18 & 19 Months - Evil Coopy?

He isn't totally evil.. he is an angel most of the time. But he does have his moments.



So the past few months have been a blur and with selling our house I didn't do a good job of keeping up on the blog. So 18 & 19 Month milestones are getting lumped together. Not to sound like a downer, but I think we started to see a glimpse of 'evil coopy'.. HA. By that I mean he has been starting to show signs of the terrible 'two's'. At times he is sweet as can be, and then in the flip of switch he is a wholly terror. Oh the joys of todderhood. We are on the course to a whole new adventure with this. Here are a few things that I remember:

1. His personality is in full bloom. And he is quite the character. Silly & Goofy. Inquisitive - He wants to know how things works and he'll take it apart to figure it out. He is very determined. And he is stubborn as can be. Hmm.. I wonder where he gets that from??

2. He started feed himself with a spoon and fork more. Gettting more cordination. Sometimes the spoon goes in upside down and the food doesn't quite make it to his mouth, but he is working on it.

3. We finally dropped the baby foods. But is one picky eater.. I guess that is just pay back for Joe and I being such picky eaters. He loves his fruits, snacks & cookies. And he is really starting to take meats much better. But vegetables, well that is a whole other story.

4. He has been a little more agressive lately, hopefully this translates into his athletic skills.. and doesn't continue to hit.. and bite. HA! No but seriously he has been hitting a lot lately and biting occasionally. So we are working on 'breaking' these things. We have to get these 'nipped in the bud'. I swear.

5. Testing --- Testing, testing, testing.. he is doing that constantly. What a little turd. This stage is definetly challenging. But that's ok.. bring it on. We can handle it. I'll admit though it soo hard to not laugh sometimes, because he can just be soo dang cute. The worst is when he does something bad, and then comes right up into your face to see if you stay serious or 'crack'... Ughh... he is something else.



Cooper is blowing a kiss here.. sometimes the kiss doesn't actuallly leave his mouth.. HA!

Cooper & Santa.. not so much.

So in the previous post I didn't really comment on how Cooper is dealing with the move. Well this picture is a good description. Ha ha.. just kidding. Cooper is adjusting really well to the move. The first morning he woke up in his new room, he kept pacing around his crib. He couldn't figure out where in the heck he was.. poor thing.

Anyway back to the point of this post. We visited Santa last weekend. We thought it probably wouldn't go over so well. Recently Cooper has been afraid of strangers. Even though for days I was 'playing up' the visiting Santa thing. It didn't matter as soon as we got there, he totally flipped out. He just wasn't having it.

I'm sure he'll laugh at this picture some day.

Bye, Bye... Our First Little House

Well I haven't had any entries so far this month and its because our lives have been somewhat hectic. That might be a complete understatement. Life has been totally insane. Within a month we got a offer on our house, made repairs, jumped through 'five million hoops', packed up... pack some more and had a totally nightmare of a moving experience this past weekend. I recall it as "MOVING- the story from hell". Well maybe nightmare & hell are a bit dramatic. But I'm telling you.. it was one 'hell of' a weekend to say the least. I know people had been telling me that "moving really sucks" "its way harder than you think" "you have a lot more stuff than you probably think".. and when I first heard all of these comments, I was like yeah, yeah... we'll be ok. Ummmm... yeah right!!! It was hard and very stressful, but we DID IT.. and only because someone 'up there' was watching over us. And through each diseaster that came up this past weekend, somehow things kept working out.. and somehow each time something bad or unexpected came up, it would manage to get fixed or when we needed more help, people would show up.. or when things seemed awful and unfixable, then something good would 'fall into place'.

I don't usually write about 'Non-Cooper' stuff, but I think occasionally I will. This is one experience that I don't want to forget. Even though in the heat of the experience, its was sooo 'not funny'.. I guess eventually when we look back or maybe when you read this, its soo ridiculous that its pretty comical.

I'm not really even sure where to start, but lets start with Friday, since that was the beginnning of it all….

FRIDAY

We knew selling our house would require some repairs, but they sure turned out to be quite the headache. We had to put on a new roof. Which that really sucked... but thankfully we shopped around and ended up finding a place that was a 'friend of a friends'. We even got a free upgrade on the architextural shingles. Our buyer has no idea how nice of people that we are : ) ... So anyway the last stupid repair was a spring on the window. Sure, that can't be too hard.. YEAH RIGHT. We were going to kill ourselves in order to not have to get a whole new dang window. Which by the way worked perfectly fine. It just wouldn't stay up beyond a certain point. 'Big deal, open one of the other 4 windows in that room, Ughh.. I could have killed our buyer at this point." Anyway so we about went insane figuring out how to get the window repair without totally replacing it. After a few people looking at it and no luck.. I finally found a little window shop off of PAIGE AVE (no where near our house or 'side of town'). Well of course I didn't find this until Friday (keep in mind we were closing on Monday). So my entire Friday afternoon.. that was meant to be used for packing and preparing for the 'move day' on saturday, was used driving all the way out to 'yee haw'... arriving 5 minutes before they closed.. to buy a stupid little metal spring for our window.. that no one else carries.. a window that the company doesn't even manufactor windows anymore. Anyway.. thankfully I found the part, just in time and our roofer/contractor was able to install it. He about sliced his hand off.. but he got the part in and the window operating again. So that was the main shinanigans.. then the rest of the evening was spent packing. Thankfully I had some good friends come over to help. I was already dilerious and tired and overwhelmed. But we got a ton of stuff packed... even though it appeared like we barely made a dent. Joe took several loads of boxes to his Mom's and great uncle's basement. I seriously can't believe how much stuff we really have. We packed and moved boxes.. and more and more stuff is still there. Its crazy!

SATURDAY - 'MOVE DAY'

So Saturday was really the big day. Our original goal was to load everything into the Uhaul that we rented, take it to our storage facility.. and maybe some items to Joe's great uncle's and his moms. And be done. Just come back late that night and clean... and finish up. Well... HA! That is soo not how the story played out.... in a nut shell our stuff wouldn't all fit in the Uhaul truck, moving turned into a Sat, Sun & Mon excursion, it rained and snowed throughout the weekend, at one point the Uhaul wouldn't start, we barely made it to our closing (we basically ran into it - late, unshowered and dishelved), and we still had more stuff to go back and move out after the closing.. so by 5:30 pm Monday (after our 1pm closing), we were FINALLY moved out and it was over... good bye little house. See the notes below where I outlined in a 'nut shell' the things that went wrong and the lessons that we learned...

We learned some valuable lessons that is for sure.

1. Ask lots of people to help - the more the merrier.

We so did not have enough people. We had 6 total including us. And don't get me wrong our friends and family that were there, we absolute life savers. But it just wasn't enough people for the amount of crap that we have.

2. Make sure you rent the right size U-haul truck.

We rented a 20 ft. truck and according to the U haul's website that should be sufficient for a small 3 bedroom house.. Ummm... not so much. Our first major catastrophie Saturday was as we were loading the truck it was more than obvious that our stuff wasn't all going to fit in that truck. Not in one trip, that was for sure! But the funny part... is two days later when we returned the truck it turns out that the idiots we rented it from didn't give us the right size truck. The WHOLE time we had a 17 ft truck. Yeah seriously, when Joe went to pick up the truck they switched the keys with another lady picking up her truck. Which brings me to the next lesson....

3. Don't rent your U-haul from some 'Po-dunk Hole in the wall Hardware Store'

We used a storage facility in Arnold, about 10-15 minutes from our house. Well they didn't offer the size U-haul truck that we needed, but they said they would arrange for us to get a truck from a nearby hardware store. Sure, no problem... that sounds legit, right??? Ummm, no not really. Stupid me for not going and scoping the place out first. Turns out its was a total 'Hole in the wall', which is fine I'm sure they are good at selling people random tools and crap, but not for renting a Uhaul. The truck was a piece of crap. It ended up leaking some water into the truck bed after it rained, thankfully at that point the truck was empty. Then Monday morning as we were taking our last load.. Yes, Monday morning and our closing was that afternoon at 1pm. The truck wouldn't start. We totally freaked out! We lost about 2 hours, that we didn't have to lose. Which in turn is why we still had to go move stuff after the closing. Luckily the Uhaul mechanic came out and was able to fix it fairly easily. Thank God, I can't even imagine what we would have had to do if the truck wouldn't start up again... YIKES! So anyway we didn't figure out the truck was the wrong size until Monday after it broke down.. and we were returning it. I was handed an invoice with someone else's name of it. WHAT?!?! They mixed everything up, another lady, named Debbie also picked up a truck on Sat. Well she was given the wrong keys.. the keys to our 20 ft. truck. What a mess... the guy worked there was a hot mess, with half of his teeth missing. And I told him "look we can't wait around for you to FIGURE this out, we close on our house at 1pm, and thanks to you giving us the wrong SIZE truck, we still have crap in our house... Ughhhh! Joe and I were soo tired and delirious, we just couldn't believe it.. I mean seriously.

4. Pack in advance, as much as you can. More than you think that you should. Because when you move, your crap multiplies..no joke.

Well not to make excuses, but this was a little bit tricky for us. We should have had way more done in advance. But to our credit we were scared to. Our buyer backed out once.. and that scared the crap out of us. Guess he had 'cold feet', with his job situation, finances.. whatever. But we wanted to wait until his loan approval, to make sure things were more 'for sure'. And that was the Wed, before our closing date. But that just wasn't enough time. Next time we have to have WAY more packed. And the furniture HAS to disassembled and covered more in advance. But I just didn't realize how much time that would really take. And my estimate was really, really off. Oh well, lesson learned.

5. And last but not least, number 5 in lessons learned... how approiate that is 'our number'... long story.. lots of funny weird little things throughout our entire dating and marriage revolve around the number '5'.. and strangely enough we sell our first house.. '2725' ... after living their for 5 years (our first 5 years of marriage), the sale price had a 5 in it, the payoff check had a 5 in it AND we closed on the house on Dec. 5. Hmmm... 'do do do do' ..

So in conclusion.... to save our sanity... and our marriage. Maybe we'll do lesson number 5 next time, which is ....

just hire a freakin' mover... HA!

(well probably not since our stuff is scattered at three different locations.. but at least we have a better idea of what to expect.. and maybe NEXT time things will go a little bit smoother....

Checkout our picture from the closing. Our agent is so fun.. she insisted we take this photo. And I'm so glad that she did. This was one experience that we won't forget.



Yeah we look totally rough... HA!

Now.... onto the next adventure... the next chapter.