We've Started!

Well, it's finally begun! We are in the last week of being Texans and we are busy getting everything organized.  We are having those feelings of hurrying to get everything done, see everything, and visit everybody before we leave.  We went to our good friends, the Teague's, for a little Super Bowl get together, going out with a friend from work tonight, and then having a big going away supper tomorrow night.  Whew! 

Sunday morning we took all of the decorations off of the walls and filled the holes.  We were expecting it to be a more difficult project but it really took no time at all.  I went  a little ahead of Beau and took the stuff down and Zoey followed him with a jar so he could put the nails in.  Our house looks so bare and different! 

Daddy hard at work!

Charlotte didn't know what to think of all the commotion!

I love watching them play.  Charlotte is so amused with anything Zoey does and Zoey loves making her laugh.

Baby always has to give her dirty looks!

My big girl.  She is so excited to get to Kansas, I think she was a little hesitant at first and talked about how she will miss her friends and our house.  Now she talks about all the fun things she can't wait to do when she gets to Kansas.  I called the school to let them know her last day will be Friday and the lady went on and on about how they will miss her and she is such a good helper in the mornings getting the other kids their cards.  I'm so proud of her!  She's had some kind of bad days lately and it was nice to hear that even though she can be difficult at times they still appreciate her personality.  She is so excited to start school with her cousin Andrew and meet her new teacher.  I hope she does good!  I told her Nana Kriss will go sit with her at school and make her behave, at least that's what she always threatened me with haha!

I've been busy getting laundry ready and cleaning what we can clean before we take off on Saturday.  I'm taking the girls, the animals, and the things the movers won't take like fingernail polish and some other things.  I bet Beau will be happy to have a super quiet house for a couple of days haha!

What's Happening?

Well, things have been getting back to normal around these parts, just more preparations for the big move.  I can't believe it's going to be here in like 2 weeks.  Zoey's last day of school is February 10th and then we head out on the 11th.  I'm getting so excited the closer it comes, I am ready to be in Kansas and get settled in.  My mom asked me a couple weeks ago if I would want to help out the Health Office in Sharon and be the secretary, it's only 3 days a week and she knows the other lady that works there and says she's really nice.  I went ahead and applied and I'm going to do a phone interview the 31st.  I'm kind of excited!  It will be so nice I won't have to put Charlotte in daycare and have 4 day weekends every week, I hope I get it.

I set up Zoey's princess tent in the living room the other weekend and Charlotte absolutely loved it.  They had so much fun climbing in and out and playing peek-a-boo.  She's quite the character, between her and Zoey they keep us entertained.

Charlotte's new thing is to scrunch her nose up and give us dirty looks, I love it!  She does it when other people talk to her sometimes or when she's getting into something she's not supposed to.  She's been kinda sick the last couple of days, coughing and runny nose and a little bit of a fever.  She is not sleeping well at ALL and I felt like a zombie the last couple days.  Beau told me that he would take care of Zoey and Charlotte's breakfast and everything this morning and to go take a nap.  I slept until 11:30 and I feel so fantastic!  Got caught up with laundry and everything, it's amazing what a little sleep will do for you.  Even though Charlotte has not been feeling well she is still in such a good mood and eats pretty well, she's so mellow.  We are so lucky to have such sweet girls!

 Look at that face! She's so saucy sometimes.  The weather warmed up a few days this week and we took a trip to the park.  Zoey had fun playing and Charlotte loved watching from the wagon.

Ah! I love that face!

Don't you love when parents get homework too?  I got a note last week saying that to celebrate the 100th day of school we had to make a poster of 100 things .  Zoey and I had fun finding all the things and counting them out to glue them on.

I'm off to try to get this sweet baby to sleep, cross your fingers she sleeps more than an hour at a time tonight! 

Picture catch-up

Since I'm always so late writing a post I'll just put some pictures from my phone up.  I haven't done that in a while!

Ms. Charlotte was playing in her playpen with a ton of toys and I look over and she was fast asleep.

Zoey and I made these pretty paper stars for Christmas.  They are still up even though I took down all of our other decorations, Zoey wants to hang them in her room.

So gross! Beau got a wild hair and decided to shave the dog.  He was needing a hair cut super bad and it took us 5 hours to get him all trimmed up.  I'm glad we did because we found a tick behind his ear! We got it out without any problems and I can tell Cupid feels TONS better. 
Here's what he looked like before:

And after:

Isn't he a handsome boy? 

Zoey had to try out her new fingernail polish she got for Christmas.

My smiley girl :)

I absolutely love watching them play together, especially since Charlotte is getting so mobile and really interacts with Zoey.  She usually won't play with any of her toys, just tries to climb on Zoey the whole time.

Haha this was the other morning when Charlotte would not stop bugging Zoey and she was trying to watch her toons!  Zoey ended up just sitting on Char's pajamas so she couldn't go anywhere, poor baby!

Kitty has mixed feelings about Charlotte, she likes to be around her as long as Charlotte doesn't screech at her or touch her.  She sat in the playpen with her for a long time and tortured the dog because he couldn't get to her. 

Gah! When did my girl get so grown up!?  Sometimes I look at her and it just surprised me how much she has grown!  She wanted me to take a picture of her pretty white teeth since she had just been to the dentist.  She does such an awesome job for them, I'm so proud of her!

Here's my silly girls, I just love them so much!

I don't have much to report on, just getting ready for our big move next month.  We are hopefully going to join our friend Priscilla and do a garage sale next week and sell some of our stuff we don't need.  I'm baby-sitting for a friend of mine's little boy this week, he's 3 days older than Charlotte and probably 10 pounds heavier!  He's a biiiiig boy, but sweet.  Him and Charlotte are having a good time playing together.  Hope everyone is having a wonderful start to the New Year!

New Year's

Happy New Year everyone! I can't believe it is already 2012, it's so weird to think about.  Also, I realized today I was high school 10 years ago! TEN!

We had a few friends over and had a fantastic New Year's Eve, it was the perfect way to ring in the new year.  The other ladies and I also did a cookie exchange so we had yummy stuff to snack on while we waited for midnight.

Zoey was so excited to get to wear a party dress and get ready for all of her friends to come over!

Charlotte was just happy being Charlotte haha!

Hmm, someone needs a shave and it's not me! Haha I love you Beau, even when you drink all my wine and give me prickly kisses :)

The blowers were the favorite, even little Jackson tried his hardest he ended up humming into it.  He's such a little cutie!

The whole gang!  Poor Landon passed out around 11:00 and Zoey kept talking about how sad it was he missed all the festivities.  Poor guy was just so tired, he didn't move at all during the commotion.

We all had a great time hanging out and visiting, I'm going to miss everyone so much when we move, they really are the greatest.

We are getting back into the swing of school and normal schedules again, I'm hoping for a nice relaxed weekend.  We don't have too many left before it is going to get crazy busy around here getting things around to move.  I can't believe we are going to be in Kansas next month, after we've waited and waited for so long for something to happen now that it is, it seems to be moving so fast.  I'm so excited to start the next chapter and be close to family again!

Hope everyone is having a wonderful start to the New Year!

Christmas 2011

I have been neglecting my blog something fierce here lately, as always my excuse of the day is: BUSY!  The holiday season is winding to a close and I feel like things are slowly returning to normal.  Here's how Christmas went for the Gardner's this year:

First off, we got some snow on Christmas Eve! It was a pretty little snow with the hugest flakes I've seen in a long time.  Zoey had a great time playing in it. 

Charlotte thought sister was crazy to be out there in that cold!  She likes to be warm and dry thank you very much.  A few milestones for our big nugget, she's waving, saying Momma and Dada, pulling up, and crawling!  It seems like we turned our heads for a second and she is all grown up.  Her crawling cracks us up, it's very stiff and robotic and she usually only does it when she's upset about something.  What a little stinker!

Christmas morning!  Zoey was so excited to see Santa had come with a wagon for Charlotte and a LaLa Loopsy doll for her.

Zoey with Crumbs Sugar Cookie and her silly hair.

Charlotte was a little confused why we were doing all this weird stuff so early in the morning.  Since Zoey has been on vacation from school and Beau and I aren't working at all we've gotten into a very lazy routine in our house.  Zoey wakes up and gets in bed with us and Charlotte wakes up and we grab her and usually lay in bed for like half an hour before we get up and moving.  It's going to be a shock when we have to start waking up for school again haha!

The girls trying out the new wagon!

Charlotte playing with some of her new toys. 

We skyped with Nana and Papa so they could see the girls open their presents. Don't ya just love technology!

Zoey also got a costume complete with a wig to match her new LaLa Loopsy doll.  She has had so much fun dressing up and playing with all of her new stuff.

Of course sister couldn't miss out on all the fun!  Wouldn't she be sweet with head full of long curly hair?  I'll pass on the pink though haha.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas like we did!

Comparisons

I had to get a Baby's First Christmas ornament for Charlotte so Zoey and I searched and searched the other day.  We finally found one at K-Mart that was so cute, it almost matches Zoey's!

Here is Zoey's:

And here is Charlotte's:

It's so fun going through all these first with Charlotte and Zoey thinks it's pretty cool too.  She is such a good big sister.

I cleaned off the front of the fridge the other day and I noticed we had 2 family portraits up. Here is one Zoey did at the beginning of the school year:

I love how she had Charlotte still in my tummy even though she was 4 months old when Zoey started school haha.
Here's one she did the other day when we went out to eat:

Now she has me holding the baby, she's such a silly girl.  I was very impressed by how much better her pictures have gotten! It's only been 3 months or so since school has started so she has improved her drawing skills quite a bit.  So proud of my girls!

Holidays

Alright, who else has been super busy this season? Between the birthday parties, planning Zoey's class party for school, and just enjoying the holiday season, I have not had much time for anything!  I've been doing some organizing and cleaning things out, getting ready for our big move.  Beau is on leave and has been keeping busy going to all of his appointments for out processing.  Charlotte is almost on the move and can get around really good in her walker now so she keeps us on our toes.  Zoey is doing fantastic in school and is so excited for her party tomorrow.  Here are a few pics from what we have been busy doing:

We went to Sarah's birthday party a couple weekends ago at Mr. Gatti's, it was a blast!  Charlotte loved looking at all the lights and I don't know if Beau or Zoey had more fun playing the games haha.

They rode the bumper cars and had so much fun.  It was just Beau and Zoey and another little boy and they pretty much went after Beau the whole time, it was so funny.

Happy birthday Sarah!  She's getting to be such a big girl!

Zoey's school put on a pajama party skate night last week so we decided to check it out.  Did you know it's a lot harder to skate when you're 27 than when you're 15?  Yeah, it had been awhile, I did maybe one lap and put my skates up haha!

The skating people can actually tighten the wheels on the kids skates so they're not so slippery and that really helped Zoey be able to get the hang of it.  There were quite a few tumbles and falls but she kept saying how fun it was.  She's a trooper!

It was my birthday, happy birthday to me! I told Beau I wanted the cheesiest best pizza ever, we usually have homemade since Beau can't have dairy, so we went to Double Dave's. Yum, it was just what I wanted.  The Teague's came and we had an ice cream cake and it was a really fun birthday.  Priscilla got me this really cool wood saying about friendship and some socks and some smelly goody soap. I have it in my bathroom now, it's awesome! Thanks Priscilla!  Beau got me a new set of pans! I was so excited, I have been using the same ones for 9 years and they were about done for.  I love them, they even have silicone handles so you can put them in the oven if you want to, amazing!

We went to the Fire Department Christmas party, it was a lot of fun.  They had a bouncy castle for the kids, it was so nice since they usually just run around whenever they have parties. 

The night can't be complete without a tiny bit of pouting :)

Santa came, fake paper beard and all, and Zoey told him what she wanted. 

She got some Hello Kitty stuff from Santa, she's been playing with it all weekend! Santa did good!

Of course the young guys had to tell Santa what they wanted too haha!

I have lots of shopping to do today, I have to get Zoey's teacher gifts and I have to make cupcakes and a fruit tray for her party tomorrow.  I'm excited and nervous I hope it all goes well.  Santa is going to be there so I'm hoping for some nice pictures, maybe with Charlotte too.  Happy Holidays everyone!