The House is Officially Ours!!!

We closed on our house on Friday and are moving in on Tuesday!  We can't wait to get settled in our new home and are looking forward to buying some furniture that is from this decade!  (Although that will have to wait for a while longer...)

The last two weeks have been busy with Christmas preparations and packing.

Allan took a break to talk to his Mom.

The mess.

Me in the mess.

We got a little too excited about packing though.  First, I forgot to leave out an extra tube of toothpaste and only discovered it when we ran out so we had to make an emergency trip to Walmart.  Then Allan was sick and we had packed all of our medicines, I opened that box twice because I didn't get both medicines we needed out the first time.  I thought we had everything we needed for our meals the next few days and so we packed up all of the other food.  Then we discovered that we had packed some of the spices we needed and didn't have any pans.  We packed all of our coats thinking that we had set aside the ones we needed only to discover the next day that Allan had put the coat he usually wears in the laundry and we hadn't set another one aside.  Good thing tape is cheap because we've opened and closed a lot of boxes multiple times! 

 Last Thursday we went to the children's Christmas play - Surfin' Santa.  We saw a few children in our ward and they did such a great job!

That Friday we babysat for some friends of ours.  They have a little girl who is about 5 months old and they are going to be our new neighbors!  We're so glad that our little girl will have a friend her same age to play with.

We had so much fun playing with her.  She is such a happy and cute baby.  

Allan entertaining her while I ate dinner.

Kissing her chubby little cheeks.

 When it was time for her to eat she wouldn't take her bottle (she usually nurses).  She cried for quite a while.  Allan took her and held her during the worst of it, sweet man.  We finally got her calmed down by holding her a certain way and then turning on a movie.  Poor little girl, she never did take her bottle.  When we were watching the movie she had to have me hold her and then be touching Allan in some way.  She would hold on to his hand or his arm, whatever she could reach.  What a cutie pie.

The next day was the ward Christmas party.  The primary kids sang and did such a great job.  I made Allan's favorite macaroni salad to take to the party and he was very upset, lol!  He told me (teasing of course) that I always make the good stuff to take to parties and he doesn't like to share the good stuff.  When I asked him what I should take that wasn't good he said "Something with carrots."  Haha!  He's been eating a lot of salads with carrots in them lately.

This Thursday I babysat three little girls.  The one's who are super shy until they get me alone, and then they talk my ears off.  I love those girls, they are so sweet and so creative.  We played Old Maid, hide and seek, and in the imaginary swimming pool (we even went snorkeling).  They used their big rocking chair as a diving board and showed me all of their best diving moves.  They also taught me the imagination game they play with their Christmas tree and the oldest recited some poems.  It was a very fun evening, I was a little bummed when their Dad came home and I had to leave.  It was their bed time though so the fun wouldn't have lasted too much longer anyway.  ;)

We went to Allan's work Christmas party Friday night.  We had a lot of fun getting to know some of his coworkers better and we got some hilarious white elephant gifts.  We forgot to bring Allan's ear plugs though and the restaurant we were in was VERY loud.  By the time we got home he wasn't feeling very good.  Then he woke up with a horrible headache and a head cold on top of it.  He was laid out most of the day Saturday.  He made it to church today and has been laid out since.  If we ever go to another work party we will be bringing his ear plugs!  Lesson learned.

It was my last day teaching music time for the primary today.  I got to teach both the younger and older kids today which made it even better.  During one of the songs we sang I had the pianist stop occasionally and whoever had the bean bag we were passing around had to tell us why they loved Jesus.  Here are a few of their answers:

"I love Jesus because He gave me my cat."
"I love Jesus because He gave us clothes."
"I don't love Jesus, I love Firemen."

You gotta love kids!  This is always one of my favorite activities because you never know what they're going to say!

Another activity we did:  we stood in a circle holding hands.  I would squeeze a child's hand and they would pass the squeeze on so that there were hand squeezes going around the circle.  I told the kids that the squeezes meant "I love you" and that if you got a squeeze on both hands at the same time you got "love shocked"!  They got the biggest kick out of it.  When I told the older kids that the squeezes meant I love you they all freaked out and let go of the hands they were holding.  I thought they would probably do that but I wanted to try anyway, mostly for the laugh.  I got their attention again by patting my head and rubbing my belly (random I know but it usually works) and then I told them that it meant that they loved Jesus - that they were telling Jesus that they loved Him.  After that they decided it was okay to hold hands and give love squeezes, anything for Jesus.  They also got a big kick out of the "love shock", lol!

By this time next week we'll be in our new house!  Hooray!