Greetings from Wallburg!

Well, Adam, Brady and I have enjoyed our first week at the new house. We are absolutely in love with it. Brady asks constantly on the way home, "Are we going to the new house," as if we had anywhere else to go. If you ever come to visit, he actually gives a pretty good tour, starting and ending with his new room. Our new home package includes: 3 bed room 2.5 bath, full basement, walk up attic, 3 car garage attached to house, 4 car garage detached, barn, pasture, dog lot, and a bigger house payment. The house is completely unpacked, and after this weekend, the garage is cleaned out and everything is in storage. Now, don't get me wrong, we still have a very long "to-do" list. However we have made quite a bit of progress. I have included some pictures, but would love all our friends and family to come out for a visit. Just call first. Here she is.

This is actually the part of the basement up under the front porch. Perfect for storage...or bowling.

Brady's new room. He loves showing everyone this place.

The basement. Brady loves coming down here so we moved all of his big ride-on toys down here. Perfect play place on rainy or cold days!

Our bed room....I love how fresh and bright this room turned out!

Front door and Adam on the phone.

Nice big foyer with coat closet and half bath.

We acquired a very nice wood stove. We cranked this baby up the first few nights during the cold weather. Our room is the farthest from the Living Room, and I woke in a sweat in the middle of the night. This thing works! There are also hook ups for wood stoves in the basement and in the detached garage (Man Cave).

Beautiful wood molding. We are also retrieving an old leather chair of Adam's that we couldn't fit in the old house with the big couch. It will look perfect between the windows!

Living Room

Kitchen...and the best part is....I have a dishwasher!!!!!!!!!

We have a very bright eating area.

The bar over looks the Living Room.

Dog woods are blooming right outside my window.

The barn comes fully loaded with ( chicken poo) an attached goat pasture. It will be a while before we can get Icy out here because we will need to clear the pasture. We will also be extending the pasture up towards the house.

View from the back of the house. You can also see Brady's new play set. Thank you so much to Stephani for giving this to us! Brady is so excited about it.

The old chicken barn will soon be a horse barn. We already have the plans. We just first have to get out all the chicken cages that line both sides of the wall. I hope the chicken smell comes out with them, because I hate chickens. I will hopefully start on the barn this summer.

A lovely front porch. We have a porch swing that needs to be put up, and I have so many plans for this place. It will be the perfect chill-ax place when I'm done with it.

My car finally has a real garage to live in. This is the main garage from the side of the house.

Beau's new pen.

The detached garage, AKA, the man cave. It can fit about 4 cars in it. It also has a back storage room that expands the length of the garage. This is Adam's favorite place! He already has a stove, a sink, and a wood stove hook up going in his favor. Note: to Adam's friends and family...If you see smoke rising from this structure...he's in there.

.

House Update

We are in the final stretch. We found out the closing date for our house was bumped up from the 20th to the 11th, as in this Friday. We have been packing like crazy but things have started to slow down. If everything goes as planned we will close on our new house on the 16th. Once that happens I'm going into over drive to try and paint before we move the furniture in there. I'm hiring my volunteer paint crew, so let me know if you are interested. Once we get in there I'll start working on all the before/after pictures to post.

Brady, gets it and is so excited about his new house. He talks about it all the time and is always asking if we need to pack more the new house. He is as excited as we are.

NEWS FLASH!!!!

Ok so all within a 2 week period of time, this has happened:
We sold our house by owner
We looked at 8 homes
We picked 1 of the 8
We have signed all papers and the new house is contract pending

Yes, it's a lot to take in! So many changes are happening in a very short period of time. We are scheduled to close on our house March 20th. Then we are scheduled to close on the new house March 31st (hopefully sooner). We will now be living in Davidson County off Old Thomasville Rd. We will have almost 5 acres, a barn, a pasture, a shop for Adam and lots of room to run for Brady and the pets. We are so excited to move in even though we will have a lot of work to do before we everything just as we want it. I will be posting (in theory) all of the before/after shots as we work on this new house.

Christmas/New Year/ Birthday...so much fun packed into one!

So yet again, I have fallen behind in my blog posts. One would think with the winter break and then all the snow days I would have had time to blog a bit...but no. So instead, you are getting several big events all at once. Let's start with the most recent and work ourselves back.

January 31st, Brady entered his terrible two's...just one year away from the terrifying threes so I hear. His actual birthday was pretty low key. Adam and I took Brady to Chucky Cheese for the first time. Yes, we rode every single ride imaginable..sometimes twice, three, four or even five times. It's been a week and he is still talking about all the rides he went on. Looks like at least one day out of the week during the summer is planned!

We didn't have his actual birthday party until Super Bowl Sunday. We again rented the Doe Run club house as we did last year. This year Mickey Mouse was the guest of honor as every time you turned around his big ears were staring you in the face from balloons, stuffed animals and even the cake. After the pizza had been cleaned out, we hit the gifts; which after just finding places for all his Christmas presents, every time wrapping paper was flung through the air, I was racking my brain for where on Earth would we find a place for one more thing, because it sure as heck wasn't fitting in our little house.

OK...no, Brady did not get a case of beer for his birthday. His helmet for his 4-wheeler was in it...come on, give us some credit!

The Grand Finale came when Brady received his first 4-wheeler. I can't really explain the scene...you will just have to watch.

And yes...I am still trying to figure out where to put all this stuff!

Christmas:

We had a typical holiday this year. We spent the entire holiday travelling between 6 different celebrations. Eating and sleeping in beds that we didn't fit in together, or in the same room with Brady, which means, limited sleep. But between all the road rage/missed turn arguments and sleepless nights, this Christmas was an exciting time as this year, Brady understood that a man named Santa Clause would be leaving presents under his Christmas tree.

Brady became very ill the day after Christmas and sadly he did not get to enjoy the snow that covered our area. You may notice in some of the pictures he doesn't seem to be feeling well. However, he was quite the little trooper and stayed jsut as sweet as ever, even with the fever that woudl eventually turn into a nasty double ear infection. He of course is clear of it now and recently had a great 24 month check up. He is even barely on the weight curve..which is the first time in about 20 months!

Happy Belated Halloween from the Smith Family!!!

This was finally the year that Brady would get to have his first Trick or Treating experience. We tried and tried to get him to say "Trick or Treat" on our way there that evening, and he repeatedly refused to say this phrase...my son, that talks non-stop and no vocabulary boundaries, would not say a phrase. Adam and I figured his cuteness alone would be enough with out the "Trick or Treat".

We met up with our friends and hit the first house. The door was opened and we gave the bigger kids first choice so that Brady would not feel overwhelmed at the first house. The doorway cleared and we stepped up for the big moment. I squatted next to him and told him what to say. With absolute confidence and zeal, Brady blurts out, "TICK OR TEAT"!!! I thought the lady might dump the whole bowl into his small green bucket. He even ended with his modest "Tank Too".

Brady rocked the first house, unfortunately he did not spread the absolute adorableness to the rest of the stops as this was the one and only time he was able to get his words out. We made it through about 5 more houses before only a Kit Kat could sooth him on the way back to the car. We were not out too late, and we didn't come home with tons of candy that we didn't need around the house tempting us. Not bad for a first Halloween on the town.

The Best Hookie Day Ever!

As Adam and I reached the end of a highly stressful week, we made the decision that we needed a family day together. Some would say, "well you can have family days on the weekends." But with everything that has to be done in a short period of time, our weekends fly by without us doing one thing together as a family. I needed it, Adam needed it, and even Brady needed it. Adam and I took Friday off and took Brady to the Chidren's Museum in Greensboro. Adam nor Brady had ever been there before. As soon as we walked in the door, both boys were immediately gone from my sight. I at least slowed down enough to pay and get our wrist bands. I found the boys again and we quickly began exploring. Adam was running one direction playing with something, while Brady ran the other direction to climb onto something. I figured the bigger Smith could take care of himself so I opted to stick with the smaller Smith.

The only issue we had was the almost meltdown we had when we had to stop Brady from walking out with a shopping cart, full of goodies he found along the way. He asked me if we could take all these things home, and he was quite disappointed but understanding when I told him these things were not ours and we could not take them home with us. That did not stop him from still trying to wheel the cart out the door.