One Year ago today

One year ago today I was pregnant with baby girl and we were sightseeing in the English countryside. Looking back at the pictures today seems like it was way over a year ago when we were there. I really enjoyed seeing all the beautiful places overseas and I miss it....yes I said it. I miss it. I was not a fan of my teeny tiny house or that the houses seem to be built on top of each other....but I miss all the beautiful places we visited.

So much has changed in a year.......

We are looking forward to seeing all the beautiful places around our new area.

First day of school

Today is the first day of school!! We have a second grader and a first grader this year!

The girls were able to meet their teachers last night and I think we will love them.

The girls are going to Hunt Meadows Elementary school this year. It will be a lot different than the Dodds school. Hunt Meadows is a school out in the country and only a few miles from the house.

Sarah is making sure the girls are getting ready.

All ready to head out the door!!

My big girls:)

Lazy Summer day

Rob and the big girls enjoying a swim in the pool.

Move to South Carolina

We are officially living in South Carolina and have most of our belongings with us! We still have a lot of unpacking and organizing to do. I am waiting for our storage from California before I hang anything on the walls and look forward to getting my bedroom furniture too. If all goes as planned we will have all our things by the end of this month!

7 month old picture....a little late

better late than never.....

I am up and running with internet at the house, so I plan to update the blog a little at a time.

7 months old

This post is a few days late and hopefully I will attach a picture too. We have been very busy with the move and Sarah has been busy growing and changing.
Sarah was 7 months old on July 23. She weighed 17.5 lbs on July 6 and is 27 inches long (I will guess she is still about that size).
Sarah eats three meals a day and was down to 4 nursings a day. Since the move she is nursing at night again but doing great with the time change and all the changes in her little life.
Sarah can say Mama, Baba, Dada, Papa..and her favorite sound is "boba"! Sarah likes to get attention by coughing or clearing her throat. She will also try and make sounds you make to her.
Sarah took her first plane ride (from London to Raleigh NC). Sarah has met tons of family and took a road trip from North Carolina to South Carolina to house hunt (big job for a little girl!ha).
Sarah is all over the place with rolling and moving herself. She isn't crawling, but she does the tummy move to get places. She can sit up well but still falls over after a while. Sarah is trying to pull herself up into a sitting position while she is laying down.
Still no teeth but the bottom two look like they may show up soon.
Sarah is so much fun and still a very happy baby girl. So many changes in her little life and so happy we are living near family again so they can see her grow and change.

Adventures in rental house hunting

This is one adventure that I don't want to do very often. I think it would have been much more enjoyable if the heat of the summer wasn't on us and taking a baby around was hard to do. She did awesome, but we had to go a little slower because we had her with us.

We had a good game plan down and arrived in Easley later than expected because of a road closure and long detour. We stopped at the first hotel we arrived at...Hampton Inn and got a great rate on a room (military discount). After dinner we checked some of the house rentals online and headed to bed. The first full day of the hunt started with us driving to a few of the properties before we called the realtors and that saved them some time. The first house looked beautiful in the pictures and looked like it would be a great rental....wrong. The house was in a run down area and the yard was crazy. Crazy with the landscaping and a hill on the side that wouldn't be fun to push mow.

Next house we headed to was in Clemson and it too looked nice in the pictures.....but was needing a good bath in "person". We decided to call the realtor to look inside and that didn't help change our minds about it....it smelled and wasn't worth the rental money. The realtor was trying to tell us that one of Clemson's past football player's family lived in this house....like that was going to make us want the house....ummm nope:)

I am drawing a blank on how many more houses we looked at this day. We were looking at so many on the internet and in person that I lost count. We found a few we liked, but a 3 year lease was not an option and we have no plans to move during the middle of this tour. We ran across some super sweet people and one of the realtors reminded us of Grammy (Rob's grandma). Marjorie, the realtor, was a super sweet lady, going to make no money off us, but looked for houses for us and showed us some all three days we were there. She found us some beautiful homes in our price range, but they were not as family friendly as we wanted them.

We have seen dirty houses, messy houses (yes there is a difference in dirty and messy), old and new houses......lake front, hill side and finally found the house fit for our family. The hunt for our perfect house all started by Rob talking to an Army Major in Chickfila....the Major gave us his friend's number (a big time realtor in the area)....who talked to a property manager...who was about to list a house that fit our needs! We not only was able to see the house before it was listed, we were able to meet the owner. Super nice owner, who passed along his contact information, just in case we need to contact him.
We start all the paperwork this coming week and will hopefully be able to pass along the address to family and friends by the end of this week!!