El Paso pics again!

OK, here are some more. These are some that we took when we were driving along Rim Road on Saturday (this most recent Saturday). Rim Road goes from downtown by Las Palmas Hospital, through a very affluent neighborhood, and up the mountains. There are a couple parks along there, and that's where we took these pictures.

Erin trying to look for our house. Good luck, kid!


All of us, with downtown El Paso and Juarez, Mexico behind us:


These two are too cute. I can't NOT post this. Poster boys for Baby Bjorn carriers (and cool shoes! Converse All Stars for dad, Robeez with electric guitars for son.)


See the writing on the mountain? That's Juarez, Mexico over there. Loosely translated into English, the writing says, "Read the Bible, Juarez."


Here are Thak and the kids at the obelisk marking the southernmost tip of the Franklin range of the Rocky Mountains.


A city this big makes anyone feel small from up there. That's not even 1/10 of it.


The next day, it was more unpacking boxes... Shocker, right?!

Orren wanted to help dad.


And a totally unnecessary pic of Thak and Orren, but since Orren almost looks like me in this one, I'm showing it anyhow! ;)

El Paso pics!

Finally, I got around to it. Here are the pictures from our first week in El Paso.

First off, here's Erin outside the Ft. Bliss housing office. No, we do not live on post, but we went to the housing office to use the computers to find off post listings, through which we found our house, so it worked great! This was last Monday, the first weekday we were in town.


And later that afternoon...... drumroll please....... WE GOT OUR FABULOUS HOUSE!!!

Here it is! (Yes, I'm aware this first pic is horrible. I took it late in the day, so the sun was directly to my right, and made it way too light on that side, but you get the idea. Cute terraced lawn, two car garage, court yard, etc...)

The outside:

Inside the courtyard:

The living room:

Dining room, which we use as an office/sewing room:

Eat-in part of the kitchen, which we do, in fact, eat in:

The kitchen, and by far the most functional one I have ever had!


The master bathroom! Check out the shower! It's so cool. The tub is basically like a pit. It has steps down into it, and it's all tile. It's big, too, way bigger than it looks!

Yes, the sink area is in a separate room from the shower/toilet area. The door to the left is the closet, which is HUGE, by the way.


The bedrooms just look like any other bedrooms you've ever seen, except that the windows are huge, and our ceiling has some cool little detailing of it, not unlike our master bedroom ceiling in Georgia.

Here's the really cool part! The big back yard which is entirely enclosed by a stone wall! It's so nice to be able to let Erin and Frank out, and not have to worry about them being in the next county if I look away for a second. Stone walls in backyards. The rest of the country should take note because El Paso got this one right.

Oh yeah, and we have a huge covered patio, which is AWESOME!


The one I took of the other side of the yard didn't come out well because the sun was so bright, but the right side of the yard looks a lot like the left, in that we have another raised area, and it's still sandy, but with grass roots which will grow in again as soon as we begin watering it. What's cool about the other side is that you can see the mountains from that direction. Literally, you want to see the Franklin Mountains? Open the back door of our house, and look to your right. There they are. Awesome.

That's our house! We love it!

Two sick kids... and some pics

Well, apparently I spoke too soon about all being well with Orren. All is not well. He seems to have caught what Erin had. He vomited before bedtime, then he has only slept on and off, which is what she did last night. Now he has diarrhea, and is just not feeling well, and currently is screaming while Thak attempts to rock him to sleep in his room. There's nothing more for me to do at this point, so I figured, I'm up anyhow, so blog. This night won't be an easy one. I figure we'll be taking turns with Orren and Erin, who's still pretty achy and whiny, for the rest of the night. Erin was going to start school tomorrow, but with her being so sick today, there's no way. She'll start Tuesday if we're lucky and she gets better the rest of the way. She can keep food down now, so it's hopeful. Orren is (KNOCK ON WOOD) keeping things down just fine at the moment, but he's really uncomfortable. We'll see what tomorrow brings. It doesn't look good.

At least this is happening now that we have our house, and Thak is home rather than deployed. Dealing with sick kids alone sucks. I know better than I want to. I don't want to know what it's like to deal with sick kids while living in a hotel. Thankfully, I don't have to find that out at this time.

Anyhow, I'm up, so why not have a few pics.

The move:
First off, Thak securing the car to the trailer in preparation for the big move. Also, a picture of our house in Georgia for those who hadn't seen it:

Now we have a pic of the crock pot on the floor of the truck. Yes, I really did ride to Texas sitting cross legged, cooking dinner at my feet as we went. It worked pretty well.


Next, here's Erin being silly in Mississippi:


Erin and Orren hanging out in our hotel room in Louisiana after a LOOOONG day on the road. We got Orren that John Deere onesie at Cracker Barrel in Oxford, AL. We actually got him two. Green really is his color!


The next day, we arrived in TEXAS!!! We were practically bouncing off the walls when we stopped at the Texas Welcome Center!



Then as we drove across Texas, we made our way through the beautiful Hill Country, the cities of Dallas, Ft. Worth, Midland, Odessa, and every tiny town in between. We saw wind turbines and oil wells side by side. As we passed Odessa, the terrain got more and more desolate, and the oil wells got bigger and bigger. For a while, there were oil fields as far as we could see. West Texas goes like this:

Wind turbines, oil fields, open range, the most desolate desert you ever saw, and wind. The wind here is insane.

Look behind her. You may be able to see the wind turbines. (Click the pic to see it bigger, and you can see several of them!) This was in Sweetwater, TX, the wind energy capital of the US.


Here we are east of Odessa. There is one oil well in the background, and if you look close, you will see a big refinery on the horizon. Good old American oil! We need more of that and less of this foreign crap we buy so much of! Also, you can tell in this one how hard the wind was blowing.


And that's all for now. I have a ton of pics of El Paso, and of our house here, but they're all still on the camera, and I'm not uploading them right now. This is a little bit of our trip out here. It was an experience, but 4 days on the road with 2 kids and 2 animals is not something I want to repeat anytime soon!!

Oh, and we have just figured out what is wrong with Orren. He appears to be teething. Yes, at 3 months old, he appears to be cutting his first tooth. We can feel it below his gumline, and this homeopathic teething gel we have on hand seemed to help the situation a little when nothing else did. He's having a really hard time with it. For now, he has gone to sleep on Thak (he is such a daddy's boy!!) I'd take a picture for you since it is pretty adorable, but the flash would wake him up, and I think Thak might kill me if I did that! So that's it for tonight. I think we may see if this boy will go to bed, and then try to get a wink or two of sleep ourselves.

We're back in business!

We have been in El Paso for a week and a day, and have internet again as of a couple hours ago. There is so much to update it's not even funny, and we have tons of pictures to post, but I don't really feel like doing it right now, so it'll wait until tomorrow.

We've been busy. We had 250+ tagged items come off the moving truck, and each one of them had to be put into its proper place. A good 120 of those items were boxes that had to be unpacked, and we've gotten all but about 10 of them done and over with as of now. Thak has done most of the unpacking. I have tried to stay on top of the laundry and dishes. Our dishwasher doesn't work, so we're back to doing them by hand for the time being, but it's not so bad since it's temporary.

Erin was sick today, and we spent much of the day cleaning and sanitizing the house, including steam cleaning the couch cushions where she vomited, and most importantly, keeping Orren as far away from all that as possible. We still don't have a pediatrician here yet, and if he got sick, we'd end up having to take him to the ER, and that would suck for everyone involved, so the best medicine is "don't get sick". We've been cleaning, and disinfecting, and keeping his distance from her, and so far, knock on every woodlike entity in sight, it's worked. Oh, and by the way, the Target brand disinfecting wipes are better than the Clorox ones, and way cheaper. Just a good money saving tip there.

But anyhow, we love it in El Paso. The people are the nicest we've ever met, the food is outstanding, Ft. Bliss is beautiful, probably the nicest post either of us has ever seen, far less set foot on, and other than one run-in with a purely idiotic military wife who was hell bent on telling us how bad this place sucks, we've been pretty damn charmed ever since we crossed the state line.

TEXAS, MY SECOND HOME!!! WE ARE BACK, AND IT IS AWESOME!!!

T-3 Days

Our stuff is gone. The movers came and packed it all up, then took it away. We're sitting here in our empty house, sleeping on air mattresses like refugees, and basically just biding our time until we're out of here in about 72 hours.

Erin's been playing with her friends across the street a lot. All her toys are gone, so it's best for her, and also they'll miss each other after we move, so we're letting Erin play as much as possible while we're still here.

The other big adjustment is that Tink no longer has anywhere to hide, and is not quite loving this big open house where Frank can chase her all over the place with nothing stopping him. She also is no longer allowed to sleep with Erin since her claws could easily puncture Erin's air mattress, and we get little enough sleep around here. The last thing we want is to do an emergency air mattress repair at 3 am, so no cat for Erin at night anymore. Her CD player is also gone, so no more Hannah Montana CD at bedtime either.

Oh well... It's only for a few more days. Later today, I get the lovely experience of washing diapers in a public laundromat. This could prove interesting, but it's got to get done.

We're pretty much ready!

Well, we're as ready as we're going to be. We've got most of the stuff we're taking with us consolidated into the closet of our office/sewing room, and most of the laundry is done. Thak and I don't plan on getting much sleep tonight since we'll be up doing the last of this laundry for at least the next couple hours. There will, of course, be no catnaps with Orren after Erin's at school in the morning either. The movers arrive at 9. We'll be tying up loose ends until they get here, disconnecting appliances, and all that other stuff.

What I do know is that tomorrow is going to be hard. Orren's stuff is all packed into the closet so that the movers don't take it, so we'll be doing tomorrow without his bassinet, without his play mat, without really much of any of his stuff that we use all the time. I don't know how we're going to do this, but I'm sure we'll find a way.

At some point tomorrow, I also have to go up to Erin's school and talk to the office people about getting her records ready for when we disenroll her next Tuesday.

Friday, as in day after tomorrow (well, technically tomorrow since it's after midnight already) the movers are coming back to take all our stuff away and drive it to El Paso, where it will go into storage until we call and schedule delivery to our new house which we don't have yet.

The weekend, we'll be spending trying to occupy the kids despite all our stuff being gone. We'll probably spend Saturday at the Irish children's festival in Savannah, and Sunday, maybe we'll head out to Tybee Island just to see the Atlantic Ocean one last time before we go.

Monday is going to be hectic as well. We may just keep Erin out of school that day. Early in the morning, the carpet cleaners are coming, and not long after that, we have to go to Savannah for my very LAST appointment at the birth center. While we're up there, we'll head to Chatham County Public Records, and get Orren's birth certificate.

Tuesday, we'll be cleaning the house from top to bottom to get ready for our move out inspection, which will take place Wednesday morning at 9. Also on Tuesday, we'll pick up our trailer from U-Haul, load the car onto it, and get our initial weight tickets. Then we'll come back here, load up all our stuff in the car and truck, and weigh it full to get our final weight tickets to turn into the transportation office at Ft. Bliss for our partial DITY move.

As soon as the move out inspection is done, on Wednesday morning, we'll be on the road, and hopefully will arrive safely in Jackson, MS where we'll spend the night. Thursday, we'll arrive in Dallas, and by next Friday, we ought to be in El Paso. With luck, we'll have a house by Monday, but who knows.

We'll be busy for the next week or so, but we can still be reached on both our cells. We're not going to change our numbers until we're absolutely done with everything from here (as in, we've received all our deposits back, gotten every payment for the move, and all that) so we'll probably have our Georgia phone numbers for at least a month after we arrive. When we do change our numbers, we'll text everyone with the new ones.

Last day!

Thak might still be at the Change of Command ceremony for his Company Commander, but after he's done there (which he may or may not already be) then he's heading on over to final out. He has to turn in his clearing papers, and get his bulldog stamp, and then he's good to go. Tomorrow, he'll sign out on leave, but as of maybe right now, but definitely sometime this afternoon, he's no longer a member of 3rd Infantry Division, no longer assigned to Ft. Stewart. We're officially in limbo, and will stay like this for 29 days, but hey, it's not bad. It means nobody can bother us, although I'm sure someone from the platoon will find a way anyhow. They always do.

The movers come tomorrow to get our stuff. I still have done absolutely nothing with packing away the things they don't need to take, or with getting all the laundry done, or with putting all our sensitive documents and valuables in the car (that's instruction from the moving company. No valuables in the house while the packing is being done.) I also still have to call a company to come and clean our carpets sometime before next Wednesday. I still have to go get Orren's birth certificate, too.

There's a lot to do, and we're running out of time. I'll just be glad when it's all done and we can get out of here. I'm tired of talking about the move, and ready to just do it and get it over with.