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OK, so it has been over a month since I have blogged. But I have good reason, my life has been a crazy whirlwind! This post will probably ridiculously long and jam packed so just bare with me :)
I guess that I will start where we left off. July 11-14th we drove to Utah for Matt's family reunion on his Dad's side. It was a long drive, but we had A TON of fun. It was way better than I expected actually and the weather was so perfect. Remind me again WHY I live in Arizona?? So anyway, that trip was great and we came home right in the middle of a monsoon storm, which was even better! I love the rain.
Before we left for the reunion Matt and I decided that we really should move and Matt had the STRONG desire to do it sooner rather than later, so we started looking at places to rent. On Friday the 18th we had an appointment to meet with a landlord and check out an older 70's style duplex (That we had viewed before our trip and wanted to look at again). Since we were driving over to Glendale (about 40 minutes from our apt in Mesa) for the day, I decided to try and find some other places to look at, we had already looked at a bunch of apartments and a few of those duplexes. On a whim I decided to check out a rental house website just to see. I found a house that looked great and was only about $25 more/month than the other apartments we had looked at, so on the way to Glendale I called the real estate company and arranged to look at the house that same day. We went to the duplex first, some other people were there looking at it, but the landlord never showed up to meet us and answer our questions. As I walked around the place I didn't have a very good feeling and was overwhelmed by the general craptastic splendor. It was definetly more poorly maintained than I had remembered and just the fact that the Landlady missed out appointment, made me feel pretty uneasy. Before we went to the other house, the realtor called me back to tell me that they had just decided that morning to drop the rent on the house, but hadn't changed the online listing yet, so it was even cheaper than we thought. In fact, it was going to be cheaper than the duplex we had just looked at. We drove to the house and it was PERFECT for us. By far a million times superior to anything we had looked at in the proice range. 1300 sq feet, 2 car garage, backyard (that needs a little TLC, but that's ok-we'll work on our tans) and 3 bedrooms. I was in love and so was Matt. We said a quick prayer, felt great and decided to put in a application on the house that day, before someone else jumped at the dropped rent price (it really is an amazing deal).
Tuesday morning I got the phone call that our application was approved and that we could pick up the keys on Friday the 1st (a week and a half later). I had to run ALL around town getting everything worked out and it was a CRAZY day. I decided to not put anything off until the next day, to try and sqeeze it all into one miserable day instead of 2, which was really lucky because a little karmic balance was right around the corner.
5:55 am Wednesday morning, I fall down the stairs half asleep...ALL the way down. If any of you have EVER walked up my stairs you know how ridiculously steep and narrow they are. As soon as a started to fall (from the first step) I flopped to my back, I figured that would be the best for the baby, I was try to protect my stomache and reached my arms to the sides to prevent myself from tumbling and just laid back. Which turned out to be great, the baby is fine, thank you Lord! But unfortunetly my butt was the thing to take the brunt of ever step, and trust me as I was going down I felt every single step and knew that my tailbone had broken before I was even halfway down.
So now I have a week and a half to pack, a husband who just started his 3 12 hour days of work in a row, a one year old, and a broken tailbone. I don't know if any of you have ever broken your tailbone, but it is one of the most painful things I have ever experienced. In fact, even though I am typing this 3 weeks later, I am having to type it in incriments and take a break every 15 mintues for a couple of hours, because I can't stand to sit on my booty for an extended period of time.
So needless to say, it made doing any and everthing about 50 times (or more) harder. There was alot to be done, switching on and off of utilities, etc. and of course the house has to have gas and electricity and then the usual H2O, trash, phone cale, etc. I had to do lists written and stuck to every available surface! I put Matt in charge of the U-Haul trucks, we were going to need 2 trucks, and we were going to do it in 2 days, since we weren't going to have alot of help. In hind site I am REALLY glad that I gave him that job and not something else, because it turned out to be SUCH a hassle and by that time I was SO done with the stress. Almost everything that could go wrong with this move did. Both days the U-haul place didn't have out trucks, is the short version of that story, Matt had to call the corporate office and drive around town to find an available truck both days, which put us running late and really behind, which in effect caused us to miss/be late for other things. One thing it didn't effect was the people who showed up to help us from the ward...because NO one showed up. Matt's family and my brother Charlie were our only hope and they were SUCH a huge help, thanks so much you guys. I owe you my sanity. One of the things that we missed was the gas guy coming to turn on our gas, so we had no hot water for the first 4 days of living here, before he could make it out again.
Anyway, I won't go on any longer about the details of all the drama, but lets just let it be said that nothing can ever be easy right? I did EVERYTHING I could to be so prepared and organized and make it easy and smooth for all involved and everything that happened was just completely out of control. Matt and I have been living like college kids for so long and this house and the place emotionally/financially/physically/spiritually we are currently in is just too good to be true, so I guess that the universe just had to balance it out with a few dozen grains of salt :)
As the dust settles and I look around it is amazing to see how truly blessed we are. Life is good. Things could have been so much worse. Everything that has been thrown at us has been a challenge, stressful, irritating, even painful, but it has all been things that we can handle. I have the most amazing husband, who I love more than I ever knew was even possible. He is my best friend and I just genuinely like him. I have a daughter who keeps me on my toes, is a ball of fun and a beautiful wonderful little person (even when she makes me crazy), and I have another baby on the way. A baby who I can now feel wiggling around inside me. I can't wait until next week, when we find out which flavor he/she is and we can refer to him/her as "____" instead of baby :)
I am grateful to my friends and family for your love and support, especially if you are still reading this. I love my Savior and the gospel. I am grateful for my faith and testimony and for the amazing and crazy experience it is to live on this earth!
I feel like I am leaving so much out, but that this post is already too long! My tailbone is finally starting to heal and I am appreciating the ability to roll over in bed without wanting to scream out in pain and the increase in ease of moving around. It is slow coming, but it is finally starting and I am GLAD! Hopefully now I will be able to update this more often!
Here are some family reunion pics
And some others from the past few weeks:
Lily in her I love NY shirt that Auntie Andrea brought her
Lily loved having all of the cupboards and cabinets emptied. My family I am sure will think of the pictures of me crawling into the kitchen cabinets at this age, I guess she is more like me than I admit :)
She is getting so big!
