The Count Down Begins

Dexy turns 1 on Thursday and then he has his 1 year routine check-up on Friday morning. We are leaving for Texas right after his appointment. I realize that I didn't fill everyone in on the details (sorry, Emily), so I will now. I tried to do a post a while ago, but it didn't work and it was late, so I never re-did it. Here's what's up. Brian has a wonderful opportunity to go to Texas with a summer sales company. He will be selling pest control there. His friend who got him hooked up with it make quite a bit of money doing the same thing last summer. We are looking forward to the adventure and really hope that it will be a succesful trip. This company does this in several places all over the country, but they let Brian choose his area. He picked the Dallas/Fort Worth area for me, so that I could spend the summer with my oldest sister, Heather, who lives in that area and we therefore don't get to see her or her 5 beautiful kids very often. He will be out knocking doors all day (hopefully getting tons of sales), so it will be great for me to be close to at least one person I know. We will be there until mid/late August. We are getting so excited!

A down side to all of this is the stuff! I had no idea that we had collected so much junk in our last place. It was pretty small and we only lived there for a little over a year, and we still managed to gather up a bunch of stuff. We will only be in Texas for a few months, so Brian's parents have very generously offered to let us keep all of our crap at their house. But we moved out in a hurry, so it's all kind of unorganized. Now we have the daunting task of going through ALL of our stuff, deciding what to keep, what to donate, what to junk and then boxing it all up and organizing it in the Bowles unfinished basement without having it take up too much space or be to obnoxious! Today was our first day on the job. We made piles all over their basement and now it looks like a real mess, but I guess it has to get worse before it can get better.

And my poor boys tried to keep themselves occupied, but it didn't last too long, so we had to close them in the room with the TV and all their toys so that they wouldn't totally be undoing all of our efforts. I'm sure that by the time we sort through it all, they'll have abandonment issues.

But, I did get to spend time with them this evening, so hopefully the feeling won't be permanent. They were being really cute before bed as Ollie tried to talk on the phone and then shared it with Dex, saying, "here Dexy, it fo you."

And they haven't had a night since we've been here where they've fallen asleep without talking, laughing, crying, screaming, just generally struggling because there is usually noise and something going on. But tonight, we finally got a break from all the noise! Everyone ended up gone when it came time for me to put them to bed and it was so nice for us to have a smooth, quiet, fuss-free bedtime again! But it has been really fun to be here playing with Brian's family and letting the boys make bonds with everyone, especially because one of Brian's sisters entering the MTC just a couple weeks after we leave. Anyway. They're just so cute! And I hope we can get everything pulled together by Wednesday night, so that we can enjoy Dexy's birthday on Thursday and hit the LONG road on Friday! Good Luck to us - we'll need it.