Voilà

So we got our floors done!! They look A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. Seriously, I actually like my home now instead of hating it with every part of my body. I have the before and after pictures below. But first, another sleeping position of Caleb after playing with Tristan for 3 straight hours at bedtime. Love it.

Now for the pictures of the floors. Seriously, if anyone needs a contractor, please use our guy. He is a great guy and has very low prices. He is the same one that did the kid's room too. I would recommend him to anyone. E-mail me for his contact info.
I honestly don't think these pictures do the house justice. I think it makes a difference in person but here are the pictures anyway.

Living room BEFORE (yucky concrete):

Living room AFTER:

Here are the stairs BEFORE. I really don't think these pictures do it justice on how awful the stairs looked. Trust me, they were awful. I didn't really want to zoom in on the stains.

 

Stairs AFTER: (again, I don't think you can tell in the pictures):

Upstairs hallway BEFORE:

 

 

Upstairs hallway AFTER:

Locked up

So I was going to post a video of bath time at our house. It has child nudity and although it's not much, Vincent has assured me that I can and will be arrested for posting it on the Internet. I tried to find some video edit program to add a black box over the nudity but I couldn't, so sorry.......I know you all had your hopes up.  :)

So bedtime at our house is MISERABLE. I know I have already touched on this subject but Tristan and Caleb should not be allowed to sleep together but we just have no choice. Some nights it gets so terrible that I just let them play until they pass out. They have now broke both bed frames and I'm not getting any other toddler bed frames or any for that matter until we move. So now all they have in their room is 2 mattresses on the floor, a TV stand and a TV. Oh, but they manage just fine. I caught them trying out their new adventure. It's where they line up the mattresses on the floor and then get on the TV stand and jump and try to roll to the next mattress. But most of the time, they put a mattress up against the wall at a slant like a slide, then they line up on the other side of the room and run and try to jump as high as they can on the mattress and then slide down. Believe it or not, neither one has had a broken bone yet. Knock on wood.
This is what happens when we let them collapse on their own from playing too much. This is Caleb's legs off the side of his mattress with a blanket completely covering him. Not sure how this happened.

One the nights when we are burned out, we put Tristan in our room to sleep. Then once Caleb falls asleep, we move Tristan back to his room. But we are downstairs the whole time. So what we were noticing is that Tristan would leave our room and go back to his room and climb the baby gate and go back to partying with Caleb. We would go from hearing nothing to boys destroying a room again. I would go upstairs and spank both of their asses. Hard. They did not care. Within 5 minutes, Tristan would be back in the room with Caleb. Shoot me in the head. So, one night when it was girls night out, I get the following picture text to me from Vincent with only this text "Problem solved". It worked. You can actually see Caleb in there, crying. It's awesome. So we now double-gate it always.

House update: So we bought the laminate yesterday. I love it. I will be taking before and after pictures so y'all can see. After talking to my neighbor about the laminate I became convinced that we should not do laminate on the stairs. If anyone has ever seen Caleb walk 20 feet, they know he falls like 13 times in that distance. He is a klutz. So I was having dreams of Caleb trying to climb up laminate stairs and it was bad. I just knew every bone in his body would be broken. So I convinced Vincent to do new carpet on the stairs, laminate upstairs and downstairs. He finally agreed. I left a message with the contractor to schedule the work so hopefully it will be soon. Now all we have to do is pick out the carpet for the stairs. Yay!

And last, I have a video for you. Brayden is starting to crawl! Sorta. He is doing that rocking back and forth and kinda moving forward. I tried to get a short video of him in his room by himself but then Caleb and Bailey came in. And of course Caleb had to play with Brayden's toys too. Poor kid. He is totally a 3rd child. All sorts of distractions, lol. Can't even get his own video.

Recommendations

So I was going to post a video but I can't seem to upload it in a timely fashion so I will use this blog to make 2 recommendations. Both random, but valuable for those that have kids.

# 1. Personalized suitcases for kids. My kids are always going to my parents house. And, for whatever reason, (not like my parents had 6 kids or anything) they can never figure out which clothes and shoes belong to Tristan and which belong to Caleb. Yeah, common sense tells you to look at the size and then do the math on their age but they are getting old. So, I decided to get the kids their own suitcases. I ordered them from this website - Luna Belle Boutique. The kids absolutely love them. They roll so the kids love rolling the suitcases themselves. I would recommend as gifts. Here's some pics of them I took.

#2. Vaporizers. This might be an obvious for other parents but unfortunately not for me. I have spent a lot of money on 5+ vaporizers since I have had kids. None seem to work. I actually was starting to think they were just a scam of some sort. But then my doctor told me how beneficial it could be for my kids. So I looked a bunch up and read the reviews. I finally decided on the Crane Drop Shape Cool Mist Humidifier. Love it! I'm about to order 2 more. You can actually see the mist and it fills up the room pretty good. The only bad thing is that it will only last about 8 hours before you have to fill it again. But honestly, that is a tiny detail compared to how awesome it is. Get it.

I know this blog was kinda dumb but I'll try and upload that video for you next. It's pretty funny. Well, Vincent doesn't think so, but I do.

I'm back!

So I got an e-mail from my brother, Nate, who is deployed right now. It reads:

 

 

Yo,

Put some fresh shit on your blog. I just google'd it since my last deployment here 2 years ago because that's when I get bored enough to read it. But I just read you're getting rid of it. Start that shit back up. I got 2 more months of boredom ahead of me. Entertain me. Tell vincent to get on that shit if you're "too busy". Quit having children. I'm out!

 

So obviously, how can anyone resist that plea from the heart? So I have decided to try the blog again. I will really, really, really try to post 1 blog at least 1 time a week. My goal is to just share the stories that I share with friends and family and just try to make a blog about them. The problem is so much crap happens to me that I forget to blog about it. But I got an app on my phone so when something happens, I'll make a quick note. Hopefully this helps the blogs become more frequent. Also, if my audience out there can contribute, I would appreciate it. I mean, Nate, don't get me wrong. I like writing for you but it doesn't hurt to know that other people give a crap about what I write about. Feel free to become a "Follower" or put your e-mail in so that when I publish, it gets sent to you. Also, please comment on my blogs. I hear from people that they thought a certain blog was hilarious but I never hear anything on my blog. Please comment. This will encourage me to write blogs if I know people want to read it. Okay, soapbox done.

So where to begin? My life is a train wreck. First there's work. So I don't know if I explained my job completely because I am just now starting to understand it. But I work for a benefits software company. Basically they sell the software to like say, Lockheed Martin. Then I would be the account manager and in charge of getting all the employee's information loaded onto the site. Also I would have to get a list of their carriers and contact them to build a report that needs to be sent from the site to them updating any changes with employees. Basically the process from start to finish is mine. So if they have special requests for their plans - i.e., rate changes from doing a wellness exam, I would make that happen. I use javascript and whatever else behind the scenes to make the website perform correctly. Then the company uses the site for their employees to enroll in during open enrollment. It's especially busy during 4th quarter - because everyone wants their benefits effective 1/1. That's why you didn't hear from me at all. Things have calmed down but cleaning up data is the biggest issue I  have right now. I work Tuesdays and Fridays from home and I love that. It lets me save gas and toll money and also lets me sleep in. It is super challenging and I usually learn something new every day. Fo' real.

Vincent. He is doing great. He got a new smoker and has been smoking all kinds of meat. It's actually sad because he'll smoke a 10 lb brisket and I can't stand brisket and the boys eat about 3 bites. So Vincent ends up eating the whole thing himself for lunch for the next 2 weeks. But he loves the smoker. His next big project is a kegerator. He makes all his beer at home. It's actually really really good and saves money. Well now he wants to build a 4 tap one using a huge deep freezer. I'm not sure how it will be done but I have asked that my brother, David, be involved. Like we don't have enough crap in our garage, by the way....

House. Ugh, I hate this topic. So, we haven't put our house back on the market since the last time. We transitioned the carpet downstairs to stained concrete. I hate it. The acoustics are awful. We have decided to install laminate downstairs, on the stairs, and upstairs in the hallway. We are actually in the process of doing it right now. I just ordered a sample of the color we like and if we like it in person we will order the full amount. We decided to do laminate versus hardwood for 3 reasons. 1, it's a LOT cheaper. 2, they look very very similar now. Laminate has come a long way. 3, our house is in a bracket where people won't be insisting on real wood. They'd settle for laminate. Anyway, we were going to do hardwood but I really was against the waste of money. Which brings me to moving. We have decided to pay off our debt, except for student loans. I know they're considered debt, but I don't really consider them to be since they don't affect your credit. We have no problem taking forever to pay those off. But once we pay off the debt, we have decided to rent out our house. This way we can get out of it but not have to spend money to get rid of it. Vincent says the timeline is this December for moving. I am a pessimist so I would assume the beginning of next year. But honestly if we have all of our debt gone, we should have extra income to work with and be able to be prepared if anything happens with our house as a rent house. That part makes me really nervous.

The kids. This topic is overwhelming. I wonder at least 1 time a day why I had kids. Tristan is almost 4, Caleb is 2 1/2, and my sweet Brayden is 6 months old. Tristan and Caleb are terrible. I mean, awful. And I don't mean that in a funny way. I mean that in an exhausting way. We don't go very many places on the weekend because of Tristan and Caleb. If we go to a store, they take off running. They don't even know where they're going. Just trying to free themselves, I guess. And I don't want to hear advice on whooping their asses. I whoop their asses. I spank them till my hand hurts. They don't care. I think it's the age. Bedtime is an absolute nightmare. I drink more since they started sharing a room together. First it was Caleb being bad and would keep Tristan up. So we moved Tristan to our room until Caleb fell asleep. Then we would move Tristan back into the room with Caleb. Now, Tristan wakes Caleb up when he goes back in and they party hard. Caleb has already destroyed his bed frame. He now sleeps on his mattress on the floor. It looks white trash but I'm not buying another one for him to destroy. Now we just put them together in the room at bedtime and go downstairs and ignore them. It's all we can do right now. Ugh. But Brayden. He's so sweet. I keep telling him to not grow up and be like his brothers. He just smiles his gummy little smile at me and melts my heart. But I know better. They all turn 2 eventually. Sigh.

So I believe we're caught up for the most part. I know there are tons of stories that I need to share but I'll wait and put in a blog.

Any comments, suggestions, or ideas for the blog???

 

 

Retirement

So I have decided it is time to retire this blog. I know it has been forever since I blogged last so I'm sure you've moved on but I really don't have time for this. So I just wanted to make it official. Maybe if I get more time in the next few years but I don't have the time now. I have 3 kids under the age of 4, 2 beagles, a full-time job, and a family full of drama. Unfortunately, right now, typing blogs is more a chore than fun so I need to go into retirement. If you hang out with me, you won't miss out on any of the funny stories and drama anyway. Lucky you. :) Also I try my hardest to stay current with Facebook. It's not the same as a blog but I try to keep a lot of pictures there. Please join Facebook if you haven't yet......Aunt El. :)
Anyway it's been fun. Hopefully I will be back soon.