Our First Home

As I mentioned, Stephen and I have put our house on the market. I took pictures of the house for the MLS listing with my own camera, and so I thought I’d go ahead and post them on here… mainly for myself for years in the future, but also for any nosy people who are interested in buying our house!

Sooo – welcome to our home! When you walk in the front door, you enter our living room.

Just opposite of the living room is our dining room. The dining room and living room are all one big open area.

We also have our desk in the living/dining area.

On the other side of the dining area is the kitchen. We have lots of cabinet space in our kitchen. There is an area for a breakfast table and a bar (but we never bought bar stools.)

We have a galley-style kitchen, but it is long, so there is a lot of countertop space!

Christopher’s room is off the kitchen.

He has his own private bathroom with a HUGE shower.

Also off the kitchen is our super-big laundry room.

The last room of our house is mine and Stephen’s bedroom. It is off the living room.

We have a nice-sized bathroom with a full shower/tub. We also have a HUGE walk-in closet, but I didn’t get any pictures of it.

Off our bedroom we have a covered porch. Hopefully in the near future it will be a screened-in porch. ;)

That is our first home! It has been good to us -- it was a great starter home and I know that I will be sad to leave it, but I also look forward to moving on to bigger and better things! (Read: three bedrooms and a garage.)  :)

(I just realized that I don’t have any pictures of the exterior of the house. I’ll have to take those soon and post them as well!)

christopher loves jasper <3

Saturday, Sunday, Monday

This past weekend Stephen and I made a trip to Ft Smith with Tyler and Britney. We were mainly going to watch The Green Lantern, but I did manage to get there a little early and do a little shopping beforehand.

I got both of these cute frames from Target for $2.50 and they were originally $14.99! I love Target, but it’s probably better for my wallet that I don’t live closer to one. 

I know that I am not a “graduate” yet, but I’ve had Senioritis for about 4 years, and now I am finally, officially a Senior in my MAJOR field and I will be graduating next spring! I couldn’t help but buy this neat frame for myself. In less than a year, I’ll be able to post a picture of it again – complete!

We made it to the movie, which was pretty good. Stephen has a huge list of movies that are coming out this summer that he wants to go watch… Eh. I’d rather shop.

After the movie, we had some yummy Olive Garden for dinner. It was 6 on a Saturday evening, and there was a 30 minute wait for a table. The inside was packed with people waiting, so we had to wait outside in the HOT weather.

We stopped in Poteau on the way home for some snow cones. (My favorite is Wedding Cake – YUM!)  We had a great time with Ty and B, as always.

I was so excited to be home, though, because Christopher had spent the evening and night before with his Nana, and it had been over 24 hours since I’d last seen him. I was glad to have him back home with me. :)

On Sunday, we slept in. (Speaking of which, what happened to my plan of going to bed by 10 and getting up by 7 during the month of June so that I wouldn’t get off schedule and going back to school in July wouldn’t be hard?) We ended up going to my MIL’s around 1:30 so that Stephen and I could swim while Christopher napped. I LOVE that she has a pool right down the road from us! It’s so nice to be able to go over whenever we want!  Christopher took a 2+ hour nap while Stephen and I swam and played around.

Last night, my parents came over to help us finish some projects around the house. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on the blog yet, but Stephen and I put our house up for sale last week! We are still getting a few last-minute things together (like finishing up painting jobs, de-cluttering, etc. My mom helped me to stage the house and I took pictures last night!  But more about that later – this post is getting long enough as it is!

Today we had a pretty relaxing day at the house. I worked on laundry while Christopher watched – wait for it! – SHREK! (I have to add, just before I snapped this picture, Christopher was actually leaned over the arm of the couch facing the TV, but he moved as I was grabbing my phone to take the pic) I also got registered for an online class at RMCC, which starts tomorrow. My month-long break from school was SOOO nice and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’m not counting my break as over just yet, even though I start this class tomorrow… it’s online, so it doesn’t count! I start back to classes at Henderson a week from tomorrow. I’m taking two classes at HSU, and one at RMCC… I’m hoping that 9 hours isn’t too much to take on for a summer session, but it will make my fall semester SO much easier. I love summer sessions and would actually like for all classes to be offered on a 4-6 week-long schedule… I just think that even if the classes are hard, you just push through it and it’s over so quickly and there’s not as much “busy-work” as a normal semester.

Just a sweet picture of Baxter – crazy dog. ♥

Anyway… that’s about all that’s been going on around here!

birthday pictures

Now that I *think* that I have Christopher’s birthday invitations finalized, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite pictures that my mom and I took on Monday evening. I’m not including the ones that will be on his invitations, but I will share the invites after I order them.

That having been said, I’m probably going to order several of these pictures as large prints or maybe as canvas prints, if I can find a good deal for canvas ones. I have NO idea how I will choose between these great photos, plus my three favorites that I’m not even including here… help! Which ones do you like?

His birthday isn’t until August 18… but I’m trying to take care of as many details as possible now, so that I don’t have to worry about them during my summer classes. (The LAST summer of [undergraduate] classes that I will EVER have to take!)

ogres are like onions

So.

Christopher is 22 months old (ack!) and all over the place. I’ve been trying to get him interested in TV since he was about a year old – I bought him a portable DVD player and a Mickey Mouse DVD for his first birthday. He wasn’t interested in Mickey, so we tried Veggie Tales, Sesame Street, Dora… he would watch them in the car for maybe 15 minutes or so before getting bored with it. And at home – forget it. He wasn’t interested at all! I’ve tried all different sorts of children’s programming recently and nothing was working.

It’s not that I want him to be a couch potato. And to be honest, he’s really good about independent play, so it wasn’t something that I pushed. Just every now and then, when he was bored and ripping my house to shreds I would try to get him distracted by TV.

Anyway, this past weekend, I remembered a few friends whose kiddos loved Shrek, (and honestly, I love it too) so I told Stephen to pop it into the DVD player and see if Christopher would like it.

And since Saturday, Shrek has played on my DVD player approximately 3541 times.

Okay, not really. But I would say that we’ve had Shrek on at least once a day. Sometimes twice.

Don’t judge me.

Christopher LOVES it. He normally sits and watches it for about 20-30 minutes. After that, he gets off the couch and start playing around in the living room, but he never leaves to go (destroy) another room while Shrek is playing.

He asks to watch it. If the TV gets turned on, he comes into the living room and grabs our black DVD remote and goes “Rawwwrrrr rrrooaaaaarr raaaaaawr.” This means “Shrek,” because at the beginning of the movie when Shrek is scaring the village men who are supposed to be hunting him down, he roars at them to scare them away. The first time Christopher saw that, he thought it was SO funny and he roared at me. Afterwards, I would ask him -- “how does Shrek go?” and he would roar… so now he just ROARS at me when he wants to watch it.

Sneak Peak

My mom and I took Christopher around town tonight to get some pictures for his birthday party invitations. How is it possible that he’s going to be TWO in less than two months? He’s getting so big!

I took 312 photos… and I actually had quite a few of them turn out nicely! (Thank goodness Granny was there to help!)

Here is a cute sneak peak of my almost-two-year-old in his birthday shirt!

Trip to Fayetteville

Yesterday, Stephen needed to go to Fayetteville to cover the State All-Stars baseball and softball event, so Christopher and I decided to tag along for the ride!

The trip to Fayetteville is about two and a half hours, but it goes pretty quickly. We called in a pizza at Gino’s (I can’t go through Ft. Smith without it!) and ate it in the car on the way.

We had fun watching the boys play (a boy from Mena was the starting pitcher) then about halfway through that game, we headed over to watch the girls softball game. Christopher and I stayed in the parking lot for part of the girls game, so that he could run off some energy. We drove through a little piece of U of A’s campus. The whole town of Fayetteville is so pretty and I love the campus. If I could re-do college, I would go to Fayetteville, but when I was 18 and deciding which college to attend, the size of U of A scared me.

After we finished with the softball game, we drove around Fayetteville just looking at some of the town. We really had no idea where we were or what we were doing, but it was fun. We have discussed moving to Fayetteville or the NWA area after we graduate from Henderson, so it was neat to drive around a place where we might live in the future! We passed a park that had tons of people out in it with dogs and kids. It looked really neat; nothing like what we would see in Mena.

We ended up going to a Home Depot. I have never been to a Home Depot where people were so friendly! Everybody who worked there was nice and offered to help us. We were wanting to buy a rug for our back porch, but we weren’t sure if it would fit in my car. They let Stephen go out and see if it would fit in the car while I stayed in the store with Christopher, that way we wouldn’t have to ring it up, pay for it, and then if it didn’t fit, take it back and return it. (It fit, so Yay! for a new rug!) After we left Home Depot, we went to Logan’s Roadhouse for dinner, then headed home around 10:00. We had such a good time and really enjoyed our mini road trip.