What a difference a few weeks make...

It really looks like a house now...check it out.  It's coming along nicely!

Front...almost done...

Master bedroom...window seat cabinets!

Master Bath Shower

Kitchen with cabinets...Love it!

 Kitchen from Great Room (those dark cabinets will be the island)

Autumn's room (sorry, not the best picture)

Stone Fireplace!

Covered deck

Patio and retaining wall!

Just over a month to go and we can't wait!

Building a House is hard work...

I am totally loving and hating the whole custom home building process.  There are soooo many decisions to make that seem like (at the time anyways) the most important decision in the world. Like which way your doors are going to open for instance to get you in and out of the bathroom...or what paint colors to put on the wall...haha!  I know we're making it much harder than it needs to be and luckily our builder Scott Britton has been awesome working with us through it all, but I am ready to be done with making decisions and just getting to enjoy the end product! Because I just love the way the house is coming along!  My favorite parts so far...the exterior looks so nice...lots of angles which really just give it a lot of character!  The openness between the kitchen and great room!  The wood ceiling he is doing in the kitchen and our bedroom!  The stone fireplace!  The covered deck!  Wood floors throughout!  The amazing trim tile I found for our shower!  The claw foot tub in our master bath!  Oh my!!  I just can't wait for it all to come together! (I realize that is probably a way overuse of the exclamation point, but I just don't care...haha).  It is going to be a beautiful house and I just can't wait till we get to live in it.  It probably doesn't hurt anything that I also can't wait to get out of this apartment...everything here is on the fritz...only half the burners on the stove work, the dryer doesn't work so we have to wash our clothes here and then dry them at the laundromat, and just this week the dishwasher went out.  Hopefully the landlord can fix at least some of it, but I'm even more hopeful that our days here are numbered and we can move in to this beautiful house soon!!

Here are some pictures from today...

The Front

Great Room from kitchen

Kitchen from Great Room

Autumn's room

(hers is one of my favorites...the 11ft ceilings and that window seat...amazing!)

Master Bedroom

Great Room Vault

Deck

In other news...Autumn and I had a fun week...with two "firsts" for her.  Yesterday we went to see a free movie at the local movie theater.  She's obviously seen movies, but never in the theater before.  They were showing Despicable Me which neither one of us had seen and she did great.  It was such a cute movie and she sat on my lap and watched the WHOLE thing!  It was so much fun.  And then today we took her bowling!  She did great...I only beat her by 4 points (I won't tell you how bad I bowled...haha).  Below is a movie of her efforts...I won't show the ones where Jacob didn't give it an extra "push"...because they are about twice as long!  They all made it down to the pins though...so no rescue missions!  She did at one point decide she needed to chase after her ball to get a redo and quickly learned why not to do that as she was flat on her back in no time!  Oops...that was the last time she crossed the line!  It was such a fun time...and we just learned she can bowl one game free every day all summer at the bowling alley just up the street. So we'll have to go get some more practice :o)

I think that's about it for now.  Autumn and I are headed out tomorrow for two whole weeks in St. Louis and I can't wait!  It will be great to see family and friends again!!

Happenings in East Tennessee!

I know, I know...I've become pretty much the worst blogger EVER!!  And just like last time I have absolutely no excuses at all except for just being lazy!!  So if I have any readers left out there...this one is for you :o)

Things here in Kingsport are still going very well.  Autumn and I are enjoying our time together and especially the summer weather and sunshine!  And even more so now that the outdoor aquatic center is open at the YMCA!  It is awesome...there is a huge 2 foot deep area with a little kids play area and slide in it (pretty much where we spend most of our time) and a lazy river!  It is perfect!  And as of this week Autumn is now officially going to Mother's Day Out twice a week which is just lovely for both of us!  So far she loves her teachers and new friends and seems to really enjoy her new found freedom...and her teachers say she jumped right in with no problems. And I'm loving being able to run around and do some errands without dragging a little 3 year old everywhere with me.  Oh, and yes that's right...I said 3 year old!  Autumn turned 3 earlier this month...can you believe it?  I sure can't!  She is turning in to the sweetest little lady and I'm so proud every day to be her Mommy :o)  Here are some pictures of her birthday photo shoot done by the awesome Wendy Russell of Malland Photography!!

And I'm sure you're all chomping at the bit to see how the house is progressing...I can't believe the last pictures I posted it was just a hole in the ground...because now it is an actual house with a roof and all!  They will hopefully be adding brick, siding, and drywall this week!!  Then the real fun stuff comes...like floors, and cabinets, and paint.  I can't wait to see it all come together...we love it so far!

Front of the house

(the roof is completely done and all windows are in...

but somehow I don't have a picture of it)

Kitchen with coffered ceiling

 Great Room with Fireplace (looking out onto deck)

 Back of the house...love the covered deck!

That's about it for now.  And I'm not making any promises that I'll post again soon because I know how that will turn out.  But who knows...stranger things have happened I guess :o)

Spring has arrived!!

It seemed winter was NEVER going to end here in Tennessee (and the rest of the world it sounds like), but finally the weather is warming up, the trees are turning green, and there are flowers everywhere!  I love it!  I absolutely love this time of year...especially after a long dreary winter. Autumn and I have been out and about a lot...our favorite new spot is definitely Warriors Path State Park.  It's a great park about 5 minutes away with a huge playground, a beautiful lake, some running paths, etc...it's just perfect.  We even go in the evening with Jacob sometimes and Autumn and Jacob play while I run :o)  And yesterday they had a free little music program in the outdoor auditorium...it's so nice being able to be outside enjoying the sunshine and 70 degree weather...what could be better?  Here are a few pictures of the park...

A few weeks ago our new friends invited Autumn and I to join them at a cute little farm called Mini Meadows.  There were goats, bunnies, miniature horses, cows, llamas, peacocks, etc.  You got little feed buckets for the animals which was fun except the crazy goats attack you for it. Autumn was doing great feeding them all by herself until she got overrun by goats and pretty much dropped the bucket and ran.  Ha!  I remember a similar story about crazy goats from when I was little...I wanted nothing to do with them after they started eating my dress!  Geez...you think these animals were never fed or something, but I know that's not true!  We all had fun holding the bunnies, seeing the baby chicks, and especially mining for gems!  They give you a bucket of sand filled with all sorts of jewels like fools gold, diamonds (very pretty, but not the same as the kind they find in Africa), ruby, emerald, amethyst, etc and you have to put it through the water trough to flush them all out.  Autumn loved finding all the pretty rocks :o)  We had so much fun we're actually heading back tomorrow!  Here are some pictures from the day...

This little baby goat was so cute...it liked the slide...

This was after the goats attacked...not so cute now...

Lastly...an update on the house...it's been a bit of a slow start, but hopefully things will start picking up soon as we are more than eager to get the heck out of our current cramped apartment. I am chomping at the bit to pick everything out and for it to start looking like more than a pile of dirt.  They are ready to lay the block for the basement and will hopefully start framing next week...then once it's under roof hopefully things will move along quickly without any spring showers slowing it down.  Here are some pictures (the last one we took tonight)...

Loooonnnggg overdue!

Ok, I know I haven't written in F-O-R-E-V-E-R, but we've been a little busy moving across the world and all :o)  Just kidding...actually the move went fairly smoothly...it's pretty amazing having a corporation move you.  They do most of the hard work.  Even still the last couple of days in Brussels were pretty crazy...the day the movers were supposed to pack everything one guy showed up and said everyone else was sick or something so he would pack a few things, but that they'd have a big crew there the new day to pack AND move everything out.  Which also meant we couldn't really do our cleaning until that same day too...and Jacob ended up being gone pretty much that entire day running last minute errands...like returning the cable box and closing out the bank account.  So I was stuck cleaning and scrubbing the entire place down...while trying to stay out of the movers way.  It was bad planning on our part.  We probably should have stayed one more day and given ourselves a little extra time, but we made it work and were excited to be on our way to our new home.

We had a furnished apartment waiting for us in Kingsport too so it was nice to go straight to an apartment and not have to spend time in a hotel.  It's not the nicest place in the world, but it was just great to have some place waiting for us.  We were hoping to find a house right away too so we wouldn't have to stay here long, but unfortunately that didn't work out exactly as planned.  After seeing probably around 30 houses there were a couple we liked, but unfortunately nothing that we loved and especially not at the prices we were finding them at.  Soooo...after lots of thinking we decided to build. Our realtors husband just happened to be a custom home builder so we found an awesome lot and are planning to build a beautiful house that fits our needs perfectly...and stays in our budget!  We also found another apartment at half the price just up the road from here...so although moving again is not ideal, it's totally worth it to save some money!

Autumn and I have been getting out and about quite a bit too.  We joined a mommy group and the YMCA and also visit the Kingsport library for story time.  We're meeting some nice new friends and exploring the area.  Tri-cities definitely seems very family oriented with lots of things to do so that's wonderful and making the transition a little easier.

I'll try to update a little more frequently, but for now I'll leave you with a picture of Autumn standing in front of where her new house will be...and a link to the floor plan we're building (it will be a 4 bedroom, 3 bath as we're building the bonus room with a full bath).

The Greenbranch floorplan by Don Gardner.

One Last Wild About Wednesday!

Our final "Wild About Wednesday" or at least our final one in Brussels (maybe we'll pick it back up in Tennessee). And it wasn't even a new place...it was just the children's museum just around the corner from here, but we had a blast because our good friends Liz, Grace, Audrey, Andi, and Brooklyn all joined us! It's sad to say little by little our good-bye's as the days are quickly ticking away. But I'm hopeful that we'll see these amazing new friends again someday.  Enough of the sad...we still have a week to go...ok, back on track...the children's museum...this time with pictures (since I remembered my camera)...

My little Picasso...

 Tea time?

Andi checking out all our little shoppers...

 Too bad this wasn't a real cake!

My big potty trained girl standing by the "golden potty"

Dress up time!

Time to go fishin'

Thanks to everyone who joined us on our many adventures...I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did!  And next Wednesday we'll be on our flight to Tennessee...ready to start our next big adventure!