November in a nutshell

How time flies! So many things have been going on since I've blogged last. Jeremy's sister Sarah and her husband Reese have moved here and they found an apartment less than a 10 minute drive away so we (or at least I!) have been having so much fun. The closest we've ever lived to family our entire military career was the hour away we lived from Jer's family while we were in Arizona. I am starting to feel a little pampered as our Army career (fingers crossed) winds down. How wonderful it is to have people close by that you can count on like family :), and how awesome that we just love Sarah and Reese. They are quite a bit younger than us and just starting out with their own family (they are expecting a girl in February) and it has been great for me to learn things from the "younger" crowd. Since Sarah and I are both stay-at-home moms, and I've known her family for a LONG time, we already have a lot in common and I have really enjoyed the times we've gotten to just sit and chat. It has gotten me through some pretty tough days with Isaac seemingly screaming at me all day--thank goodness Sarah is also patient! :-) And I have a go-to visiting teaching companion (Sarah just got 200% done for last month) and a buddy for new adventures like checking out the Aldi supermarket. I recently got to meet with my 3 very good friends from Clarksville and Sarah got to meet them too. I had been feeling sad that it was going to take me forever to make friends as awesome as those 3 friends again, but having Sarah here has just been wonderful.


We continue to be hit again and again it seems like with unexpected costs but we are weathering those too. And it sure seems like a lot of other people are having just as hard of a time if not harder lately. Why is everything falling apart on everyone right now!? Lame. We got through the expense of the boys' wisdom teeth coming out and then I suddenly had to have a root canal. On Halloween. I got really lucky in being able to go to an oral surgeon in Birmingham that was AMAZING. I have been in more pain from a filling than from that root canal. It was fabulous. I didn't even need anything for pain other than a couple Motrin that night and the next morning. And my part with dental insurance was only $225. Of course, I still had to pay for my very first crown to go over that root canal and to fix a couple nasty cavities on either side of that tooth, so that was only $400 more. It was kind of lovely though that our mortgage payment was finally fixed so we pay $100 less a month now, plus they refunded us the extra we had already paid this year. It felt so good to put some money back into our back account. And that huge amount the VA owed us from JUNE finally got returned to us, just in time for me to not cancel Christmas. None of this begins to cover the expenses we've had lately but it could be worse for sure!


I mentioned going to the Aldi supermarket with Sarah. I guess the one near here just opened a month ago or so. We've only gone the once but we loved it! I mentioned to someone the only black Friday deal that would have gotten me out of the house was milk for $2 and guess how much it is at Aldi? I was so excited. The butter that is usually $3 at Walmart and the commissary is $2 at Aldi's. The oranges that Walmart charges an arm and a leg for and then you lift up the bag and the entire bottom is rotted, ew--well guess what? Aldi had four lb bags of lovely, lovely oranges for $2! There were about 8 in my bag so that's 25cents each! Sarah got grapefruit for 39cent each (vs. Walmart 79cent). A head of lettuce was 99cents. Their eggs were 49cents for a dozen. Not everything was cheaper and most of it was their own version of other well-known brands but we bought several things to try and so far, so good. I may be hooked. If they keep up this awesomeness, I am definitely hooked. I will save $4 a week just on milk and as Sarah pointed out that is over $200 a year!! For one product! They don't accept manufacturer's coupons but I quit using them when I realized mostly they are for junk I don't want. Just give me the plain old food cheaper and I'm there. You have to bring your own bags if you want any (or you can buy them there) and they don't bag anything for you at all, plus you have to put a quarter in a shopping cart to unhook it and use it and then once you return it, you get your quarter back. And inside the store, things are very simple, no distracting displays at every turn. Another plus for me was that the parking lot was graded up to the store, meaning no curb, so you don't have to figure out how to get your cart off the front sidewalk. I know I'm weird, but I just loved it. Well, at least the one time I went. :-)


This weekend Nicholas will be performing at some drama/music competition called Trumbauer. He is singing a duet of the song "A Stud and a Babe" with a girl from his school. Here's the link to one of their performances: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlzqRhUK9ik I will add a disclaimer here that Nick did not choose this song and it is a tiny bit risque, but it is really funny and I think Nick was awesome!


We are all decorated for Christmas now and this really is my favorite time of the year. We are looking forward to an insanely busy December as usual when your family is musical but at the end will be 2 lovely weeks of no school! I think I get more tired of school than the kids do. It's just so hard to keep track of everyone and everything that is going on.


I finally did something I've been wanting to do for almost two years. In fact, I created an etsy account last January and finally this week I actually listed some things for sale! Sarah and I encouraged each other to go ahead and do it and I finally took the plunge. My name is Egglintine on there. I still don't know what I am doing but it is really exciting. Here's a link for that: http://www.etsy.com/people/Egglintine?ref=si_pr I may never sell anything at all but it sure was fun to do the photo-shoots of my crafts. To do well at all, I'm assuming I'll have to pay the extra weekly fees to have my product come up when people search for different "keywords" but for now, I'm just happy looking at my stuff on there. I hope my family doesn't mind that their ornament ball Christmas gifts were used for one of the photo-shoots! And I have so many more ideas I can't hardly get any housework done all of a sudden.


I just realized I haven't done Isaac's 1st birthday post either. At his one year appointment he was 31 lbs. and I think 33 1/2 inches long. He is breaking my arms! He is also into everything as expected I guess. We had to bungee-cord the chairs to the dining table to stop him from climbing up and falling off and cracking his head on the tile, but just today he figured out how to open the drawers on a piece of furniture in the living room and use them like stairs. Giant sigh. Good thing he's cute!