The trouble with cuteness

This morning as I was looking over my email Desmond came into the living room with his arms covered in flour asking "is this for dogs mom, is this for dogs mom?" over and over. I'm not sure why he wondered if it was for dogs but I immediately took him into the kitchen to wash him off only to find that he had gotten into the pantry and ripped open a new bag of flour and spilled about 1/3 of the bag on the floor.

Two days ago I was on the phone with John and after finding a huge puddle of milk on the table and floor I commented that Desmond is the equivalent of 15 kids. And it's true. So as I was cleaning up the flour I said it again and my girls said "if Desmond is at someone elses house we need to keep him away from their pantry" and I said "and their milk, and their eggs, and their cereal, and peanut butter, and sugar, and soap, and faucet sprayers, and goldfish, and spaghetti, and cannery juice mix, and hot chocolate, and butter, and toothpaste, and desitin, and deoderant, and baking soda, and baking powder, and I'm sure I'm missing something. Seriously, these are all things that I have come into the kitchen or bathroom and found a gigantic mess.




So maybe you should watch your child Robin you're thinking, and although there is an element of truth to that there is also just an element of the kid is a magnet to messy stuff and making messes and getting in to everything when I turn my head for even a minute. Will he ever outgrow this? I think so because Collin was exactly the same way and he has toned it down a bit. But honestly, I don't know if I can survive much longer, I have had 3 mess makers right in a row, so much that sometimes I don't even blink an eye, I just pull out the broom and start sweeping. On the other hand sometimes I completely loose it like yesterday when he decided to wash off the peanut butter he had spread all over his body in the kitchen sink and then proceeded to take the sprayer and spray down, nay soak, my entire kitchen. Water was dripping from the ceiling. That was a proud moment in the Holman household.

If he wasn't so darn cute and didn't walk around singing Bob the builder and Super Why and saying "I miss you" everytime I come home from being gone I'm not sure what would happen. What do you do with that much cuteness and that much trouble?

2010 - what a year

Ok, I guess it's time to face up to the fact that I have not had an entry for about 1 1/2 yrs. Oddly enough 2010 was probably one of our more interesting years. Here's the quick summary:

January 15th: John's last day at Brown & Brown

January-Marchish: we try to decide what John will be doing for a new CAREER not JOB and where we want to live. We decide that we are feeling good about Tucson and put our house on the market FSBO. Within a week our house is under contract and we are amazed. Although it was priced well, we were still surprised how lucky we were. Ultimately it did close on May 26th and we knew we had made the right decision to put it on the market when we did.

March: with the house under contract we know we need a plan and ultimately decide to have John run for Justice of the Peace in Tucson. Kind of a crazy idea but we decided to really go for it and see what would happen.

April: John moves to Tucson and begins collecting signatures and we later join him on May 26th. That was quite the move. We had the moving truck, John's truck and my van so full that I literally had no where to put my purse. This is not an exaggeration, my van had every nook and cranny taken. We made it though and got settled in with a few more dings on our furniture than previous moves. Thanks you movers...

Summer of 2010: In the blazing heat, we all go tracting door to door to hand out fliers and talk to people about John as a candidate. Lesley, Benjamin, Alan, and Angela all pitched in on the door to door and Lindsey, Lesley and Angela made a million phone calls. John worked full time on it nearly every day. It was amazing to see him out in 110 degrees with a suit jacket on. We all put in a big effort and felt that we had done all we could.

August 7th: Madison gets baptized. Angela, Alice and her family and Grandma and Grandpa come in from out of town and Nana and Papa and Lesley and her family are also in attendance. It was a great day and Madison looked beautiful!

Aug 14th: My mom came down to Tucson to watch my kids for over a week (who were starting school the next week) while we flew to Florida and set sail for the big Holman Cruise 2010! All of John's siblings and spouses surprised his mom for her 60th birthday. We had planned it a year before and had to keep it under wraps that whole time! We all met in Florida where we surprised her at dinner and announced the cruise to the western carribean. It was a great week and tons of fun. Thanks mom for babysitting and thanks Holmans for such a wonderful memory. We arrived home on Monday and went to the polls the next day.

August 24th: The big election day. We went to the booths and cast our vote and awaited the results. When they came in that night, we saw soon that it was a landslide and not in our favor. In the end John got about 25% of the votes and Keith Bee got the rest. Some have said that wasn't bad for the first time of throwing your hat in the ring. To us it felt like a big loss. I would have thought that the vote would reflect our efforts at least a little more but alas it is politics and it didn't happen for us. All in all I think it was a great experience and would never wish that we hadn't done it. How often do people try for something big in their lifetime? At least we tried.

the rest of the year: Once again we tried to figure out a different career for John. Nothing ever jumped out at us and ultimately he started applying for attorney positions. Because there wasn't a lot out there and we wanted to stay in Tucson, nothing came too quickly. In the end he took a job as an elevator operator at a constuction sight the beginning of December. It was a blessing because it was income. He worked a lot of overtime and was gone for 14 hrs every day.

Jan 2011: John worked 265 hours this month and more than made up for being home with us for so long. We missed him but were glad for the work.

Feb: John's position ended at the construction site (at this point, he was more of a safety guy than an elevator operator) and that afternoon he had an interview with the Santa Cruz County Attorney's office. The next day I enrolled in and started Real Estate school. Finally I was doing something I had wanted to do for about 7 yrs and had put off for various reasons.

March: John ended up getting the job as a prosecutor in Nogales and he started the end of Feb. I finished school just before he started. I took my exam and passed! Yay! and will be working with some friends here in Tucson on their Real Estate team. I am so happy to be doing it, I have loved house hunting ever since I did it for the first time in Bisbee in 2004. Maybe now if I can house hunt for other people we won't be moving so often. :) John works 4 10's so he has Fridays off which gives me another day to go and work in Real Estate. John has a long commute but is able to carpool and really likes the office and people at his job. I personally will be so happy to have real health insurance (something without a $7500 deductible) since we haven't had that since summer 2005. Also, it means we can get a loan for a house so you know what that means.

So there you have it, just a quick overall synopsis of 2010 without all the cute sayings or pictures of my 4 adorable kids. I have a great family and a great life. Maybe now that I've forced myself to start again, I can begin posting things like birthdays and holidays and start back up a record of our lives.

El Tour de Tucson

I'm starting to think my husband can do any kind of double dare physical challenge. First he does a half ironman (did I forget to post about that?) which consisted of a 1.2 mile swim (in open, really cold water), 56 mile bike ride, and he finished it off with a 13 mile run. And just this past weekend he did the 108 mile El Tour de Tucson bike ride.

I suppose the fact that he rode 108 miles on his bike was not the real accomplishment of the weekend. What was even more amazing was that he actually found AND bought a pair of bike shorts! Way to go John!

Seriously though I think he's pretty amazing.



This is John and my brother-in-law Rob who also participated.

A little food for thought

Since I'm apparently incabable of blogging about our lives, I thought I would share this video that I saw on a friend's blog. Enjoy

I'm so excited!!

I can hardly contain my excitement, I just discovered this morning that we now have a Show Low Craigslist! We've been requesting one for years and we finally have it!

http://showlow.craigslist.org/

It really is time

Ok, it's time for another post. I can't locate my cord to download pictures so it's going to have be picture free but I have too much to update. My attempt at documenting our life (I don't scrapbook or write in a journal) through this blog is failing miserably. So here's just a quick summary so that I'll have some memory of this crazy time.

1) We bought our house and have officially moved in. Buying this house has consisted of a whole lot things.

a) big estate sale to empty the house so that we could move in. We did the sale one Thurs, Fri & Sat and it was amazingly successful. Thursday morning we ended up with a constant crowd of people until about noon. We probably had a least 10 people there at a time the entire morning. By the end of the weekend we had sold almost all the stuff. We finally had stuff that people up here were interested in. Kid stuff doesn't do to well up here. We ended up with 2 bedroom sets left and a washer and dryer which we put in an auction that will happen the end of this month. That was a little bit of a pain but my dad came in and saved the day and has taken many loads out to the auction. Thanks Dad!

b) we wimped out and hired someone to paint the entire house. In the end we ended up with 6 different colors (purple in the girls room, tan in the the master and boys room, darker tan in great room, blue in kids bathroom, and lime green - yes lime green in the master bathroom and laundry room, plus the pretty white/slightly cream for the trim. I love all the colors and am so happy that we have it all done. John also managed to rip out the weird fake fireplace before the painter came and luckily so because he did a great job fixing the wall.

c) once the painter was finished we were going to have the tile done but it got delayed because it was on back order so we decided to just move in. Moving week was a little overwhelming but thanks to my 2 sisters it was doable.

d) we moved in and set to work trying to organize. Eventually we got our tile installed and then found out our carpet was also on back order. (I guess the annoyance was balanced by the fact that it confirmed that I had chosen a good tile and carpet and was getting a good price - apparently a lot of people were choosing the same thing).

e) Angela persisted on getting me to tackle the garage so with Alice's help for a couple of days we cleared it out, tucked a lot things away and prepared for our second yard sale. From our move we personally had a lot of things to sell. We held the second one and once again had a lot of traffic. Probably not as much as the first but we still got rid of a lot of stuff. It made me realize that we unknowingly picked a really good weekend to do the first big sale.

f) The entire house has vaulted ceilings (except the bathrooms and laundry room) including the 2ND and 3rd bedrooms and sometime in all of this it was thrown out there that we should build a loft in the girls bedroom. The more John looked into it the more it became a reality. Before I knew it he'd built it and we were able to have the carpet installers even install carpet up there. I have to say John has done some cool things since I've known him but to me this was one of the most impressive. I love it, everything about it. And I'm so impressed that he went from talk to almost finished in a month. I think the kids are going to absolutely love it and it looks so cool! They still have an 8 foot ceiling but it has an opening on the far end of the room. You don't even see the loft when you walk in. Anyway, I can't think of a better way to have added a playroom to this house. Way to go John!

g) This week we finally got our carpet in and let me tell you I love it! I was worried at first that I didn't like the color but the last 2 days I have fallen in love with it.

h) I forgot to say that somewhere in the last month I also went through the house and installed all new door handles and I LOVE them! I think it makes such a huge difference.

We still have a lot to do for the house (baseboards, yard, kitchen counter, etc) but it's coming and we're having small and big victories every week. I really like the layout of the house and am very happy overall with the house itself. The back porch is so great to go sit on especially during a rainstorm. It's nice to be close to the park and the store and we seem to have really great neighbors. In fact this week we had a neighbor come over and invite us to a neighborhood BBQ this Sunday at her house. Fun stuff.

Angela and Alice and my parents get a gold star for all the help they have given me. Alice watched my kids on numerous occasions and her and my mom were a huge help with the first yard sale. They came every day and worked the outside garage stuff while I worked the inside bigger stuff. They were fabulous! Angela devote all her time off this summer to me. It was amazing, she taught summer school and then came and lived with us for basically a month. She changed so many diapers that John started calling her our diaper Sherpa. She basically stepped in and did anything from cleaning the garage to changing diapers to babysitting so John and I could go out to getting up in the night with Collin to putting all the outlet covers back on. Needless to say I miss her greatly and tried everything I could to get her to just move in as a full time nanny/friend. And if anyone is wondering if John was OK with all this, he was. It was a big help to him and he and Angela get along great and well he's just a really good sport about a lot of things.

In the end I probably could spend my whole life trying to say thank you to my family and still never feel like I expressed it enough. It really meant a lot to me and to be completely honest there is literally no way I could have survived it all without them. Seriously, I'm already barely surviving and adding a move to that would have put me over the edge.

In other news, the kids started school this week. Oddly enough we're not entirely sure who Bridgett's Kindergarten teacher will be, it's been a little bit crazy but she's attending and loves her teacher. We're keeping our fingers crossed that she'll be able to stay in her class. She has afternoon Kindergarten and so far has 8 kids in the class. Pretty crazy. Madison started 2ND grade and was thrilled to get the same teacher Hannah had last year and was very happy to have her friend from Kindergarten back in class with her. I'm adjusting to being on a schedule again and hoping to one day have my house clean...

Miracles do happen

Well, it's official. We are finally buying a house. It's only been a short 2 years and we have found the home of our dreams. OK it's not really our dream home but a while ago we decided that we needed to find one of two options.

1. A house we love with a mortgage we like.
2. A mortgage we love and a house that we like.

So ultimately we found the house that we liked with the mortgage that we loved. Here are the specs.

1530 square feet
3 bedroom 2 bathroom
the tiniest 2 car garage you can find
decent back yard

The cool thing is that it's full of furniture so we get to have a fun yard sale and we have even acquired a 42' plasma TV and some nice patio furniture.

So overall we are excited, mostly to be done looking and to finally have our own house. Yay for us!