There are butterflies in my house!

This morning, Paige woke up about 6:30am which is almost an hour earlier than usual. When Justin went to get her out of her room, he said her room was really cold. I had adjusted the heat yesterday in my office because it was warm in there, but I guess with her door closed she has less vents and it made it colder in her room. So, that's probably why she woke up early. Since the house was still very dark, Justin brought her into our room to lay in bed with us. This NEVER works. I actually had a little hope this time because she seemed to lay there still for a few minutes. But then out of the blue she starts saying "There are butterflies in my house". I just grunted in response. She's quiet for a few more minutes and then says it again. She probably said it 4 or 5 times, but said nothing else. She must've had a weird dream about butterflies. We hadn't watched any tv the night before about butterflies. I don't know how she came up with that one.

What's gotten into her?

Paige set a record for time outs this weekend. I honestly lost count. I know it was at least three times this morning, at least twice this afternoon, once in Target, twice in the Mall yesterday morning, and at least 4 times at home yesterday. She also lost her Dora and her Goldfish (crackers) privelages today, and had her dolly taken away for the day twice (both Saturday and Sunday--she was throwing it). She's been throwing her toys, hitting, pulling hair, screaming, hitting more, and just having temper tantrums...about the only thing she didn't do was attack Ella, who wisely has been fairly absent this weekend. Toward the end of the day, timeouts were officially extended to a full minute from now on, up from 30 seconds. That seemed to help a little.

In between being a terror, Paige has been an angel. She can be incredibly sweet one minute and then be downright awful the next. She's gotten very good at saying that she's "sorry for ___" after her time outs. Almost too good--in the car ride home, she was doing high pitched screams followed by immediately "sorry for screaming." Apparently, saying "sorry" doesn't mean as much as it once did to her.

Three ideas on what's going on. 1) it's a stage where she's once again decided to challenge our authori-tay and see what she can get away with, 2) she hasn't been feeling good and is taking it out on us (we have no other reason to think this, except maybe for sleep habits), and 3) she's noticed that mom and dad have been a little stressed and distracted lately and is acting out in response. I imagine that all three could be true on some level.

The thing that's strange about this weekend's acting out is that it hasn't, usually, be in response to us not paying attention to her. That's usually when it happens. We actually had lots of quality time with her this weekend, be it playing with her, reading to her, or even going down to Lakemont Park to see the lights. If anything, I've had more time to spend with her since the semester ended a week ago. Hopefully she'll snap out of this soon--I'm not looking forward to long road trips with her acting like this.

At least she's going to sleep again. A few days ago, she started letting me pick her up and sing her a song before I put her into bed (as opposed to letting her climb into bed herself and then doing the singing while she's laying down). This is much closer to what we did when she was still in her crib, and it seems to really help. The last few nights she has actually asked to go to sleep after the second song or so. Not the same child we were dealing with a few weeks back.

Inspection Day!

Today was the inspection on the house. Justin went and the seller was there as well. There are potentially a few big issues, but they all need some further research. The seller seemed willing to have them researched/addressed so we're still hopeful. I think they are going to need to have a plumber, electrician and someone else (from the gas company maybe) to look into these things. Hopefully nothing will be major or a deal-breaker.

Tomorrow we meet with our lender. We were able to lock in a 4.5% interest rate (with no points), so we're super excited about that.

Merry Christmas!

Or "Merry MisMis" as Paige would say.

The other day it was just the two of us in the car and she was getting cranky so I put on some Christmas music. It wasn't helping, so I told her to listen to the music because they were singing about Santa Claus. Then she was quiet for a little while. Later after we ran some errands we were back in the car and I was singing along to the Christmas music. Then Paige yells at me and says "Momma, DON'T sing MisMis music to Santa Claus!" She's not exactly a huge fan of Santa right now. She likes that he's going to bring her lots of presents for Christmas, but when she sees him she is very terrified. We have a stuffed santa decoration at home that all of a sudden she started getting very afraid of and even made us move it across the room!

We bought a house!

We came to an agreement with the sellers around 9pm last night. They are in a really tough financial situation right now, so they did come down some in their asking price, but we also had them throw in:

• Front Loading Washer and Dryer
• Huge playground set and swingset
• Pool table
• Home Warranty

We're happy with the outcome and now we have 7 days to get an inspection and all that other fun stuff done before we go on vacation! We're hoping to get an interest rate of under 5%. We wrote in our contract that if we can't get lower than 5.5% then we can still back out. We can also back out at any time for anything found during the inspection. So it won't technically be a done deal until closing on or around January 26th.

Keep your fingers crossed. This really is a dream house for us. I can't wait to move!

Another house...another offer

We went looking at houses again on Saturday and found one that both Justin and I are in love with. It's in a great neighborhood (and so was the other one), but this is a lot closer for Justin's commute. This house is huge! It's a 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom. It has a living room and a family room and both are on the main floor which is nice. Plus it has a partially finished basement that we could make into my office. The kitchen has recently been updated and is Beautiful!!! The price of course is higher than the other house, so we'll definitely be doing some negotiating. Here's a link to some inside pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/paigeisone/NewryHouse#

I'll update later on how the offer went. We'll be putting it in this afternoon.

Martin's - My favorite grocery store

Martin's is the real reason I want to move to Hollidaysburg! I love this grocery store. It's huge and has wonderful selection. Plus, for Thanksgiving I got a free 15lb turkey!!!

We filled up on gas this past weekend at the Martin's gas station. We had accumulated about $.30 off per gallon (probably from all the recent shopping we've done there to earn our free turkey).
I can't remember the last time we paid $16 to completely FILL UP the tank!

Offer is in

We just got back from meeting with our realtor today. We put an offer in on the Donna Street house. She is going to try and present our offer to the seller in person either this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Then the seller has 24 hours to get back to us with a counter-offer. So now we just have to sit tight and wait.


Update: Our offer was $13k less than her asking price. She countered by lowering her price by $5k. So then we countered back, but she said no. $5k less than asking price is the lowest that she's willing to go. So at this point we're at a standstill. It's not looking good :(

Breakfast with Santa

On Saturday morning, Justin's school had a breakfast with Santa for kids. Paige was so excited to see Santa (as you can tell from her expression)
That picture was taken before Santa showed up. As soon as she saw Santa, she made us hold her and she buried her face in our shoulder. She was TERRIFIED! We didn't even attempt to have him hold her. I don't think we physically could've pried her out of our arms. So Justin and I sat next to Santa and Paige was on Justin's lap screaming. Our camera's battery was dead by this time, so we'll have to wait until the elf sends us their picture to post that.

First Haircut!

Can you believe Paige is 2.5 years old and is just now getting her first haircut?! She could've gone much longer without getting it cut, but in some places like the front, back and sides it's very uneven and was looking sloppy. I'm hoping to get our holiday pictures taken this weekend, so we all went in for haircuts. I wish I would've thought to take some better "before" pictures. The hair in front is sort of swept away to the side in the first picture. But, some pieces went well down past her eyes if pulled down front.

Here's the After picture where you can see the front part is combed straight.
She was such a good girl. We had been telling her that she was going to get a haircut and she was so excited to go. But when we walked in the door and she saw someone else getting a cut, she grabbed her head and got really scared. We had her sit on Justin's lap and gave her a book and her cookie monster. Once she felt (or rather didn't feel) the first clip, she was much more relaxed and thought it was kinda silly. One lesson we learned is not to pick out a Look and Find book the next time. It requires too much head movement for her to find things in the picture and makes it a tad more difficult for the stylist!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I know I'm a little late posting this. We drove out to Cincinnati to celebrate Thanksgiving this year while stopping over for a night in Pittsburgh on the way. We left here on Tuesday night. The snow was coming down hard and the roads were really bad. The first hour or so of our drive was pretty bad. Then there was a gas leak in Murrysville, so we had to take a small detour. It ended up taking us about 3 hours to get to my parents house. I'm so glad we didn't try to go straight to Cincinnati from here in that weather.

After our rest in Pittsburgh, we headed out to Cinci around 9:30am on Wednesday. Clear skies and dry roads the entire way. Paige was a trooper. She only napped for about half an hour, but we listened to her music and kept her entertained most of the way. We stopped for lunch in Zanesville and then a stop for gas a little while after that. You won't believe how much we paid for gas... $1.45/gallon!!! We made it to Cinci by about 3:30pm.

Our first Thanksgiving celebration was that evening at Grandpa and Grammy's house. There were 20+ people that attended and it was great to see everyone. Usually we only get to see that side of the family at Christmas time. Paige behaved very well. She was a bit shy at first and took a little while for her to warm up, but she eventually did.

The next big feast was on Saturday afternoon at Nama and Pop's house. Paige loved all the dogs and even got to ride in a cart pulled by one of the Berners. Again there were probably about 20+ people there too that we only usually see once a year.

The ride home on Sunday took a lot longer. This time we drove straight from Cinci back to our house to save some time by bypassing Pittsburgh. I'm not convinced it saved us all that much time. We left before 10am, but didn't get back to our house until about 7:30pm. It rained most of our drive and we made several rest stops to get out and stretch. Paige went through about 4 movies and was still getting pretty antsy. At one point, when we were in a standstill in traffic she started acting up and I gave her the santa claus warning. Told her that he knew when she was naughty and when she was nice. So she stopped crying and told me that she was all done being naughty. It was really cute. This is going to be a fun Christmas!