Far too long

Once again I see that it's been about a year since I've done a blog post.  And, boy, has it been an eventful year for us!  When I last posted we were living in a two bedroom apartment, yep ALL 6 of us, two tiny bedrooms, while we waited for our house to be built in Polk City.  We moved into our house at the end of October last year ~ not a minute too soon as the walls of that two bedroom apartment had started to feel like they were closing in on us!  Looking back it was really good for about 3 months, but that last month was a doozy!  Alas, we all survived apartment living and were ever so grateful to be in our new home.

The kids started school in our new district at the beginning of last year and quickly got into the swing of things in their classrooms, making new friends, learning, and comparing things to how they were done in their 'old' school.  We survived the first school year in the new district without any problems and the kids declared the move a success.  Phew!

As for the new house, we love it!  I remember telling Cory after the first couple of months that I'd like to move into a new house every few years because they are so easy to keep clean!  When you start off clean, it's easier to keep clean...by now, however, this new house is a dirty as our other houses!  The kids all enjoy having their own room and have adjusted to having us downstairs instead of upstairs with them.  Even after almost a year, Elyse is still territorial about her bathroom only allowing the boys to have access to it on occasion.  When we started thinking about the design of our home, it seemed like a great idea to have our only girl have her own bathroom and to have the three boys share one bathroom.  Now, after a year of living here, I'm beginning to question that as I sometimes need a gas mask to go into the boys' bathroom upstairs!  EWWW!  Beginning this month, they have earned the right to clean it themselves WITH regular check ups by Mom and Dad.  Too much trust on our part, didn't turn out to be the best idea when it came to ensuring that their bathroom actually got clean.

We are really enjoying being part of small town living as well.  It was a bit of an adjustment at first to not having a grocery store in town and on more than one occasion, we've been unable to cook or bake something because we didn't have one ingredient on hand and Casey's here in town didn't carry the missing ingredient.  It does take us a bit longer to get to our same old familiar spots in Ankeny like church and friends houses so we're late a little more often than usual, but I'm still blaming it on the 'new' additional travel time. :)  I'm pretty sure now that it's been almost a year, that excuse has run it's course!  But, until someone calls me out on it...I'm still using it...