August

We visited a nearby nature preserve along Reed Creek. It was a beautiful place to explore. Most of it is swamp with boardwalks built throughout for people to walk on.

This was under the bridge. The pattern of the dirt was caused from the way rain falls between the spaces in the bridge. Kind of interesting.

Kevin lost his first tooth. He said he woke up at midnight and it had fallen out and was on his tongue. In the morning he wouldn't let go of it.

Then at some point he misplaced it and he said he left it in the kitchen somewhere.😕😫😛😨

Ryan needed some time alone to do some things to get ready for work, so I took the kids to this amazing park. It has three play structures, a splash pad, and lots of other fun extra things!

Check out what the humidity does to Ann Marie's curls!

August 8th was the first day of school for everyone. We got up early to drop Ryan off at work because he had a faculty meeting early in the morning. Then I drove Kevin and Heidi to school. They went into their classes easily and happily. Ann Marie thought she was going to kindergarten too and wanted to stay. Instead we ran some errands and got a library card.

Odometer patterns are fun. We missed 123456, unfortunately. It happened sometime during our second trip to NC when we moved into our house.

This is was my mom hack for the after school car line. You have to hang up these placards when you pick up your kids, so I clipped a pants hanger to mine and just hung it up on the mirror.

Ann Marie and I were in the car a lot in August. In the morning we would drive Kevin and Heidi to school, then take Ryan to work, then come home and/or run errands. In the afternoons we would pick Kevin and Heidi up, go home and work on homework, then go pick up Ryan and come back home. The afternoon car line was also really long. Even if I got there ten minutes before school ended I still wouldn't get to my kids for half an hour. The school and the university were both 15-20 minutes from our apartment, so it added up to a couple of hours a day in the car, plus I had to bring Ann Marie up and down all those stairs every time we drove somewhere. It was kind of rough, but we made it through.

Ryan enjoys his job. He teaches four labs and has three one-hour lectures per week, plus grading and lesson planning. The department seems to have some really nice people. We would love to stay here for a long time. We'll have to see.

Heidi decided she wanted short hair again because it's easier to brush, so I gave her a haircut. She liked the mouse buns I made to get the top layers out of the way.

We also kept working on getting ready to close on the house. I kept feeling nervous that for some reason it wouldn't work out, but everything did. In fact, the bank contacted us and asked if we could close a week earlier, which was great. So we closed on the house on August 26.

The morning was busy with getting everyone to school, and I was also trying to get the kitchen all packed up. There was still plenty of packing to do after I dropped Ryan off, but when I got home I was still wearing my exercise clothes and sweating from packing, plus I hadn't straightened my hair. I was going to do a quick shower and just wear a ponytail so I could get more packing done, but Ryan looked so nice in his work clothes and I decided I didn't want to look like a dumpy housewife when I went to buy my first house, so instead of packing I fixed my hair and put on nice clothes. It was totally worth it.

Ann Marie and I picked Ryan up around noon and then we went to the lawyer's office. We signed a million papers and talked to the seller for a while with some questions we had about the house. Ann Marie was upset that she didn't get to color on all of our legal documents, but the lawyer had some paper and crayons for her and our realtor colored with her.

Then we went to see our house--so exciting after driving past it on the way to school and wondering if it was really all going to work out and what it would be like to live there. We picked up Kevin and Heidi from school and were very relieved that they would start riding the bus the next Monday, then we went to the apartment to finish packing clothes and have a snack because we were driving to North Carolina that evening to stay with friends and get the rest of our things out of the storage units.