Building: Week 2

CJ and the other families have been hard at work everyday (except Sunday) on the house. I went out last Friday and Saturday trying to help but not doing much of anything except shoveling snow because I kept falling on the ice in the house, and the snow covered hills outside of the house. It was weird knowing that the first time I had to "clean" my house I was shoveling snow out of my walls and throwing it out my windows.lol It was only 8 degrees on Saturday for most of the day. It started to clear up and get warmer just before we left...go figure. My feet were soaked for so long and I was so cold that my body couldn't fight the cold Megan had been trying to give me for 2 weeks. I now have a nasty cold. I must say that I am finding out just how much of a wimp and a baby I am. CJ goes out there every day...at night...after a long day at his real job... and never complains! I go out once a week and come home ready to give up...and its only been 2 weeks! I thank the Lord every night for my wonderful husband and the Angels that bare him up and keep him going. He hasn't gotten sick or injured and he comes home just as enthusiastic as he was on the first day (albeit completely exhausted.) Thank you so much CJ!!!!!!

We are excited as well because we are still way ahead of schedule (and under budget.) We have all of our outer walls up and all of the interior walls as well. I got to walk through my house and really see all the rooms. It was way exciting! Today they finish the garage walls and the stairs. After that our house is as done as it can be at this point. The trusses (skeleton roof) are the last thing to go on before they start the next house but they are not scheduled to be installed for 2 more weeks, so they have decided to start working on the next house this week and then put the trusses on the two houses at the same time (saving time and money.) That means that instead of finishing in August we may be done in July. And they said if it keeps going as well as it has been, we may even be in the house in June. I think that news is really what keeps CJ so well motivated every day.

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It's far away, but here is the house with the outer walls up.

The front of the house. (In the shadows is CJ working on the garage walls.)

Looking in through the front window. (By the way Dad, you were right. Our front window will be much larger than the one we drove by and saw.)

After next week I'm not sure if I will have many pictures to post because we will be working on the other houses and nothing new will happen with ours for a while. But I could be wrong.

Building, Snow, and Singing

Well its been a while since I had a minute to post so I have a lot to catch up on. I thought about saving some of it and posting one thing a day for the next few days so that it wouldn't be so long between posts again but just in case this is the only time I have to post for the next few days I want to be sure to get it all in. Anyway, here goes.

snow, Snow, SNOW!!!

We have had an unusually warm autumn and relatively snow free December until a few days ago. I guess all good things must come to an end. We have just been pounded with snow over the last few days and we're expecting more snow over the next few days. It wasn't bad at first but yesterday was unbelievable. It just kept coming and coming. I was out shoveling the walks and had the girls get a ruler to see how deep the snow really was. We had 7 inches at 1pm but the snow didn't stop until a few hours later and by then there was at least 2 more inches out there. Normally I wouldn't mind too much because I don't have to travel in it but this time I was hating every inch. I may not have to travel in it but CJ does. He has to go 30 miles south to Payson every day to build. I worry about him on that highway with all the other drivers who forget how to drive in the snow. Anyway, here are some pics of our snow.

This is the first day of snow. I thought we had a lot then. I didn't know how much we were about to get.

I let Megan touch the snow to see what she would think of it.

She didn't like it at all.

I went to take out the trash and was met with a happy stranger.

Rebecca and Dakota have made me promise not to shovel the sidewalk while they were at school because they wanted to do it. I thought they were doing it because they thought it was fun. Turns out they were doing it because they wanted to earn money. Oh well. I'm going to take advantage of them while they actually want to shovel the walk.

Here is the ruler. I know it's hard to read but it says 7 inches. That was before the additional 2 inches.All the neighbors made ginormous snowmen with the abundance of snow. My girls decided to make a snow fort/sledding hill.

School Holiday Sing.

Last Friday was the last day of school before the winter break. It is a tradition for the kids to have a holiday sing for the parents. Each class gets to perform a song or two. I was really tired and CJ had the morning off so he got the kids off to school. I forgot that I wanted to fix their hair real cute. Oh well. Maybe next year.

Building Week 1:

Last week was the first official week of building for our home. The construction supervisor decided to build our house first since he knows the plan better than the others. I'm okay with that now that I know what his plans are. We are going to frame our house first. When everyone is done with our house (the training house) they will frame all the other houses at the same time. The interior work will be done simultaneously so that all the houses will be done at the same time. Our house won't be done any earlier than anyone elses. CJ was out at the house every night last week. He is having a good time building and getting to know our neighbors. The biggest problem he has is that it is cold at night and they have to shovel all the snow away before they can start to work and that takes time away from the build. I was amazed when I went out on Saturday at how much work they had done. They had the basement wall done, the stairwell (minus the stairs) done, and the floor almost done. It only took a few hours on Saturday with everyone there to get the floor all the way done and start on the outer walls. By the time we left we had our first wall erected. It was so much fun to see the wall go up, I almost cried. CJ came back tonight and said that we have all four outer walls up. That is great news. We are way ahead of schedule. If we keep going at this rate we will be done way before August. It helps that a few of the families have people in them that know what they are doing and don't need to be trained. One of them just graduated from school with a degree in construction. It really helps having him there if we have a question.

This is the floor half way done.

The only time we will have 2 inches of snow in our basement...I hope.

How many people does it take to lift a wall?

The wall is almost up.

We have a wall!

CJ holding up the wall (that's our bedroom window by the way)

This is the view from our bedroom window. At least until a house gets built in the empty lot behind us.

I will be going out every Saturday so I will have more pictures every week.

The Many Moods of Megan

When my parents came to visit for Thanksgiving we took some drives. My dad who loves to take pictures was sitting behind Megan (who is still in a rear facing car seat) in the car so he took lots of pictures of her. I thought these pictures were so funny because they really capture Megan's mood swings. These particular pictures were taken in about a 3 minute period and as you can see her mood changed constantly from super happy to playful to frustrated and back again. What the camera didn't show you were the times she yelled at Grandpa for making her look at him and smile, lol, but I think you get the point. She is so much fun but she can be very stubborn at times (she gets it from daddy of course.)
I will post some pictures of the other girls as soon as they let me take some. I want you to see how beautiful they are too. It may take some bribing and maybe a few stolen camera shots but hopefully you can see them soon too.

Missed a photo

Sorry Dad. I don't know why I didn't post this one. It's a great picture. I love the pictures you took and I am so grateful you took them. CJ has them posted in his locker at work so that he can see them everyday.


Here we are with my parents (and a neighbor girl) in front of our big, wonderful hole.

Building: Day 1

Our house is evolving. The hole is now a basement. The small room in the front is the cold storage room that is directly under the front porch. Next to that is the garage. Pretty cool.

We got an email on Wed. that we were expected to be at the building site today, bright and early, so that we could put in window wells in the three homes that have been started. CJ and I were there and way excited to finally get started. Window wells is kind of a "get to know" you activity. It is not part of our 35 hour requirement (which technically starts when we begin framing) but is still mandatory. If all goes well with the weather we will start framing, and our 35 hour a week plus mandatory Saturday morning requirement, next Saturday. All 5 families that we have so far in our group were there and we all worked very well together. We had a lot of fun doing this assignment. We got to know the other families better and think that we have a really good group. This will make the very long build process much easier to deal with. Our home is scheduled to be finished by April 15, however, don't forget that we can't move in until all the homes in our group are finished. They are all scheduled to be finished August 31, with a move in day about a week later. That will be the hardest part to me. I will hate seeing my house every day for months and know that we can't have it yet. I don't want to think about that now though. I will just take it one day at a time and today was a great day.

Thanksgiving Cooks.

It was so nice to have my parents here for Thanksgiving. We had a wonderful time with them. Time always flys too quickly when you're having fun though. For dinner my mom let me cook the turkey and the pies. They turned out pretty good if I do say so. The rest of the dinner she let the girls cook. I was amazed. She told the girls what to do and then let them do it. I would have been a basket case, having to watch their every move, but she didn't even think twice about it. The girls had a blast making the food and I loved watching them cook with Grandma. That was more special to me than anything else. I would love that to become a tradition. I found out that they are pretty good cooks. The food was fabulous! I really need to give them more time in the kitchen because they do really well. I am very proud of my girls.

Megan helped by making sure the floor was well swept. I had to buy a new broom so I let her play with it and she would not let it go. She took it everywhere with her.

It's a really, really big hole!

I have never been so excited about a hole in the ground. We didn't even know that they had started digging our home yet. My parents were in town for Thanksgiving so we took them to see the lot that we are building on. To our surprise we saw a big pile of dirt and a big digger on our land. At first I thought it must be someone else's plot but it was indeed ours. I screamed in excitement. We have finally started!! We should have footings poured by the end of this week. We should be able to start framing by the end of this month or beginning of next month depending on the weather and how fast the foundation can be poured and cured.

View to the north.

View to the south.

The kids had so much fun just climbing on the piles of dirt and in and out of the hole. It was a great Thanksgiving surprise. Two other homes have been dug with footings poured so we know it is going as fast as they can go. We are so happy and our prayers have been answered.

My musical baby : )

On Saturday we went to see High School Musical 3 because CJ got some tickets from work and we thought we would surprise the older girls since all they can talk about is High School Musical. As usual I wanted Megan to sleep during the movie so I kept her from going to sleep at her normal nap time so that she would fall asleep as soon as the lights went out at the movie theatre. She was really tired so I figured she would be asleep before the lights went out. Boy was I wrong. From the beginning she just sat and watched the movie. About half way through she got the bug and started to dance to the music and by the end she was singing, dancing, and cheering. She was loving the movie, and CJ and I were having a blast watching her. She started singing in church again on Sunday but this time she added the dancing and cheering to the music. She kept looking around and wondering why no one else was dancing and cheering too. It was funny. She tends to sing and/or dance any time she hears music. We may just have the next star of High School Musical 13 on our hands. Watch out Vanessa Hudgens.

And Then There Were 4

It has been so much fun watching the older girls go ga-ga over their baby sister. They have been so happy with her in our family and have shown no signs of feeling like mom and dad were "starting over and replacing them" like I was told to watch out for. They kept asking if we were ever going to have a baby brother or sister for them to play with. In this way they think that we had Megan just for them, and they keep asking for another baby because having Megan to play with is so much fun. They absolutely love their little sister. I don't have as many pictures with the four of them together because all of them are camera shy. We are working with them and they are letting us take some pictures now...with smiles included. The best example is the Halloween pictures. Here are some of my favorite pics of the four of them together.
I know you have seen some of these before but like I said these are my favorites so I just had to post them again because I love looking at them.

Three Musketeers

I just love looking at pictures of my three older girls. Almost all of them are pictures of the girls together. These three did everything together. They still do most of the time but as they get older their likes and dislikes are changing and so they don't hang out as much as they used to. They also don't like having there picture taken anymore. I have to bribe them to get a decent picture now. But its all good. They still love each other and that is what matters. I have soooo many really cute pics of them together that it was really hard only being able to share a few. My girls are my pride and joy. I love them so much. Enjoy the pics.

Elizabeth 2, Rebecca 1, Dakota 1 month.

It's too late at night to think of a title.

So I just realized that it has been way too long since I put up a post. I have been busy lately, its just been with nothing post worthy. I guess I could at least go through my old photos and put another one up. Hopefully I'll do that tomorrow (technically that would be today since it's after midnight.) Anyway, here is a short update on the house. We've been delayed AGAIN. I no longer think we are going to start building this year. I am beyond frustrated but since I can't do anything about it I will just sit back and wait for the word, go. The construction supervisors have put in the build permits to the city of Payson and we are waiting for those to come back. Once they come back...this week or next...we technically could start building. That was our last hurdle. However, since the process is taking so long we had some families drop out of our build group and now we don't have enough families to get started. We need 6 families to start building and we have 5. We are just waiting for one more family to join our group. Since they don't advertise and just rely on word of mouth this could take weeks. Ahhhhhh!! Okay, I got that out of my system and I do feel better.

As for the girls. Megan's fingers are looking really good. It has been two weeks. Her cuts are almost completely healed and the bruising is minimal. She is still wearing her splint though just to protect the healing bones. The older girls all got their report cards today and they were great! All of them are doing really well in Math, Science, and Social Studies. Elizabeth got A's and B's, Rebecca got A's and one B (she even got 116 out of 100 in reading, no surprise there though since she is always in a book), and Dakota got all A's. This is a significant improvement for all of them and we are so proud of their hard work and great achievements.

We are getting ready for a visit from Grandma and Grandpa Tanquary next week for Thanksgiving and are soooooo excited for them to come. Other than that there isn't much to report. I guess that means I get to go to bed now. Thanks for reading and I hope to have something else soon.

Dakota's Big Day!

I am late getting this post on the blog, but better late than never, everyone always says.

Dakota turned 9 on Oct. 20.

She was so excited for her birthday (can you tell.) It wasn't because of the presents though, it was because of the cake. She couldn't wait to make her own birthday cake. She loves this new tradition and was counting down the days from her sister's birthdays until the day that she got to make and decorate her own cake. She has had this all planned out for months. She picked chocolate cake, chocolate confetti icing, and blue decorator icing.

She wanted a two layer cake (I think because it makes the cake look bigger.) Again I just left the room and let her go to work and do what ever she wanted. She had so much fun decorating her cake. I think that the cake turned out great! I think the girls really do a much better job on their cakes than I ever could.

As if making and decorating the cake wasn't enough to look forward to Dakota made up another tradition that she wants to do on her birthday. This tradition was looked forward to even more. It was the reason that she picked chocolate cake with chocolate icing. Dakota thought that Megan had so much fun eating her first cake with her hands that she wanted the same privilege on her birthday. She asked if she could eat the cake with her hands. I told her that eating cake with your hands is for babies. If she wanted to be different and really have some fun for everyone, she would have to eat the cake with no hands. She liked that idea even more.

She tried to make as big of a mess on her face as possible. She had so much fun and we had fun watching her eat (and occasionally pushing her face farther into) the cake. I don't know how many years this tradition will last (Rebecca absolutely does not want to eat cake with her face) but I will let Dakota enjoy having her cake, and eating it too, for as long as she wants.