A few before and after pics of our new house

Our dinning room before

and after

Family room before....

and after!!

Thanks to all of our friends and family that really helped us get this place in shape!!

Second part to this past year

So after spending countless nights, weekends and thousands of dollars working on our new house we finally moved in over Memorial day weekend. Thankfully we had some help from friends and family members to help us complete the demolition of two bathroom, painting and ripping out floors. As for the moving we hired a moving company!

In June my aunt and uncle and their daughter came out from Utah to visit for a week. My uncle is a building inspector and knows how to do just about anything when it comes to home repairs so he and Ed agreed to stay back and work on the house while my aunt and I and all of the kids headed to Ocean City for the week.. I know not to fair but they got a ton done while we were gone.

So while I'm away Ed calls me to tell me the next door neighbor that had been so extra nice to us since the second we bought the place had just bee arrested! I was completely shocked. Of course Ed being totally non social had no clue why he had been arrested. So the next day the local paper comes out and turns out he was arrested on charges of child molestation.

Let me tell you I was floored. He seemed like the nicest guy on the planet.. mowing our grass, offering to help take a few trees out on our property, filling us in on all of the activities in the area for the kids etc.

So anyway he posts out on bail and is STILL awaiting his trial which was supposed to be in August and has since been postponed until this October.. talk about awkward.

He comes over to talk to Ed the day it hit the papers and never once says "Hey I didn't do this" . Instead he just goes on and on about that the incident occurred 8 years ago and tells Ed not to worry cause we are not in any danger.. gee thanks.. that makes me feel so much better. so needless to say we have cut all ties which makes it so awkward to even go in our backyard when he is in his back yard which for some reason is like every two seconds either to mow the grass.. water the lawn or work in his garden. We are in the process of having a 6 foot fence installed as soon as our permit goes through.

The whole thing makes me so mad... at first i wanted to sell this house immediately, but after thinking it through I guess it's better to have the information then to not know at all...I'm still hoping that somehow he is innocent and the victim recants the entire story.

I'm back.. well sort of!

So it has been over a year since I last blogged. So much has happened since last summer. In August of 2009 we put our townhouse up for sale ( it was getting a little tight with having 3 kids and 3 bedrooms)... we were anticipating a long wait before it sold based on the housing market and were totally surprised when we got an offer in about 45 days So by closing we still had not found "our dream home" so we moved everything in to a little tiny apartment ( and a ton of stuff to a storage place). The apartment was horrible to say the very least, and I think we all went in to a slight depression living there! Finally in January we put a bid in on a house that we really liked only it was a short sale home and let me tell short sale means anything but short when it comes to waiting on the bank to give you and answer on your bid.. in March after some haggling back and forth on the price we FINALLY came to an agreement and settled on March 26th 2010 ( also known as Jillian's second birthday!)

Next came the two plus months of painting, reflooring, ripping out bathrooms etc.. and on memorial day weekend we moved out of the terrible apartment and in to out new home. ( I will have to post some pictures later.

At the End of January Alexis started to feel sick so we took her to our family doctor for a check up, after some blood work it turns out her platelets were over doubled of what they should be.. from there were sent to a hematologist at children's hospital and to an infectious disease specialist.. after some more testing we were told she had Llymes disease.. 3 weeks of doxycycline and another couple of tests with zero improvement, the Lymes disease was eliminated as the cause. Over the next few months there were several more appointments more blood work, a cat scan, ultrasound, 2 genetic mutation tests and a bone marrow biopsy. ( The biopsy for me was the worst) For two days I had to wait for the results hoping and praying that the platelet count was not due to a type of myleoprolific or lymphomic cancer) We were told the odds of it being a cancer were 40% (scared the life out of me literally) After all of that and now we are 7 months in to this we still do not have a firm diagnosis other than that if her platelets remain in the millions for an entire year and they do not ever find any type of cancer she will be solidly diagnosed with a blood disorder call Essential Thrombocythemia or ET for short. In a few weeks we have another appointment and yet again more blood work and then a follow up Marrow biopsy in December. so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that things go well.

So much more to blog about as far as the past year goes, but I will have to do a little at a time to try to catch it all up!