New house!! 2014 started with a Bang!

The last couple of months have been a bit insane, and that's putting it lightly.  We had the thought sometime in the end of November to look for a house.  So we contacted my awesome sister Tina, and started the process of getting pre approved and getting all that fun financial stuff together.  We hadn't been really contemplating moving until Casey got orders or was done with school and the Air Force would move us.  I guess the Lord had other ideas for our family.  

We looked around and finally found something that fit the needs of our family that was in the area I wanted to be.  While not all of Tacoma is nice or clean it was close to work for Casey, and close to Costco/Trader Joes.  Which in the end was a pretty big deal. We found something in a good part of Tacoma, it was built in 1954 so its not perfect by any-means but we still felt it was right to go forward.  The process didn't exactly go smoothly, the seller was not the most honest or most ethical out there (Be careful buying a flip!).  

We ended up moving the beginning of January, which was a nightmare with moving off base.  Since we didn't have an exact date for move out we had to guess when we'd be signing.  We told them the10th would be our last day, since we had hoped we would sign the 6th.  That didn't happen, the seller delayed it another week.  Everything ended up working out well and we were able to get moved in. 

I am a visual person and I know our family wont really see it for a while, if ever, so we wanted to post a few pictures.

Here is some pictures of the house before and after move in.  The front yard is from today!  I love my flowers.  We had no idea that there was flowers until about 3 weeks ago when we saw little leaves popping up.  Needless to say we love that that work is already done! 

This is the front room, the ceilings are our favorite in here.  They have a pretty drastic slope that just makes the room and shows the old fun features of this house. 

The fireplace isn't the cleanest on the outside, but I still love it!

One thing is not lacking in this house, and that's closet space! We have 12 closets that we can store our things in.  Its been fabulous!  I need to get some shelves for the garage to store some boxes I never use, but its not really needed right now.

This is one of our hall closets that we use for a coat closet.

This is the girls room.  It doesn't look like it form here, but its huge!  You can see down the long hallway in the second picture.  Down there is the second bedroom, the master, and the large bathroom, along with closets that line the hall.

This is the second room, it has a small window and a little built in shelf.  Its not deep enough to put books on, but when we need to put someone in here I'll find a fun use for it.

Our hallway :)  Halfway down is a door you can take to go outside in the backyard. 

             

Our bathroom! There are 1.5 bathrooms in our house, so this is the only one with a bath.  If you know me though you know I don't care as long as we have more than one toilet.  Four people and 1 toilet is no good!

Here is our laundry room, its right off of the kitchen. Yay!! for an actual laundry room!  In here is our pantry (in the second picture), and our half bathroom. 

This is the master bedroom.  We have plenty of room for our california king bed, and we could fit a whole bedroom set in here if we had one.. Haha! But its perfect for us none the less.

Casey gets his own closet now!  He has a ton of clothes, he actually broke the rod the day after we moved in because everything was too heavy.  We ended up having to buy a new one. :) 

We signed on our house on January 13th.  As per the regs here we had to wait until the next day when the sale would be recorded to get our keys.

To celebrate our signing on the house we went out to lunch as a family.  We went to one of our favorite places, The Ram. Tinsley doesnt like normal kids meals, so while Riley wanted a grilled cheese kids meal, Tins wanted a salad.  We love our crazy kids!

A couple days after we moved in, Casey came home with these as a housewarming gift for me!  He's truly the best!!  I had us mostly unpacked in a week, with the pure motivation of making it ours!

This is the living room now, it's not perfect but we've made it ours.

Casey encouraged me to buy burnt orange curtains, so I obviously had to get them!

Our kitchen :)  I love the granite counter tops. 

We barely squeezed all of the girls things into their room.  They have too many things!  We are still going through and downsizing things, but it all fits. They really wanted to share a room again so we let them.  This is probably the cleanest I've seen it.  It gets pretty close sometimes, but most the time I just try not to look in there.

This is more recent, with their new curtains.  They have loved every minute of being in our new house!  I feel so grateful that we have somewhere to truly call our home. Even though we have wood floors throughout the house, and I sometimes feel like I sound like an elephant just walking down the hall, I wouldn't give it up!

Gingerbread house!

I'm not always as hands on with my girls as Id like, but I am trying to find more ways to include them when I make things.  Even now as I write this blog, Miss Riley is sitting next to me as I read aloud what I am writing.  Its not very easy, but when has being a mom ever been "easy"?  Not really ever, but its still fun and worth it!

Part of being in a so called younger family is that you get to start and make your own family traditions.  We, and by we I mean me, decided that we wanted to make Gingerbread houses and cookies this year as a family.   I got my girls together, put our aprons on and we whipped up some delicious gingerbread cookies and the makings of a gingerbread house. 

Occasionally I can get my girls to sit still for a project, it usually has to include sugar or a treat as an incentive.  They did fabulous adding the ingredients to the mixing bowl.  The hardest part was waiting the hour that the dough had to chill in the fridge!  But we made it, and with most of the dough left too!

Now we are ready to decorate!!  

It was hard not eating the candy before it made it onto the house sometimes.  Frankly, I'm surprised that that much of it made it onto the house!

The girls had a blast!  Their excitement for creativity was contagious.  I dont know how long it took us to finish it all, but it was well worth it. 

We didn't get our tree up the day after Thanksgiving like we normally do, but we ended up getting a real tree about a week later from our neighbor that was leaving on vacation.  My fabulous bestie Erin made me an awesome tree skirt last year, so I was thrilled to pull it out of the box this year and make our tree awesome!

We have a lot of random moments in our family, most of them end up being the best moments.  This was one such moment..  We had Christmas music playing and Casey took the girls and started dancing with them, spinning them around and just having a good time.  My husband does not dance! Like ever.  Even at prom I think we actually danced to like 2 songs.  Him stepping out of his comfort zone just made their day!  

My friend made this card for me after I had already sent out a cheap one.  I love this one, so even though this wasnt what got sent out as our card I pretend it is.  

I couldnt end without showing you our Christmas dresses.  Ignore the chocolate mustache on Tinsley though, she enjoyed her sandwich a little too much.  That being said, many traditions were started and continued this year.  I love watching our family continue to grow and make things our own! 

Thanksgiving :)

Well its "only" been about 3 months since I last updated our family blog.  I'm sorry to those in our families that follow, so they can see pictures!  Ill get a few new posts up today.  

Waayy back in November, we went down to Casey's Uncle Mike and Kristie's  house for Thanksgiving Dinner.  Casey's grandparents, and mom drove up to Oregon to spend it with us.  We felt a little spoiled having so much family with us on Thanksgiving.  It had been 2 years since we'd had it with so much family. We love getting to visit and spend time down with Casey's family, this was just an added bonus.

We had a busy day before eating dinner, Grandma Lovell set up a fun project making candy turkeys.  Grandma Ahn helped Tinsley.  I had to add this picture because I just think Tinsley's face is hilarious.  

The girls absolutely loved making these oreo turkeys!  Riley would have kept at it all day if we'd let her.  Here she is pretty excited about her turkey!

We were pretty spoiled to have Casey's mom and grandma there.  Grandma Lovell knew just what would keep all these kids busy. They are pretty awesome!

After our turkeys were made, we had dinner (which was awesome!) and just hung around eating all of Kristie's eggnog cookies and rolls! Sometime that day this happened! Both girls love and adore Uncle Mike, Tinsley especially.  You tell her we are going to Uncle Mikes house and she is bouncing off the walls for hours. She crawled up on his lap and just fell asleep.  For those that know Tinsley, you know this is a RARE occurrence.  Mike took her upstairs to rest, and of coarse 10 min later she woke up.  But the point here is is that Mike is awesome! 

Grandma Ahn drove home with us Thanksgiving so she could spend a couple days with us.  We loved getting to have some one on one time with her!  We took her to the beach that's pretty close to us.  I love being so close to this gorgeous water! Dani took off her shoes and went in the freezing water...crazy, but I still have my orange rocks!

One of our favorite things to do whenever any grandparent comes, is to have story time!!

Our time with family was too short, and we wish grandma could have stayed longer.  But it gives us even more to be grateful about!