It's the Holiday Season!

At some point in the near future, I hope to start a post without having to apologize or make excuses for why I've been away so long. Though my exhaustion is sure to increase in the weeks/months to come, so we'll see!!

In any case, here we go!!

This morning we left the house bright and early to catch the "Dancer Express"! Every December, the Virginia Railway Express (VRE) - the commuter train we (well, not me anymore!!) take to work, runs "Santa Trains". The tickets sell out fast, and the train was definitely full! It's just a 50 minute ride, but Santa comes through, as do some carolers, and other VRE employees handing out candy canes and coloring/activity books and crayons. The activity books are geared toward rail safety lessons for the kids. Also, the trains are a drop off point for Toys 4 Tots donations. So the purpose of the ride is for fun, safety awareness, and charity - not a bad way to spend a morning.

Tyler had a great time watching out the window.

Evan spent the majority of the time playing with a cup holder...

but eventually he joined his brother at the window.

I have a couple of really cute videos from the train ride, but our sucky internet service makes it impossible to upload them. Fios can't come to Morris Farm fast enough!!!!!

Hey! Here comes Santa!!!!!

Of course, by the time Santa got to us, neither Tyler or Evan wanted to get near him.

Must have been the obviously fake beard!!!

They were far more interested in the candy canes!

After the ride, I tried to get a picture of Mitch walking with the boys alongside the train. For some reason, at that moment, the camera decided to start acting wonky and would not focus. But here's the shot anyway... perhaps we'll just say it's "artsy".....

When we got home, there was a bunch of playing, and cleaning (we're preparing to have Evan's birthday celebration tomorrow), and eventually, nap time for us all. I was upstairs in bed, Evan was downstairs in a chair, and these two passed out in the family room while watching Noggin.

And now a bit of a flashback, to Thanksgiving a couple of weeks ago.

Unable to travel to VT because of my, ahem, condition, we went to Fammy and Grandad's for dinner.

Here's Mitch spending some time with Charlotte:

I'd like to say "little" Charlotte, but my goodness! She is nearly as big as Evan!!

Busy in the kitchen!!

A beautiful table... and yummy food!



After dinner, the triptophan started to work it's magic.

Here's Tyler chillin' in a chair with Steffie, which is quite shocking. Ususally the cat doesn't let any of the kids get that close!

Even Nathan slowed down for a bit....

And Uncle Richard was down for the count!!

In other news, I am done working. This past Wednesday was my last day. It was bittersweet, as I was sad to leave a great job with great people, but I was definitely ready to stop working! I have officially reached the state of misery with this pregnancy.

My mom arrives tomorrow. We'll have a small family celebration for Evan's birthday, albeit early, but I will be in the hospital on his actual birthday. I'm thankful he is too young to know the difference. Hope to get in a mani/pedi, and some more Christmas preparations before Wednesday morning, December 16th, when we have to be at the hospital by 8:00 a.m. for a scheduled C-section at 10:00 a.m.

I'll try to post some birthday party pics before Wednesday, but I caution you against holding your breath. I will have my laptop with me a the hosital, and will get pictures of Baby Girl Bath up as soon as possible after I recover from my surgery fog!!

Until then!!

Yes, we're still alive.

Ok, I know, I know. I have been woefully remiss in my blogging duties lately. I actually started a couple of posts in the last month, but never finished them. Blame it on being busy, blame it on my new, long, tiring commute, blame it on writer's block, blame it on distraction, blame it on 3rd trimester exhaustion. Heck, I blame it on ALL of those things!!! But I am feeling really guilty, so I promise to see this post through to the finish today, Sunday, November 22nd, 2009!!!!

I guess I'll just recap the last month, which included Halloween! I apologize that a lot of these pictures will be familiar to my Facebook friends....

Unfortunately, our trip to Pumpkinville was thwarted this year by illness and weather.

We had a touch of H1N1 in the house mid-October. Mitch had it, Tyler did not, but he had some other virus that the pediatrician couldn't quite diagnose, so he was put on Tamiflu just in case. As was I because I'm pregnant. Tyler was fine in a couple of days, Mitch took at least a week to recover fully. Fortunately, and miraculously, Evan and I managed to escape it all.

And the day we were supposed to go to Pumpkinville with the Holmquists, Mitch and Tyler were just barely recovered, and the weather was terrible, so we couldn't go. It was unfortunate since we had such a fun time last year (http://karenandherboys.blogspot.com/2008/10/sunny-saturday.html).

But, we still needed pumpkins (the boys had been begging for them for WEEKS!), so the following day, though still rainy, we headed to a local nursery to make our selections.

Yes, he pulled that wagon, and it was HEAVY!!!

A few days before Halloween, there was some carving to be done!

I have some cute video of Tyler scooping out the pumpkin, but it's taking forever and a day to upload, so I'll have to try again later.

On Halloween, we were excited thinking we would have many trick-or-treaters, so we were prepared with LOTS of candy.

This is probably less than half of the candy we had at the ready. But alas, we maybe had 20 visitors. We're still working on the candy...

But it didn't stop us for having a good time with our boys. Here they are getting ready to go out:

Weren't they CUTE?!?!?!?!?

Here we are heading to our first house.

We went to the Jones's first. They were the first people to build on this street, and in fact were the only ones here for about a year before any more houses started going up. We met them during the building process and they are very nice. They brought us cookies as soon as we moved in. We thought it appropriate that theirs be the first house the boys went to on their very first trick-or-treating excursion.

Here they are waiting at the door:

We only went to about four houses, but we had a good time.

A big thanks to Mimi for buying the boys these AWESOME costumes!!!

The house is coming along sloooooooooowly, so no new pictures of that for now!!

Other events this month included Charlotte's first birthday!!!! I have some pictures, but they will have to go in a seperate post because for some reason I'm having a terrible time manipulating them. I can upload them, but then am unable to move them where they need to go. Very frustrating! Doesn't seem to make sense, but it may have something to do with the fact that the pictures are from my Blackberry (yes, I finally got a Blackberry and I LOVE IT!), because I was also having trouble with the pictures from my office farewell party.....

Yes, my farewell party. Baby girl is scheduled to arrive via C-section on December 16th, and my last day at work will be December 9th. Not just my last day before maternity leave, but my last day. We have decided that after the baby arrives, I will not go back to work. With three kids, it just doesn't make sense any more for me to work. Nearly my entire paycheck would go to paying the daycare/preschool costs, and what would be left over would barely cover my commuting costs. So why spend all my money for someone else to take care of my kids?? I don't plan to never work again, but for now, I will be a stay-at-home mom. I'm both excited and daunted!!! It will certainly be more difficult than any other job I have had, and I hope I'm up for the task!

Well, I guess that will be it for now. I've been at this for hours, and now it's time to tend to the boys and get them off to bed. Here's one last cute picture of the boys occupying themselves before dinner one evening:

I think it lasted about 5 minutes.....

The Move

As I mentioned in the previous post, the day we left OBX was a long day! We hit the road at about 9:30 a.m. and headed north. When got to the house - the new house - at about 4:00 p.m. and unloaded what we had with us. Then we picked up a U-Haul and headed to Fammy's!



It took a few hours to get everything loaded up, and I think we got back to our house at about 9:30 p.m. We had crib mattresses for the boys (Tyler was out cold by the time we got home!), and we borrowed the mattress from the bed at Fammy's for ourselves. We had a big slumber party in the family room that night!



I must have been too tired to take pictures, but here is the morning after.

Luckily, we had a TV and a little DVD player to (try to) keep the boys occupied when the movers came (they showed up at 8:30 a.m. on Sunday morning). Oh, and it was game day, so the boys had their jersey's on.

Tyler was more interested in watching the "mans" and the 'big truck' out the window.










Dining room:





Living room:

Here's a couple of the guys trying to get our big basement couch in through the sliding glass doors downstairs. It didn't work. And they damaged our screen door. *sigh*

The kitchen looks a little better than this now, but not much!! No, actually, it's coming along nicely. I'm nearly finished lining all the cabinets (in cork) and getting everything put away. It's a process trying to figure out where everything should go!

YAY!!! Our bed!!

It probably only took the movers (I think there were 4 of them) about 2 1/2 hours to get everything in the house and unwrapped and set up. Leaving us with many, many boxes to be unpacked. It's going to be a while before we get completely settled. Good thing we plan to stay for the next 30 years!

I took the following day off to accept delivery from Sears of the washer and dryer (LOVE them), and to wait for the cable guy. Sears showed up right on time, at about 7:15 a.m. The cable guy, however, didn't show up at all.

When we called them, they had no record of the appointment and told us our address didn't even exist. Is that right? So what is this 3800 square foot structure sitting on the lot of 8913 Kingbird Court - a figment of our imaginations??? Without coming right out and saying that Comcast sucks (even though it does), let me just say that we only JUST got service (cable/internet/phone) within the last 48 hours. It was a brutal couple of weeks not being able to watch ANY regular TV. All we had were the kids' DVDs. If you'd like, I can recite "Finding Nemo" for you....

Another delivery snafu was with the couch from Macy's. They had told us our couch would arrive in the warehouse on September 22nd, and they would call us to set up a delivery date/time. I thought that was perfect, that I should be able to get them to deliver on that Monday that I was going to be home for the other deliveries. I realized while we were at the beach that we hadn't yet heard from them, so I gave them a call that Friday. "Yes", they said, "your couch is being delivered today." I asked if they planned to leave it in the driveway since they didn't bother to find out if we would be home and we in fact were not! After phone calls to 2 or 3 different numbers, I was able to get the delivery cancelled and rescheduled. Of course, they don't deliver to our area on Mondays (only Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays - go figure!), so there went my perfect plan. But, they came on Wednesday, and luckily Fammy didn't have to work so she came over and waited for them so we didn't have to miss any more work. She also prepared a dinner in the crock pot to be ready when we got home - yay Fammy!!

So it wasn't long before the boys went from this:

to this:

The couch is HUGE, and takes up a good portion of the room. But that's what we wanted - a place where the whole family can pile on comfortably to watch a movie! And it is comfy!!

Oh, and that's one of our new TVs!

Here's a picture of George, who was probably trying to figure out what the heck was going on this time. Though he should be used to it - this is the 7th residence he has lived in since I got him at 7 weeks old. Don't worry, Georgie, this should be it!!

And here is a beautiful Gainesville sunset we saw the first week in the house:

Ah, country life!!