Moving On

  So it has been quite some time since I last posted.  We continue to have so much going on! In the past month we have moved out of our house, enjoyed a visit from Auntie Mel and Abigail, gone to Athens to watch Auntie Em graduate from the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!), and spent a week in Florida.  I think that things will calm down a bit for a little while though.

Our First Home

We moved out of our house the last weekend of April.  Shout out to Chris Shaver and Andrew Barnes for helping us move.  I promise that my husband will return the favor when needed.  It was sad to say goodbye to the home that Eric and I shared for over five years.  We bought the house a month before our wedding and brought both of our babies home to that house.  Turning out the lights and closing the door one last time was more difficult than I thought it would be.  Hopefully we are moving on to bigger and better though! For now, we are still living at my parents’ house.  Even though their house is quite large, it still feels a little cramped and we are anxious to have our own space.  I always thought that it would be easy to find something once we sold ours, but that has not been the case.  I have looked at about a dozen houses and spent countless hours on GeorgiaMLS.com with no luck.  I still think that I am stuck on that first house that we lost.  We had given ourselves until June 1^st to find something before we look in to building.  So I am meeting with a builder this Friday.  I am still skeptical about building.  We were definitely hoping to get a “deal”, but we also want to be happy with such a big purchase.  I guess that it is a gamble either way.  If we simply wait for something to come on the market, then we are taking a gamble, because what if it is many months before we find something we are really happy with.  If we build we are gambling in that we are assuming nothing will come on the market.  Hopefully we can find a lot, a floorplan, and a price that we like!  We have been praying for 2 years that God would lead us to the right house for us, so we are trusting that he will!

Leah is growing like a weed.  She is definitely a kid and no longer a baby.  I miss her as a baby, but it is fun to see her growing up before my eyes.  She is full of personality and spunk!  She is talking like crazy and repeats everything.  We really have to be careful what we say around her.  The other day she dropped something and said, “oh crap!” She loves to play and is Miss Independent.  We built a fort today and she told me, “Mommy, get out of here!” She definitely has her two-year old tantrums from time to time (mostly triggered by me not understanding what she is trying to communicate to me), but she is a sweet kid.  She always says, “I love you so much!” and at night she says, “I wanna snuggle Mommy”.  It just melts my heart.  There are so many moments that I just want to capture and remember forever!  I keep a journal for each of the girls to tell them what sorts of things they are doing and basically just tell them how in love with them I am.  But it makes me so sad to think that I am probably going to forget some of these things that I love about them at each stage.  Leah is currently in pacifier detox, but she is recovering quite nicely.  I had hoped to be rid of the pacifier long ago, but with all the changes that have happened since Peyton was born, I just let her keep it.  She only had it at naptime and nighttime, but I thought that it was time for her to say goodbye.  So we just went cold turkey.  I told her she was a big girl now and she threw it in the trash and said, “bye, bye binky”.  That was pretty much the end of it.  She had one meltdown, but hasn’t really even asked for it in about 5 days now.  Peyton will be rid of her binky by 15 months.

Peyton is a happy little eight-month old.  She has two teeth and is getting in to everything! It is a combination of rolling and army crawling at the moment, but she has been trying to crawl and stand on her own.  She says “Dada”, “Mama”, “Nana”, and I swear she said “Leah” the other day! We had a slight setback when we took her to the eye doctor a few weeks ago.  From an anatomical standpoint, her eye looks perfect.  The implant lens took well and her eye is completely healed.  But her brain is still reverting to her right eye and not really wanting to use that left eye.  We increased patch time to all day every other day.  Hopefully this will help.  I guess that we just have to keep fighting the fight! She really hates the patch, but she has been tolerating it better lately (Not fussing so much when wearing it).  Unfortunately, she is starting to figure out how to take it off.  This could get expensive.  On top of that, her eye is wandering, so an additional surgery might be in her near future.   Whenever I take Peyton anywhere, literally everyone looks at her.  Some people point and even say things out loud.  I really should just hold up a sign that says, “My baby wears glasses!!”  I also have had several people ask me if her glasses are prescription.  As if I am going to torture my child by forcing her to wear glasses that are not necessary.  These are some of the frustrations that we face, but in a way I guess I can’t blame people.  I would probably look too if I saw an adorable baby wearing glasses.  The good thing is that by the time she is able to notice people looking at her, they probably won’t be because it won’t be that abnormal for her to be wearing glasses at that point.

So that is the update on the Shaver Family.  Hopefully it won’t be another month and half before I post again! 

The Girls Enjoying the Beach!