. It’s all they talked about the entire rest of the next day. 😉

My little ladybug. She just has me totally wrapped.

Someone has decided sleep may not be her favorite thing after all… oy. It’s making for some long days and long nights for this mama. Here’s to hoping it’s a quick phase and she’s back to sleeping 10-12 hours a night again soon!!

Yesterday, our sweet nephew Gabriel turned one!

We are so excited that we got to see him basically his entire special day. 😉 Since we are all transitioning between houses, we are all living at Mom and Dad’s. Sweet boy at his special birthday breakfast that Nicole made – he’s just so cute.

These two were SO excited to get to go to Bryant, Nicole and Gabriel’s new house for his party!

Happy birthday, little buddy!! This year has FLOWN past – it seems like just yesterday I was sleeping on the hospital waiting room floor while we were waiting for him to be born. 😉

These two have been killing themselves to get this house ready for Gabriel’s birthday – it’s gorgeous! I love this family!

The “What Is Happening” face during the song on a one-year-old is just my favorite. Ha!

Baby love! He’s just a doll. Happy birthday, precious boy! We love you so much!!!

Right before the 4th, we took a break from the house and took the kids to a festival that one of our local churches was doing at the minor league stadium.

The kids LOVED it. They did bounce houses, made Fourth of July crafts and we even splurged and got them Dippin’ Dots. 😉

Love this!! 🙂

There was a big concert there too, but we left right as the concert was starting. 😉 Ha! Bedtime and more work at the house was calling our names. 😉

Progress looks like a lot of mess.

Another view. All my kitchen cabinets are piled in the dining room there!

And here we go!! Dad and Jon got the first few in and I was SO EXCITED I could hardly stand it!! We were so blessed to get these cabinets on sale – God is good.

God willing, we will be in this house SOON.

Happy Fourth of July week, friends!

We started our long weekend off getting this one shorn – kid can seriously grow hair. #superpower

I was laughing at this picture – Nicole took it of me one morning at Gammy and Pops’ house about 6:30am. Baby girl had been up most of the night, but I was still up at 5am to meet my deadline. This is not a pretty sight. But it’s how things get done. 😉 

Every night, friends. Holiday weekend or not, here we are, painting, staining, caulking, painting, staining, demoing, painting and staining. 😉

Hard worker guys, like Nathan used to say. I love love love LOVE the paint color we went with – it’s “Perfect Greige” by Sherwin Williams. Such a warm color and it’s exactly the same color as small child hand prints, which was the top of my new paint must-have list. 😉 Ha!

My mama is in there somewhere. 😉 Thanks Mom!! If she isn’t watching kids, she is over working at houses. She and Dad have put in a TON over this month. And to top it all off, we are all living with them at the same time. Saints.

And then it was the Fourth of July!! The kids didn’t come in all day. And we all unanimously agreed that we would not work at all this night. Gammy and Pops truly have the best bike riding yard ever – the kids rarely come inside.

Two girls, au naturel. 😉 Little Miss was getting nervous about the fireworks everyone was talking up, I think.

Just sweaty messes, the lot of them. Not sure what we are going to do with those two. They are too cute for their own good.

The best way to hold a sparkler is to dance around with it while loudly singing the Star Spangled Banner. Right? Right.

Love this. Every year, Pops and Uncle Bryant put on a big fireworks show for us all. So fun.

Happy Fourth!! We are so thankful for the men and women who keep our country safe and allow us to celebrate our freedom. May God continue to bless America.

Little Miss went ahead and kept growing even with all the chaos going on around us, little traitor. 😉 She turned six months old and we decided to try solid food. She started with sweet potatoes.

She wasn’t sure what to do with it at first but then she figured it out really quickly. 😉

Little love. Those rolls – I could just eat her.

Middle of the night banister staining – it’s the best. 😉 And it’s coming along!!

I’m staining basically all of the orange-stained wood through the whole house. The trim will all be painted white. The left of the beams have been stained, the right is unstained.

After much debate, calculating, re-calculating and re-re-calculating, we decided to use our backyard budget and redo the kitchen before we move in. It’s a much more pressing need and the kitchen is just in non-salvageable condition. Our hope was we could clean it enough to make it last for a few years, but I just don’t think we can ever get it as clean as we like things. So, good-bye kitchen! Dad sacrificed his back for our house – so thankful for him. And Bryant – despite moving himself – also came to help. Love the men in my family!!

DEMO DAY. I think the guys actually liked this night. 😉

Once we got all the cabinets out, it was like, well, gee, I wonder how all the mice were getting into the house? There are holes EVERYWHERE. Time to patch those holes and bleach!

Another view. Jon went and rented a tool to rip up the tile the very next day.

One of Jon’s friends from work, Coach Toby, came to help with the tile removal. Long, hard days right there. Jon’s poor arms were done.

Meanwhile, back at my parents’ house, this is where the boys live. On their bikes, in the backyard. Love those two.

I love this picture. This is what a boy in the summer time should look like. Baby toad, green grass, bike helmet. 😉

BEST DAY. I hated hated this appliance garage!! It just made this weird box that stuck into the dining room and didn’t make any sense at all. Plus, I figured the mice were just renting out condos inside it – (something like: “GREAT ROOM -VIEW OF THE KITCHEN”). 😉 We let the boys break apart the drywall. Needless to say, they were pretty excited about being told to put holes in the wall.

Sweet baby playing in the midst of the mess. 😉

This kid THRIVES on a project. He lives to help Jon and Pops fix stuff. He was pretty much in heaven in the middle of all the chaos.

Parker helping Pops patch the holes in the drywall. Mice, be gone. Notice the appliance garage is nowhere to be seen! (Insert confetti)

New cabinets are here!! We are so excited to start seeing the new kitchen take place!! And Nathan was so excited that the delivery guys let him help them unload. 😉

Oy. So much going on! SO MUCH. Deadline, three kids, major remodel… 😉 Lots of blessings in the midst of everything. We are so thankful for dear family and friends!!

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. 😉