Our household goods are here!! I went ahead and had them come yesterday even though I've been flying solo this week. Steve was in CA when they packed it up, and I get to put everything away....not sure that's a fair trade!! lol But Avery was SOOO excited to see her dollhouse bookcase as the first thing coming down from the crates. The kids pretty much played upstairs for most of the time the movers were here. They were so nice to take everything out of the boxes and put everything together (train table, Avery's bike, etc.). So now the house looks, well....it's getting there! I'll wait a little longer before taking any pictures. I've actually made a lot more progress in the past day then I thought I would. There won't be too much to do when Steve gets back. I decided that Steve and I would stay in the bedroom downstairs so we're closer to the kids, and upstairs is a nice office/playroom/yarn room/reading room. Of course, we may change our minds (again). We're putting the futon up there which will be nice. The biggest project I have to organize is my yarn. It's technically organized in 11 (yes, ELEVEN!!!!) big Rubbermaid containers at the moment by type/color, but I want it on shelves so I can see what I have in front of me.
Speaking of yarn, I've typed up my first 5 patterns to sell on Etsy, and I've sold 3 so far. Yah!! I love typing out the patterns more than I thought I would, and when someone purchases it, the work is already done. It's fantastic!! It is time consuming and a little tedious putting all my sloppy notes into legible, American Crochet Language and format, but I only do that once for each pattern, and I'm hoping to sell a lot of each.=) I still like making hats for people, but I want to slow down a bit. In CA, there were times when I felt all I was doing was crocheting, and I don't want it to be like that again. I'm thinking maybe make 5-7 hats a week (since each hat takes a couple hours to make, depending on the size), and continue to sell patterns of course. I'm moving all my made to order hats on a new website, called Big Cartel. Pros: They only charge $10 a month as a flat rate, and they don't take any cut of your sales like Etsy does. Etsy charges 20 cents just to list an item (everytime it sells you need to re-list it to make it active again), and they take 3.5% of your sales. My fees were anywhere from $50-$150 a month, so I'll be saving money for sure. Cons: You don't get nearly the traffic flow as you do on Etsy. Millions of people use Etsy, whereas on Big Cartel everyone has their own website and your visitors are people that are specifically looking for you. You can't just go to Big Cartel and type in "baby hats" and all the baby hats will come up. It doesn't work like that. I have a pretty good fan base on Facebook which will be the bulk of my customers. By word of mouth I'm hoping to keep the fan base growing along with people that find my pattern shop on Etsy and wonder how they can get a ready made hat.
Moving on...Avery is now a pro at going to school. She absolutely LOVES it. I have no regrets at all in sending her there. 5 days a week is working out great. It goes by so fast, that I don't feel that she's missing out on anything that Noah and I are doing. Noah and I normally just run errands or go home and clean...blah! And we play together, of course. Since Avery doesn't nap, I feel like we still have a lot of time together. If she came home from school and napped, I'd probably feel like I never saw her.=( Since starting school, Avery has magically started to enjoy drawing and wants to do it all the time. Not even a month ago, she wanted nothing to do with drawing. Now she can even draw (her version) of a person! I'll post a picture soon.
When she got home from school today, she wanted to ride her bike, so we used the side street right next to our house. We had originally gotten her a 12" bike a couple months after she turned 3, and then returned it for a 14" because she towered over the 12". I know they're supposed to be a little small, so they're not as scary when they're learning, but she can still stand up on the 14". She's got some long legs! Right before we moved is when she mastered the peddling and stearing. It happened suddenly, because when we first got it she couldn't peddle well yet, so we put it away for a couple months, got it back out, and off she went peddling away! She didn't forget and rode back and forth down the street about 5 times.
Looking back at our house
All done! Walking back.
Even though Noah's been sleeping in a big boy bed for over a month now, here's the first time he got into it with HIS bedding - the cute Very Hungry Caterpillar. The set matches the quilt Grandma made for him perfectly (The quilt is on his chair.=)
I've always loved reading blogs (can you tell by how wordy I am on mine haha), but I tend to always read different ones all the time. I found one the other day called Kiwi Crate and I LOVE it. It has so many cute, simple, educational activities to do with your kids. It's just what I wanted. You would think that from being a teacher for two years I would have a million ideas right up my sleeve and ready to pull out at any time. Not exactly. I've had so many creative roadblocks in that category that I had my parents send all my teaching stuff. How DID I entertain 50 kindergartners all day for 2 years!? And sometimes I can't thinking of one fun activity for my almost 2 and 3 year old? Anyway, this blog is great, and I've already done a few things with the kids from it.
We made some fun stuff with cardboard and duct tape.
Noah played with his shoebox "garage" for about an hour. The other thing is a ramp for his trains. This was before we got our stuff, so we had to be somewhat creative!
And, yes, I know, that darn pacifier has got to go. He almost had to give it up once because we thought we lost the last one. It was so horrible, that I was so relieved when we found another one. Not.ready.yet. Soon!
Avery's cardboard "bird" haha!
Christmas stuff is in the containers in the background - all ready to put out when Steve gets home.
This afternoon on our daily walk I discovered a super short way to get to Uken Beach which I blogged about in an earlier post. This way bipasses the whole part of the road that doesn't have a sidewalk, which is great. It probably took us 20 minutes to walk there. Since it's the off season, the cafe, rentals, and ice cream shop are closed (they may be open on the weekends, not sure.), but it's a pretty little beach. The kids like going out on the peninsulas and playing in the sand. They haven't wanted to get in the water lately, but that might be because I haven't put them in swimsuits yet.
We pick Steve up at the Naha airport tomorrow. He doesn't fly in until 11:00 P.M. I hope I don't get lost! I have yet to venture outside of Uruma City without Steve. There's so many fun things around us that there hasn't been a need yet. He'll be happy to be home. He said the Philippines was really sad. Almost worse than Afghanistan what he saw. We'll be spending Sunday putting up Christmas decorations.=)
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