Time to Say Goodbye

With a few tears & lots of hugs, I had to say goodbye to all of my friends & patients at CMH on Saturday. After 9 1/2 years, it was kind of surreal walking out for the last time & handing over my badge. I really thought I'd stay there until I retired! But although it was really hard to close that chapter in my life, I'm very excited to start somewhere new & learn new things & become a part of a new "family." (And PS to the HIPPA police, the moms of my two beautiful friends in the photo gave me their full permission to post this, so shush! lol ;))

So we've got a lot more work to do in the next few days. We're hoping to be out & on the road by Thursday afternoon for trip #1. And we're also hoping that Vermont will still be there when we get there! lol :S We have a call into a friend up in our town to see what things look like there after Irene. We already got a call from the kids' school that school was cancelled today because of the weather. Saying many prayers that everyone is fine & any damage from the rain & winds can be easily cleaned up. Also, if you could say a few prayers for the folks in southern Vermont that we know truly have been devastated by this freak storm (they haven't had anything close to this bad since 1927!) You know I'll keep you all posted! :)

We're Selling Our Life Away

And it actually feels really good! lol You seriously have no idea how much stuff you have until you try to move it. Throw in a half remodeled house plus a 120 acre farm into the mix & you've got a great big mess on your hands! Holy cow we've got a lot of crap! But for the past week or so we've turned selling off all of our stuff into a full time job. We even met with an estate sale company to see if they could hold a big sale & get rid of the rest of our stuff for us. We're not sure yet if that'll happen, but I'm totally cool with it if we do. I'm SO done with living in chaos. I just want all of this crap gone! We've got half our life on craigslist right now, plus we're going to have another ginormous garage sale tomorrow & Saturday. After that, it's going to goodwill. Bye bye clutter!

We thought we had been living with craziness through all of the last year & a half, but I guess the pure insanity of the last couple of weeks has taken it's toll on the boys. Poor Gavin started to cry last night & it broke my heart. "When are we ever just gunna come home from school & just relax!?! I just want to watch a movie & cuddle!" Oh my gosh I could've cried myself. :'( My kid just wants to spend time with me & I can't give that to him right now. How sad is that! I tried to make him feel better & explain that our life has been crazy lately, but we're going to go to Vermont really soon & it will all be over. But to that he responded with a sob, "But then we're just trading one broken house for another! We're still going to move there & dad'll have to fix the house all day, and we'll never get to spend time together, and... and... and.." Awwww! Break my heart! So Mathew & I talked with him & explained to him that this is so very different. First of all, we'll finally have a home again. Yes we'll need to rent for a year or so, but we'll have one place to stay with all of our own stuff, and we won't have to hop from place to place every two weeks living out of duffle bags. And yes we need to remodel another house, but this time we don't have to worry about insurance companies, or inspectors, or who's going to pay us what. And we don't have to worry about much more than taking the walls down & putting them back up the way we want it. And that this time it'll actually be fun for us because it's something that we chose, not something that happened to us that we weren't prepared for. And, when it's all said & done, we'll have a forever home. A beautiful place we'll stay for a long time & just be a family. He seemed to be okay with that. And I am too.

So as Mathew is manning the garage sale by himself tomorrow & Saturday, I will be wrapping up my last two days at a job that I love with friends that I've made over the last 9+ years that I may never see again. It's going to be tough. :(

So Much to Do, So Little Time!

Oh my goodness we've been busy! You have no idea how many things you have to worry about to move across the country, until you're actually doing it! I feel like our to do list keeps getting longer instead of shorter, but I'm sure it will all get done & we'll work it all out.

We had two different companies take our stuff from our house initially when the storm happened. One is called ServPro that takes all of your belongings, packs them up & treats it for water & mold damage. The other is the Certified Restorative Drycleaning Network (CRDN) that takes all of your clothes, drapes, bedding, and pretty much anything else washable & treats & stores all of that. Well I've already told you that ServPro is being great big poopy-heads & not giving us any of our "stuff" stuff before we move. We tried to get them to send us our belongings directly to Vermont but no-go. Bummer. Worth a try. Not sure what we're going to do about all of that stuff yet, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. We've got what we need to function for now. But CRDN brought us all of our fabric stuff last week and OH. MY. GOD. we've got a lot of crap!! lol Sadly, as a mark of how long we've been going through all of this, probably 75% of all of our clothes we had to sell/donate. The kids have long grown out of everything they took & Matt & I have lost so much weight (probably due to the stress) that none of our stuff fits anymore either! So we boxed all of that up & set it aside & went out with some friends on Friday night. Our dear friends the Kappels (we <3 them! :)) own the coffee shop in our town & offered to let us use their parking lot on Saturday morning to try & get our garage sale started. Not sure if they were totally serious, but we took them up on it! lol For an impromptu garage sale that was not advertised (except for the wonder that is facebook) I think we did pretty darn good. Sadly though, we still have a TON of stuff left to get rid of, so we'll do it again next weekend. (Don't worry Tim & Kimberlee, we'll go to the commercial buildings instead! lol) And might I add, for the record, that it is my husband, not me, that is the total clothes horse. He had 8 EIGHT boxes of clothes to my one! lol Never again though. I think we've learned our lesson on the mild amount of hoarding we had going on. ("But what if I gain weight again & I need this?" "But what if this one gets ruined? I better buy 4 of them..." etc. lol)

So clothes are pretty much taken care of, we need to weed through our stuff at our friend's house to see what we're taking & what we need to get rid of there, secure all of the rest of our belongings at our house, load up all of the tools we're taking to Vermont onto the trailer, sell two more cars & our flatbed trailer, sell the gator, have our garage sale again, donate what's left, arrange for our move, oh, and the minor detail of finding a house to rent in VT. Little things, right?? lmao! Ugh. That's okay. I know we'll get it all done in time. But I hope you'll forgive me if I'm not on here much to update until things get settled. I'll try, but I don't have internet where I'm staying right now, so it's hit or miss when I'll have time. You can become one of my "followers" though & then you'll get notified whenever I update on all of our crazy fun! lol Wish us luck!

It's Official!

Well hello my beautiful friends! We are finally back from vacation & I have so much to catch you up on! First of all, the first part of our vacation was a lot of fun. South Carolina was beautiful & we had such a great time getting to spend three days doing nothing but play on the beach! :) Here's a pic of Gavin relaxing in the sand:

LMAO! Such a goofball! ;) Here's one of Natalie playing in the waves:

She LOOOOOOOVED the beach! It was adorable watching here play in the sand and play with her daddy in the water. The boys got pretty creative with the sandcastles after a couple of days. Here's their favorite:

We had so much fun!! After Myrtle Beach, we drove up the east coast & took our time heading to Vermont by making a couple of stops along the way. First we stopped in North Carolina & got to have a really nice dinner with my sister & her new husband. (Yay for gluten-free pizza! lol) It was so great to sit down with her for a while & catch up. Then we drove up & spent a day in Washington D.C. Yeah, the kids were tired, but we still trekked it all over town to get some nice pictures of some of the major monuments. Here's a picture of the kids outside the Lincoln Memorial:

Way cool!

So from there we headed up to Vermont... which pretty soon we can officially call HOME!! :D We closed on the house on Monday morning & couldn't wait to start cleaning it up a little. As we were outside, I'm telling you, it seemed like every. single. person. in the town came up to us to introduce themselves & see what we were doing. And every one of them was SO happy to see that we were "rescuing" this old house! It was so cute! A few even wanted to go inside & see because their curiosity over the house over the years got the better of them lol. It was pretty great to already feel embraced by the community. I hope we can do the house the justice it deserves!

Okay, so I promised I'd share pictures of the house once we closed & it was officially ours. Are you ready? Are you sure you're ready?

It's a big mess right now, are you sure????? Okay... here it is!

TA-DAAAA!! lol! Lovely isn't it? ;) Seriously though, it has SOOO much potential to be a beautiful house. It was built in 1861 and still has a lot of it's historic charm. It looks small, but it's actually over 2500 square feet with 5 bedrooms inside & 10+foot ceilings & everything. With A LOT of love it could be a great house!! So we're going to trade one great big project for another, but this one will be totally worth it. I can't wait to share with you all our journey of transforming this neglected building into a beautiful home! :)

So, now we've got the house, all we have to do now is live there & fix it. Well, how are we going to do that if I don't have a job, you ask? Well, it just so happens that I DO!! :D Actually, just a couple of hours after I made my last quick post here, they called me & offered me the position! Just the very next day after my interview! WooHoo!!! So they want me to start on September 12th. Holy cow! So much to do in such a short amount of time! I put in my two weeks at my job this morning. That was pretty tough because I've spent nearly ten years there. But it will be such a good change & I'm really excited about my new position.

So it looks like the next couple of weeks are going to be quite the whirlwind! You know I'll be on here keeping you updated along the way! ;)

Hey all! We're still on vacation & won't be home for a few more days, so I'm sorry I haven't been able to update in a while! :( But I had a moment to hop on a computer so I wanted to fill you all in really quick. We are officially, as of Monday morning, proud owners of a Vermont home! :) We're beginning to let people know our plans now that it's final. Yay! I had my job interview Tuesday morning (on my birthday even! Aah! lol) and I think it went really well. I hope I'll know if they want me for the job really soon. Then it's the two week notice, & a great big move for us in the very near future!! :S

Not much more time, but I'll share lots of pics & updates when I get back. TTYL! :)