Life in Indiana

The weather has been relatively nice since we arrived here last month.  Which has softened the blow of moving away from our family and friends in Lexington.

We have been spending a lot of time outdoors exploring our neighborhood and playground.  Owen loves that we can ride our bikes around the corner and be at the playground.  He will especially like that this summer we can ride our bikes to the pool.

This is our neighborhood playground (I took these photos over a month ago so it is much more green now)...

 The neighborhood clubhouse and pool - which also has a baby pool...  (Owen asks almost every morning if the pool is open yet).

We have been exploring Indianapolis by making many visits to the Children's Museum...

And Urban Chalkboard, the greatest children's place I have ever been to.  It is a modern cafe for parents and a play place for kids.  There are magazines that interest a young mom like myself (and I specifically am talking about US Weekly and People Magazine), and yes I actually got to read while my kids played happily.  Urban Chalkboard has a studio where they have music class, book club, story hour, etc.  It is so much fun and the boys absolutely LOVE it!!

We have also been exploring the city by bike.  We bought a bike trailer and a couple of new bikes for Brad and I.  It takes us about 10 minutes by bike to get to downtown Carmel from our house.  We ride through a couple of neighborhoods to get on the Monon trail - which runs from downtown Indy straight north through a few different suburbs up to Carmel and even further north beyond Carmel.  This summer we will look forward to riding bikes to breakfast, the farmer's market, and we could even hit up some breweries on the trail if the kids cooperate.  

We stopped along the trail for some coffee and smoothies...

And found a train museum that we had to stop and see...

During our bike ride last weekend the Carmel marathon was going on.  The boys loved being in the middle of all the action and cheering on the runners while listening to music along the way....

Here are some pictures of the Monon trail in Carmel - it is such a beautiful ride, I can't wait to go further on the trail and do some more exploring...

We have been spending a lot of time with our friends from Martinsville....

And spending time with Pop Pop in Martinsville...

Grayson even got to ride...

We have been to Lowe's more times than I can count - the boys don't mind at all...

 We also received a pretty awesome hand-me-down from the Majors family - our new bounce house.  We are actually using this as a ploy to make friends with the neighbors.....

And we have been playing a lot in our nice, big, flat driveway...

The boys have been adjusting well to the move.  It took Owen a few weeks and he still tells me that he does not live in Indiana, he lives in Kentucky.  But finally he is no longer screaming at bedtime or throwing major fits.  He usually chooses one (or 5) of favorite toys and plays in his room for a while before falling asleep.  Whatever works.

We are excited for the weather to warm and to spend more time exploring this new city of ours.

Easter 2015

We had a week long Easter celebration.  It started with Max, Luke and Kristin coming to visit us for a few days.  The boys were on spring break and we are so thankful they decided to spend their week with us.  Owen was waiting at the door for their arrival...

 And when they finally got here this is what happened....

It was wrestle mania for three straight days and everyone was in pure heaven.  The boys had movie nights in the basement...

 And slumber parties in Owen's room each night...

 They went fishing at the pond across the street....

 And we explored the Children's Museum... 

Owen took some guitar lessons from Max...

 Grayson enjoyed reading with Auntie Nene...

And we even got to spend some time with this special lady - our GG....

 We had so much fun and my boys were devastated when it was time to say goodbye.

After Max and Luke left it was time to get ready for the UK game.  UK played Wisconsin in the final four game of March Madness the night before Easter.  Our friend Christian came in town from California and Brian and Lauren came to watch the CATS continue through the tournament with an undefeated record - or so we thought.  The boys were into the games and they cheered for the CATs at home...

While we went out on the town and left them with a new babysitter.

I did not get any pictures from this night but it went like this - we were very excited to see fellow UK fans and cheer for the CATS, we had high expectations that they would win.  Actually none of us really questioned that it was even possible they would lose in the final four.  UK was pretty much down the entire game, and we were watching with a ton of Wisconsin fans (which I really don't understand), whom were loud and obnoxious.  We were pretty disappointed to see them lose - but no one was more displeased than Christian who spent a lot of money to come for the experience.

Anyways, we were out super late and the next morning was Easter.  I knew the boys would be excited that the Easter bunny had come.  So I drug myself out of bed at 6AM after about 4 1/2 hours of sleep to prepare for this special day.

I made myself a strong cup of this...

And I might of even added a bit of this...

Just so I could be up to see these happy faces..

Then the Drapp family came in town and we all went to church...

 We pretty much didn't hear one bit of the homily because we were busy keep up with these busy boys...

Once we got home they were ready for their Easter egg hunt...

Grayson had to see what big brother got...

 And take what big brother got....

 Overall we had a great Easter week and we were all exhausted after everyone left.  Our small family including Christian took a long nap before we said our goodbyes to Christian at the airport.  I hope you all are enjoying this nice spring weather and had a great Easter week just like we did.

We Moved!!

Be prepared people - this is a very long post!

Oh what a crazy month we have had!  We sold our house on February 12th after three weeks on the market.  That may seem like a very short time to some, however those three weeks seemed like an eternity to us.  We were actually expecting it would go a little faster but it was the middle of winter, I don't know what we were thinking.  After the sale of the house, we were so relieved!  We were actually able to focus on getting ourselves packed up for the move and spending time with our favorite people in Kentucky.

First my three best friends in my neighborhood took me to a goodbye dinner.  We spend A LOT of time together.  Our kids go to the same preschool, we see each other several times a week and text non-stop.  If one of us needed something, someone was always available to help.  And these ladies definitely got me through the most insane time of my life thus far.

I wasn't expecting to cry through most of our dinner but I did of course - they made me this precious book of pictures of our kiddos from the time they met until now.  Our kids LOVE each other so much and they will all always be like family to us.

Then we needed to spend as much time with our cousins as possible....

 And we did just that....

We went out one last night with a group of our friends to Pies and Pints.  It was so fun to have an adult night out and I feel so blessed to have been able to spend time with my favorites at one very long and very crowded table.

The boys had a sleepover with Max and Luke that night and Rena babysat.  Kristin and I used to babysit for Rena when she was a baby.  Kristin started watching her when she was 6 months old and when she graduated college I took over so we babysat for her family for over 8 years.  How beautiful is this young lady?!

Outside of all the fun we were having with our friends and family, we had a LOT to get done before our March 6th move date.  We packed up most of the house except the bare necessities the week before the move.  Our garage was filled to the brim!

 This is a tip I learned from Pinterest - and honestly it worked like a charm!  I bagged everyone's hanging clothes and wrote their names on them so we knew where to take them in our new house.  Less boxes wasted and much less time wasted!  Just hang them up when we get there and cut open the bags, voila!

This next portion is a little lengthy but I wanted to remember every last detail because it happened to be a bit dramatic!

Our moving weekend plan was to take the kids to Cincinnati to meet Brad's parents on Thursday morning so that they could keep the boys for the weekend.  Then we would drive back to Lexington, pick up the truck Thursday afternoon and movers were supposed to start helping us at 5:30 AM Friday morning.
All week the weather channel was talking about this huge snow storm we were supposed to receive in Lexington starting late Wednesday night into early Thursday morning.  And I was trying to believe that it wouldn't be as bad as everyone was saying, boy was I wrong.  It started right on time and actually ended up being worse than they expected.  First it was raining, then sleeting, and then big accumulating snowflakes.

The snow did not stop either - it continued into late Thursday morning with a total of around 17 inches.  That is a LOT of snow, but especially in Lexington.  We decided to go ahead with our plan and try to make this work.  I was nervous - very nervous to drive to Cincinnati but we did it.  The side roads, main roads and interstate were all pretty terrible!  It took us twice as long to get to where we were going but once we were just south of Cincinnati the roads were perfectly clear and not much snow on the ground.

We finally got back to Lexington after taking the kids to see Mimi and Poppy and went straight to the truck rental to pick up our moving truck.  When we finally got to the Penske store they had closed early.  What?!?  We were not happy.  While we were frantically calling other truck companies in the parking lot we saw someone pull up - it was the store owner.  We told him we scheduled our truck pick up over a month ago and no one called to tell us that they would be closing early.  We needed our truck and could he please figure out how to help us do so.  The owner said no, that he didn't have his keys.  So Brad said "Where are your keys?  We can wait here until you go get them."  The owner of the store was horribly offended by Brad's question and got in face yelling obscenities at him.  Brad and I actually think he would have physically hurt him if Brad had been more confrontational than he was.  So we left upset and worried that our move might get pushed back again.  

Luckily we were able to get ahold of someone at the corporate Penske office who was absolutely appalled by this story and found us a truck and a store that was still open and let us have the truck for free. So we were back on track, or so I thought....

I came home and realized I needed to shovel the driveway before Brad got back with the truck but I was locked out of the house and the keys and garage door opener were with Fred and Suzanne in Piqua.  I was locked out, my phone was dead and I needed to shovel the 17 inches of snow off the driveway so that Brad could get that massive moving truck in the driveway.  Our neighbors and family came to our rescue.  The Oakley's, Marc, Meg and the kids, and Tim, Kristin and their kids started shoveling the driveway.  We found another realtor in our neighborhood who was able to get into our realtor lockbox and unlock the door (we had a key inside the house) and we were able to park the truck to get ready for our busy day.  

Everyone came inside and helped us finish packing the rest of the house, taking the tv's off the walls, the beds apart, carrying heavy furniture to the garage, etc.  We seriously would have been up all night if it weren't for all of our amazing friends and family!  Brad and I got to sleep in our room one last time and say goodbye to our sweet Lexington house that we love so very much!  

 On Friday morning the roads were still snow covered in Lexington but much better than the day before.  We had the truck packed and were on the road by 10:00 AM.  I had a few very sad moments as I was the last one to leave.  I had to sweep and mop before the locking the doors one last time.  In that moment the house was silent and empty and so was I.  I had many emotions running through my head but most of all I felt sad.  I felt sad that Owen and Grayson would never return to that home again and really never say a proper goodbye.  I felt sad because my kids would not grow up in that house or that neighborhood as I had once dreamed they would.  My world was changing and it was starting right there on my drive away from our old home.