A Few New Things

I just had to put some pictures of Clara with her grandma up. Clara calls her grandma Kearl her "black" grandma. We are not sure why and we will probably never know why, but she sure loves her!

So it is finally official, we are building a new house in Lake Chapparal. No, as far as I am aware there is not a Lake Chapparal in Australia.
I knew the only way we weren't going to Australia was if Jeff changed jobs within a 2 month window between the time we made the decision and the time busy season would have started at KPMG. Well...he did just that. An excellent opportunity came around and he jumped on it. He is now employed by Axia, it is an internet network sevices company. So, we are going to build a house in the south. I figure that is the best way to get a change without actually leaving the city. They are estimating 13 months to build it, hopefully that is accurate because I am dying to get out of this house. Lately so many things have gone wrong with it. This month we put a few hundred dollars into some plumbing and electrical work. Not fun that's for sure. We have gotten a lot done around the house to finish it off. After only one year living in this place we finally have baseboards. It only took 8 months longer than I had originally planned, but it is done now. We still have some small things to fix up in this house, but it is a relief to have most of it done.
I have decided to go back to work one day a week. I work Mondays for the orthodontist I worked for when I was pregnant with Clara. It's a good place to work and 1 day a week is perfect for me. It gets me out of the house and allows me to use the skills I was trained to use. I also added a day to my dayhome. So now I have kids Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I am quite happy with this it keeps me from shopping more than once a week at least! Having only Fridays off doesn't give me much time to waste at the malls, so it really is a good thing for me. Knowing that it is only for a year makes it manageable and it is probably the only reason I am doing it.

Well this is a picture of our sweet lot. It isn't as small as it looks, but it isn't necessarily large either. The selling point to this lot is that it sides onto a green space with a park. We are so excited about this. It's a great park and every time I have driven by it has been full of kids.
We are building with Cardel and the floorplan is called the Lexington. There is a big sale on this house, and it is a really good deal. We weren't originally going to build this particular house. We had actually signed an offer conditional to financing on a different floorplan. Shortly after signing we found out about the deal on the Lexington. Jeff got up the courage and asked our sales guy if we could switch houses, only 1 week before conditions were supposed to be lifted. We had already had the lot for this house on hold for 1.5 months, so we were really prolonging things. In the end, we are SO happy that he asked. We are getting a bigger house, with a fully developed basement for less money than our original house would have cost with a partially developed basement. Our master bedroom is going to be HUGE and our ensuite will have a 3-way fireplace into the bedroom. I am so excited for that!!

It was finally time to cut Donovan's hair. It has been a long time coming but it is hard to cut such cute curls off. Curls are not quite as cute when they are in mullet form, so I said enough and buzzed his hair right off. Now he looks like such a boy and you would never know that my kid doesn't grow hair like most kids! I couldn't do this with Clara but I was tempted a few times! I am so happy with the outcome and Donovan seemed to enjoy having it done.

Well...thanks for reading our short novel. It has been a long time and I definitely have a lot more stories to tell, but I will leave it at this!!