“No! Me love Daddy!”

Alan:

He has been hard at work getting everything wrapped up for the move. He has made sure we have a house lined up to move into when we get there. There is SO MUCH planning that goes into a cross country move. Meanwhile, he’s been handing over his current responsibilities at work, signing out of his current post, lining up the shipment of one of our vehicles, and of course, our newest talent: calendar coordination.

We now use Google + calendars so that we know each other’s schedules. With each kid we’ve added to the family, and as the boys get older and have more of their own activities, there is just so much schedule planning that has to happen–constantly! I highly recommend the Google Calendar to all families!

This morning our church presented Alan with a Bible, engraved with his name, to thank him for his service in teaching Sunday School the past year. They had me go up there with him, and our pastor gave us a good farewell–which suddenly made this whole moving thing seem so real.

Wow! We really are almost gone!!

Alan is having to prep himself for returning to the student life. He will be getting his masters degree in engineering, and that is going to require a whole lot of math.

All I can say is, glad it’s him and not me!!

Me:

I’ve been trying to prep for this move by purge, purge, purging!  How do we have so much stuff!!??  Even after the yard sale, we are drowning in stuff. Bleh. Who needs it? I’m getting rid of as much as possible!!

We also have to get the house all cleaned and fixed up nicely for our move-out inspection. It’s easiest to get that finished once we move out our massive amount of junk, so for now…..I did some gardening:

Oh, the weeds….

I planted this rhododendron bush 2 years ago, and it FINALLY has its first bloom. Yes!!

I forgot to get a good before picture of this plot. It was even worse…

…..and after.  Yeah, My legs are STILL sore.

Of course, I had some helpers:

Work, Dan, work. Eh….pajamas are fine.  We’re just going to get dirty anyway. 😉

That’s one happy little helper.

Look! No hands!  And thank you, Amy!  She is ALWAYS holding babies and helping us with Daniel. I’m sure she loves always having her picture on the internet, too. haaa– I bet Amy’s hoping the new tenants do NOT have a blog….

Adding the fourth baby was big for us this year. I had to cut a lot of things: gardening was one of those things. This was the first time I had worked in the dirt in an entire year.

What else have I been doing….a lot of socializing…..because you know me, that’s what I do. 😉 No, really, I just want to see everyone one last time! I’m going to miss my friends so much!!!

Then there’s the whole schooling thing to figure out. I’ve gotten a lot of mixed reviews of the school where we are going, and I just have no peace about it. I finally decided to just devote this issue to prayer. You can find plenty of good reasons for each different method of schooling. Forget about it. Two weeks ago, I told Alan to devote the week to praying about it, I did so too, and we’ll do what God leads us to do.

I did get the answers I was looking for, so at this point we are moving forward in that direction, but I’m not ready to blog about all of that yet, so we’ll talk more about our schooling plans later.

Oh! And I’ve been working on teaching Caleb how to ride a bike. It kind of makes me want to pull all of my hair out, but we’re making progress.

Daniel:

Ah, Daniel. Daniel has learned the power of the word ‘stupid.’ We’ve never had much trouble with name-calling from our first two boys, but Daniel has this keen sense for bad or taboo words. Say something nasty in front of him one or two times, and he locks in and repeats it. And repeats it. And repeats it.

“You stupid, Caweb.” You get the idea. He likes to get a reaction. We are working on that problem…best advice:  You definitely want to watch your mouth around Daniel. He’s the only 3 year old I know that uses the expressions, “What the heck!” and “Dang it.”

Redeeming qualities: He LOVES his baby brother, he is compliant in public, he’s cuddly and sweet most of the time, and he also loves to say, “I love you, Mommy.”

Of course, sometimes it goes more like this:

Me: “I love you, Daniel.”

Daniel: “No. Me love Daddy.”

Nice.

Daniel and his best bud

John David:

The gates are hung, and JD is off! He is officially a crawler, and it is just so adorable. It also makes him happier, easier to deal with, and he sleeps better at night.  All good things.

One day last week, I suddenly realized that JD is 11 months, not 10.  Huh– so he’s our latest crawler ever–I guess that probably means we don’t have to worry about him walking yet either.

So now the baby is crying and needs to be fed, so I am outta here!