November 2008 Challenge

Last month's challenge was kind of a combined challenge broken into three parts: things to be done before Mikayla arrived, things to be done after Mikayla arrived, and things to do in general. We were successful in completing the following: installing most of our doors with latch plates, planning Victoria's upcoming birthday party, following through on Thanksgiving plans, clearing our yard of trees that we had cut down, and taking care of a lot of our Christmas gifts. Also, my challenge was surviving the month with a newborn...which I successfully accomplished. We did sell our Crown Victoria too. Yay!
Victoria really loves her new sister and is nice most of the time. She has however figured out how to climb into her old crib and now tries to wake Mikayla up when she's sleeping. So I've always got to watch what she's doing. The other day we caught her in the crib with Mikayla's binky in her mouth and a blanket on her. We fear she is regressing in her development. We've been setting up for Christmas as well. Victoria has a "Little People Nativity Set" curtousy of her Grandma Pereira. Sunday while she was napping I set it up. John reminded me that she would just take it all down after her nap. I said I knew that and that is why I took a picture of it. So it was looking nice for probably an hour. Merry Christmas!

The birth of Mikayla Isabella Riley

That's right, she's here! Mikayla Isabella Riley was born Thursday November 6, 2008 at 4:52AM. She weighed 6 lbs 1 0z and was 20 inches in length. Wednesday at about 3 PM I began having contractions, but I thought nothing of them because they were irregular. So of course they were Braxton Hicks right? Well, they continued to be irregular for 5 hours and I thought that was a bit long to be having them. Around 5 PM John and I went to DI because I figured they would go away and they didn't. I finally went to the hospital at about 9:30PM to be checked. The nurse checked me and said she thought I was dilated a 5 or a 6! What?!!! Well, she wasn't sure so she had another nurse check me and she confirmed that I was dilated 5. Wow! So I guess even if your contractions are not regular you could be in labor. Mostly Mikayla's been sleeping all day and night except for when she wakes up to eat and things are already tough. We'll get on track though. Thanks to everyone who has been helping us out or giving us calls for congratulations. Here's pictures of the lovely Mikayla. Victoria loves her new sister/shopping buddy.

October 2008 Challenge and Halloween

So John comes home one day with an idea. We have "monthly challenges" for ourselves. Each month we choose a challenge. Something that is a goal, ambition, or whatever it may be that we try to complete by month's end. This was our first month and our challenge was to de-clutter our house by selling or getting rid of the things we did not need or want. In doing this we made $195, which we then used to buy Victoria's winter clothes and had a little left over for whatever. This was of course a bit lower than we expected to get because we were trying to sell our car, but we'll keep trying to sell that even though the month's over. There are also a few of our "junk" items we are trying to sell so hopefully we'll be rid of those soon. It was a good time to do that because we'll be having a new baby soon also. So, yay for challenges!
Now, as for Halloween, Victoria was a ladybug this year. I was a 9 month pregnant lady (which actually is quite scary) and John was a chemist at a Nuclear Power Plant. Here are some pictures. I would had one taken of me, but our batteries died and well I didn't feel like changing them. Sorry for the blurriness.

Peanuts for now, other presents later

Victoria already got her presents for her birthday and Christmas from Grandma Pereira, but she doesn't know it yet. No matter though, we think she was perfectly fine with her box of peanuts. Yay!

Drumroll for...

...the new baby name. We're pretty sure the name of the new baby girl will be:

Mikayla Isabella Riley

We look forward to having Mikayla in our lives. We think that "Lizzie" (from V's middle name Elizabeth) and "Izzie" (from Mikayla's middle name Isabella) will have a blast together. Victoria is excited as far as we can tell. We've explained it to her and think she understands. Thank you for your votes.
Also I think I said I'd let you know what we decided on potty training. Well we decided to go for it and V was doing pretty well. She loved the praise when she was successful and when sometimes tell us when she needed to go, but in the end she truly was not ready. She would still go in her diaper whenever she needed to and eventually did not care for it anymore. So we'll be having two kids in diapers, but oh well. When she's not ready, she's not ready.

Name picking time...

Ok so we've narrowed it down to names that we like. We're no longer taking suggestions, but would like to see what everyone thinks of our narrowed list. Vote in our poll for which name you like the best. :)

Disclaimer: Final decision is still John and Katrina's. We are just curious as to what you all think.

We may be broke, but at least we do it in style

That's right...that's our new 2006 Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer edition! A few days ago the Crown Victoria would not start again. We'd been having a few problems with it before, but decided to keep the Crown Vic to save money. Well we got tired of it. We've got bigger and better things to do than to worry about cars. Plus if we ever were looking to get one now is the best time to do so because it's definitely a buyer's market. Just to give you an idea of how good a deal we got let me tell you the price of a brand new Ford Explorer that's NOT Eddie Bauer edition = $40,000 at least. Now guess how much we paid for this one? It has 21k miles, leather interior, a clean record, is still under warranty, and not to mention looks brand new. Ok, we paid approx. $18,200 including taxes and registration! Isn't that amazing?!!! I'm so excited and relieved to have this. I feel so much safer and lucky. More pictures...yay!

So now all we've to do is get rid of our Crown Victoria and sell John's 1970 Ford Mustang and we'll have covered most of the cost...hopefully. I'm sure we won't be able to get a whole lot for our cars, but one could hope. Also, we finally finished our kitchen mosaic and we're almost done with the kitchen...we need to do crown mouldings and seal a few more things before we're done. Did I even mention we were doing a mosaic? Well, we were and it takes a while. So here that is.