2nd post in a week, go me!

Ok well I promised I'd be better about posting and I'm doing my best to keep that word! This week we have been feeling really accomplished about getting some stuff done around the house. Tomorrow marks exactly 1 month since I left my job and although it took a little time to get into a groove (and motivated, the holidays took alot out of us!) we are finally settling into a good routine and that feels awesome! It's nice living in a clean house again, not the cluttered, "a one year old lives here" tornado mess it was while we were both working. It always felt like there were never enough hours in a day to keep up with it all, and still enjoy spending time together as a family. Our next bigger project will be moving the office from the 3rd bedroom upstairs, down to the bedroom in the basement. Not really sure yet what we will do with the old office upstairs when it's empty as we dont' have an extra bed to put in there and make it a guest room, but i'm sure we'll figure out something to do with it. Ok, obviously it'll be another nursery at some point, but I can assure you that won't be in the next 9 months :-)

Ashlynne continues to grow, grow, grow and learn, learn, learn!! This week has been a big clothes dressing/undressing week. She has learned how to take her pants off (which has been alot of fun trying to get her to keep them on let me tell you!!:)) and also she's big on socks. Her socks, Daddy's socks, Mommy's socks, she's an equal opportunity sock fan. She's been pulling hers off since she was probably, I'm not sure, 6 months old?! but now she's figured out she can put them back on, and its even funner to get ahold of big people socks and put those on as well since they have bigger holes and easier to get on. It's pretty funny, they come clear up over her thighs!


Well that's all I have for now! Justin and I begin "operation get the heck back in shape" starting on Monday next week, so I'm sure we'll have something to post about that!

WOW it's been too long!!

Holy Holy! Life got way to much away from me and I have severly neglected our blog! I promise I'll be back from now on! Well, being that my last post was in September, clearly alot of things have changed since then, and instead of writing the worlds longest entry I will try and do more of a summary. Ashlynne is now 15 months old and my oh my how time flys! She is our little defiant, opinionated, sassy pants all rolled up into a sweet, huggable, teddy bear if that is at all possible. It's been fun to watch her vocabulary grow and how she interacts with her world now, and things seem to change day to day and week to week.

Here is Ashlynne on New Years Eve :)

I know in our last post I talked about how we had all these new changes with work, Justin went to graveyards and I went to full time. Well Justin is still working graveyards and it only took about 3-4 months for us to figure out that me working was not the life for us. So as of December 15th I became a full time stay at home mom. Best decision we've ever made! It's not like we're independantly wealthy or anything, we are blessed by Justin having a good job with excellent benefits (and one that he escaped recent budget cuts on thank goodness) but we also know that this was a decision that would come with some sacrifices, in order to receive the blessings of being able to raise our child/future children first hand. Its been intersting how learning to live less friviously has made us so much happier. We learned the value of our tax paying dollar and Justin now goes to the library for books (instead of 15-30 bucks a week easily spent), we cancelled our rediculousy priced digital cable and home phone we never used anyways and instead opted for just the good ol basic comes through the wall 30 channels and the cheapest netflix package. Cancelling cable seemed so hard at first, in theory, but then once we actually did it, we noticed we dont miss it at all. It's really intersting how you can be so much happier with so much less.

So I would say thats our nutshell catch up on the last 4 months I've missed on here. We had a wonderful holiday season getting to spend time with family and friends visiting town, and are now looking forward to settling into our new routines around the house having me around full time (leaving work right before the holidays didnt' set us up well for an immediate routine, however I will say it was soo nice to be off for those couple weeks!!) We hope everyone else is doing well, and I'll update more soon!

-Beth (Justin and Ashlynne)