It's Beginning!

And so, we signed away our savings yesterday. But why bother saving if you don't intend to use it for your future?

Here is our future:

That dead tree is across where the house will go. Everything was so green and lush when we went out there yesterday that it was hard for me to figure out what pictures were what! I think I'm standing at the edge of the future house where the master bath will be and looking north.

This picture above is looking out to the road where we parked... but not from the house location. You can't see the car/road from where the house will be (300 some odd feet off the road). We met with Andrew (the tree clearing guy who is dropping a bulldozer there tomorrow), and our builders, to walk through the lot and talk about what gets cleared. We're trying to clear minimally... just the driveway and right around the house (30 feet off the sides and 60 feet off the front/back) so we'll still be nestled in a nice pocket of trees once we're done. We can always remove more later if we need to... it's a tad more difficult to put them back.

I "snuck" a picture of our builders standing at the house site. I am standing in the same spot as the first picture, just I turned right and that stake is the back right corner of our house, and looking out into the backyard. There are a few big trees out there that will have to be removed, but I think the clearing guy was happy there aren't other home sites to avoid with his dozer. We'll likely leave 10-30 feet between our property line and driveway, I think. The guy on the left is Ralph, and the guy on the right is Carl - we mostly deal with Carl since we're on his "half" of their area, but Ralph seems to tag along to most things, too. They have been really nice guys to work with so far, both have older kids (high school/college) and seem to have great family values and a plethora of funny stories.

So, since we closed on the construction to perm loan yesterday, some lot clearing equipment gets dropped off tomorrow and clearing guy (I think he has an assistant, so maybe it's a 2 man business) should start working on it Monday. The builders expect it to take 2-3 weeks to clear what we need. We have our engineered house plans and we'll see what we need to do next.

Apartment life - the pool opened up. Freaking freezing cold. We dipped our toes in one day, came back on another to "swim" and Mommy and Daddy refused to go past their knees. Mara and Isaac both accidentally stepped off the steps into "deep" (3 foot) water and Mommy had to rescue them. So both got soaked, and we made them go home after Mara was visibly shivering. They are excited about going back this weekend, and hopefully the water will be warmer. We dug up the floaties that Cherry brought and I hope Mara learns to swim this summer. She is very willing and excited!

Mara is a friend-magnet. Within a few minutes she had two different little boys sitting next to her. Haha. And her new teachers keep praising how mature and sweet and thoughful she is and how she reminds everyone to be safe (I think she gets that from me...).

Isaac prefers to spend time with this new awesome contraption:

 We were getting too lightheaded blowing so many bubbles in the evenings while prepping dinner that I splurged on this $10 bubble blower from Walmart. So far, so good.

 Bubble dance party!

 I flipped my phone camera around so Isaac could see us taking these pictures and he thought it was awesome. He yelled ISAAC MOMMY CHEESE!

His words and sentences are coming along! I think he can say maybe 4 discernible words in a string, but I usually know what he's talking/asking about. I LOVE this talking stage!

We also entertain ourselves with our indoor motorcycle racetrack/mini-truck arena. Isaac makes VROOM VROOM noises and rides this (or his toy motorcycle) around. Mara is eating salad from the colander in the background...

 While Zack was riding his motorcycle this past weekend, we tried out a local park. Mara thought these looked like giant glasses and posed herself for this pic.

 Where's Waldo? Amara?

 We made cupcakes for our new daycare that day, too. Isaac was such a helper, distributing the liners. Then, I turned my back and he switched tasks...

 He grabbed the bag of homemade cinnamon pretzel bites (see them beside the microwave in the pic above?) and decided those went in the cupcake tins better. Oh boy.

 We kept busy with art and movies and talking. It's been nice to have time to do this kind of stuff on the weekend. So different from the last MANY months of house prep/clean/sell/pack/move/etc. I alllllmost feel guilty for not working on a project like we had been... but this is so much more fun and I had been looking forward to spending more quality time with the kiddos once we had some breathing room.

 Hope you all had a great week. I have pink eye again and Zack used lots of my drops this past week when HE got it... ugh. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my doctor will let me refill my prescription.

Happy FRIDAY!