A Few Pictures of the New House

We moved over the weekend, and boy do I have lots of things to share with the blog!  Of course, I also still have a household that is about 45% in boxes and two one year old twins to look after, so I have very little time for the blog at the moment.  Luckily I do have a few pictures I wanted to share while I had a moment! Please excuse the picture quality, these were all taken on my phone and not my digital camera.

First off, the playroom.  It is the most organized room in the house at the moment.

Entrance to playroom:

Playroom left side:

Playroom right side:

Reading area of playroom:

The thing on the wall is a list of really cute/sweet "Playroom Rules" on vinyl letters I got from Etsy.  They look good but were really hard to put up!  One of the rules was ironically "Try to be patient" while we were impatiently trying to get it on the wall.

Now here is another room in the house I love, an actual dining room (We've never had a formal dining room or table before)!  We did not paint this room, it just happened to be this color and we like it!

Now here are just some random pictures of random places I took over the weekend.

Here is the babies' first breakfast in the house:

Here is the entrance hallway:

Here are the babies playing by the bathtub in the master bedroom/bathroom area:

You can't see much from the picture above I just liked the way it looked.  At this point there was NOTHING in the house except me and the babies and the bare essentials.

And finally, here is Mr. Brady outside of the playroom.  This is the first time he ventured out a little.

I have a LOT more to post about but it will probably be quite a while before I update again.  Hope everyone is doing great!  We are enjoying the new house!

 

Moving Prep Goof Offs

The movers are coming this Friday to pack our house up, and we are actually moving this upcoming weekend.  To prepare for the impending move, we spent this past weekend sorting through our cabinets and junk drawers (yes, we had more than one junk drawer).   We also sorted through our important filing/documents.  We tried to pare down things we don't want to take with us and to preserve the important things in a safe place so that the movers don't put them in a random box.

While we were busy doing all this, we ended up having a lot of fun.  I think that's the only way you can do this is just to have fun with it.  We were having a blast rediscovering things we forgot we even had.  If you've ever seen the show Storage Wars, you can just imagine the scene we had in our kitchen.  We even found $5!  We are in the money now!  I took some fun pictures to share with you.

Chad, doing his best Darrell impression (guy from Storage Wars) "That's a $5 bill right there!"

This is a funny story I will tell on myself.  I am always complaining we don't have any Scotch tape.  I always seem to need it for some reason and I never can find any.  So I always buy more, and it always disappears.  Well, this weekend we found it!  I think we are OK in the Scotch tape department for a while.

Even the kids were enjoying themselves.  They thought it was extra fun to play with all of the miscellaneous items on the floor while we were organizing.

And even though Brady will kill me when he is older, I have to post this cute pic of him wearing one of Chloe's headbands.  Maybe I can blame it on the fact that we were delirious from all of the sorting.

Even Sabrina was happy, since she found a new favorite thing to rest on!  We had a half-filled trash bag that had old Christmas stockings in it, and she found it and made it her new favorite nap place!  She stayed there for hours.  We finally had to go poke her to make sure she was OK.

In addition to all of our goofing off moving preparations, we managed to also spend some time with friends over the weekend as well.  Friday evening I got to attend a local Mom of Multiples consignment sale with my friend Jessie (yes she spells her name exactly like I do, and she also has twins!) and I had a lot of fun and picked up some great things for the new playroom.  I also scored a Radio Flyer wagon for the kids that I am really excited about!  Sunday around lunchtime we got to go visit some other friends with twins, the Dermody family.  Our kids got to play together and my friend Natalie and I got to go enjoy lunch out and a pedicure while our husbands and Natalie's Grandmother watched all of our kids.  I think everybody had a great time!

Here is a picture of Chloe before we went to the play date, I just thought her outfit was so cute!

Then here she is all tuckered out from non-stop playing:

I am pretty sure by the end of the weekend this is how we all felt!  Hope everyone had a fun and busy weekend too!

 

Our Exciting News!

If you follow our blog, you know that our family has struggled for quite a while to manage life with two adults, two toddlers, a dog, and a cat in a 3 story townhouse in the city.  I remember one of the first things Chad said when I was just 6 weeks pregnant and the doctor told us we were expecting twins was, "We need a bigger house!".  It reminded me a lot of that part in the movie Jaws when the men are battling the giant shark in this tiny, rickety old boat and the guy looks around and says, "We're gonna need a bigger boat!".

With the real estate market being what it is, we have had to make do in our home as long as possible.  Now that the babies are older, larger/heavier, and extremely mobile, the logistics of managing a home with so many stairs is becoming very difficult not only from a convenience standpoint, but it is also a safety issue.  Also, since I stay at home with the babies during the day, we've had to find creative ways to make a play space for them.  This meant giving up our "dining area" and using that for toy storage.  When guests come over to eat they basically have to stand over our kitchen counter with their food.  Our living room is essentially a playroom.  We have no outdoor space for the kids to play in.  This wasn't an issue when they were newborns, but now that they can enjoy the outdoors it would be great to have a backyard.  Add to all this the fact that our neighborhood is not geared toward families at all, it just isn't ideal.  

We had our house on the market for sale last July through October.  After we pulled it from the market, we decided to revisit our situation again this Spring and make a new plan of action.  Before we knew it, here it is Spring already!  After some thought, we have a new plan.  We have been very fortunate to find a beautiful one story home in a gorgeous family community in the suburbs to lease.  We plan to move there in a few weeks.  In the meantime, we are going to lease out our home in the city until the housing market recovers.  While selling a home in our area is very difficult right now, the leasing market is very hot!  In fact, there were 2 homes we were really interested in but they leased before we could even make an appointment to see them!  We also had to compete with another offer on the home we ended up leasing (but we won, yay!).  While this made it a little more difficult to find a new home to lease that met all of our needs, it also means that our own home should lease pretty quickly.  Our realtors feel confident that it will.

We are very excited about our new home, it means a lot for our family, particularly the kids.  They will each have their own rooms now!  They will also have a playroom that is just for their toys and for them to enjoy!  This spring and summer they will be able to go outside and play in a big backyard.  As a family we will also be able to enjoy the lakes around the community as well as the playground and swimming pool!  One of the most exciting things for me personally is that we will have a formal dining room for the first time ever, so our guests will actually be able to sit and eat!  Also, no more carrying 40 lbs worth of babies up and down the stairs for nap times!  When we go grocery shopping we won't have to carry our groceries up a flight of stairs to the kitchen to put away!  

Chad is making the biggest sacrifice in that he will now have to commute a significant ways to and from work each day, and we appreciate him so much for doing this for our family.  It will be an adjustment for him and I am going to try my hardest to help ease the transition for us all.  I think we both feel the benefits of being out in the 'burbs definitely outweigh the commute.

I hope to get some pictures in the next couple of weeks.  Our lease starts April 1st so I should be able to get some pictures then even if we don't move in right away!