Now that the problem has grown from one to many, I’ve implemented some new strategies. I’ve added more traps, poison, and the garage classic: the 5-gallon bucket. Hopefully we’ll go several days without incident so Megan will be a bit more at ease once I leave for hunting.

Eli… is successfully sleeping through the night. He has been doing this, more or less, since we moved into our house. We are so thankful that he is now sleeping through the night, that means we are sleeping through the night as well. Eli is crawling all over the place now and pulling himself up on just about everything he can. He is not walking yet but does walk along furniture and other things. His vocabulary is ever expanding, he can now say – mama, dada, baby, book, oh, no and make lots of babbling noises. Because we were unable to have him circumcised when he was born, we had the procedure done last month and he came through with flying colors. Eli is also eating like a horse, he has a lot of new foods that he likes. He likes to eat – apple slices, bananas, peaches, pears, mangoes, grapes, cereal bars, cheerios, puffs, sweet potatoes, yams, carrots (mixed in with fruit), spaghetti-o’s, bean and bacon soup, applesauce, bread chunks and so much more.

Our house… is slowly coming along. We’ve been gone for a few weekends and haven’t gotten too much done. Dave did a beautiful job on our new banister. It looks fantastic! We still need to stain it, but it is up and I feel better having it up (we have the baby gate up now). Yesterday was a good work day for us. We ripped out some sheet rock from the entry way, Dave finished ripping out the sheet rock in the 3rd bedroom, finished painting the kitchen (still needs a 2nd coat), did some more organizing and overall just felt very productive. Our next project is the entryway. We need and want to finish the entry way so we have a place to hang our coats and keys. They take up a lot of space around the house.

Other news…I got new hearing aids (pictures in the ‘randoms’ photo album). I absolutely LOVE them! I wear my hearing aids a lot more now than I ever did before. With my old hearing aids it took me 3-4 weeks to go through a hearing aid battery, now it takes me 8-10 days to go through a battery. I also have a car from work now to drive. I drive a 2010 Ford Focus, its a sweet car and gets good gas mileage. Dave has gotten some new tools and is having tons of fun doing various building projects and working on his car.

I have updated several of the photo albums, please take a look.

Eli update…since moving into the house Eli has been sleeping really well. We haven’t been getting up to feed him. He will wake up during the night and fuss for a moment or two but calms down once he gets his pacifier back. In fact, last night he went to bed just before 10pm and he is still asleep as I write this at 9am. Praise the LORD!!! Hopefully we can cut out having to get up at night to give him his pacifier back. He is still crawling all over the place and pulling himself up more and more – typically on items not safe for pulling up on. Eli has been slowly settling into the routine of being home in the morning/early afternoon with Dad, going to daycare for few hours, then coming home with me and taking a short nap. We are going to start encouraging him to eat more solid foods now that things are a bit more settled. We got out of the habit while we were busy working on our house.

The other night I attempted to make a fire in our fire pit for Dave and I to relax by, well, I wasn’t very successful. The wood that I chose was too ‘green’ still and didn’t burn at all. Oh well, it was the thought that counted.

We have seen lots of critters around our yard and neighborhood. The animal sitings so far – rabbits, squirrels, frogs, turkeys and deer. It definitely makes it feel like we living in the country, especially with how dark (we can actually see stars now) and how quiet it is at night (with the exception of a few hoodlums).

Our tentative plan is to have a housewarming party this spring sometime. We want to get things more settled and more construction projects completed prior to having a house full of guest coming to check it out. So, until then, please be patient with us if we don’t invite you over to our new home.

While the place is in chaos, for the most part, Eli’s room and the kitchen are very close to being done. We’re in recovery mode after the long push the last couple weeks. We’ll try and hit it again this weekend when we’re not so busy. All in all, we’re loving it.

We thought it very strange, but I put it together when I went in the house. I looked outside through the window and saw a couple things in the dumpster that we hadn’t put there. I figured he was putting stuff in our dumpster. I had noticed while talking to the guy that he had an old computer in the back of his truck. That probably would have been in the dumpster, too, had we not shown up. He probably didn’t want to pay to dispose of his computer properly and saw the chance to dump it on somebody else. My guess is he’s a local and had perhaps seen our dumpster sitting there on a previous trip by the house. I’m hoping I see his truck parked somewhere and can return his items. It just goes to show that you can’t trust people who wear velcro shoes.

The lame thing is he wants cosmetic changes made: nothing structural or hazardous. Our realtor said he’s never seen an appraiser make such a big deal out of these types of things (paint the deck, paint the walls, etc.).

Perhaps even more annoying is the fact that this was done so late in the process. The appraiser initially checked out the house several weeks ago. He noticed a bit of mold and said that needed to be taken care of. We took care of it and thought we were good to go. The underwriter, however, wanted a final inspection by the appraiser to approve the work that was done. The appraiser went back out to the house two days before closing. That’s when he decided to add the cosmetic items to the list. Why weren’t these things flagged before? Who knows.

We met with our realtor and mortgage broker this morning to figure things out. Our broker is going to try and push back a bit now that he’s seen the house and knows how trivial these things are. They also recommended we call the commerce department and ask some questions to see if there are any problems with the way the appraiser is holding things up.

As things stand now, the current plan is to try and close on the house with the understanding that those items will be addressed within a couple weeks. During that time, our lender has to hold onto the mortgage until we get the final inspection by the appraiser. After that they can sell the mortgage to whomever they want.