Weeeeee're heeeeere!

We made it to ..uh...sunny(?) Florida. Ahem.

Sorry. It really was sunny when we got here but the tropical storm Alberto came roaring through here and it is kinda wet right now.

We made it, though. We had a rough start with our furniture not arriving the day it was scheduled to but it all turned out well. I have found 2 HUGE spiders already in the house and I really hate spiders. Our dog got out of the house today and when I went to look for her I got some help from an older man that thought he saw her in one of the water canals. He warned me of the gators you will find in them and that made us look for dog even harder as he thought he spotted her in one of the canals. I realized too that we have on right behind the house we are in now. (this is why the kids do not play in the back yard) We found dog in, of all places, at a house where some people from Keene, NH just moved in. I was so excited to meet them and thought it neat that they live 1 minute walking distance away from us. They had their Patriots shirts on like we did the day we arrived here too. Way too funny! dog is now home and drying off in the lanai because she got wet in the canal.

The house we are building is coming along fine. The block is up and the concrete poured through the block today. A friend from NH will be flying down here on Thursday to stay with us for a couple Weeks to help sr. monkey with the trusses. He will also get help from Jared, one of cousin and Matt's boys.

I found a doctor and will get my ultrasound done soon. I also found out my grandfather may have a gallbladder problem too. Hope he is well.

Enough for now. I have errands to run and it has stopped raining for a bit.

Until next time...

Almost...

It is almost time to move. We are slowly packing. it is the little things that seem to take the longest. I am a bit sad to leave my froends and family but excited baout what God has in store for us. We really believe that this is God's will for us and if I am happy here in NH then I know that if we move to where God wants us then we will be happy and the blessings will be greater than we know. I will visit with my weekend plane tickets my husband gave to me and we will be up in the summer and holidays. We will not be strangers. Who knows, maybe fmaily will be more inclined to come visit us in FL now that we are no longer "just down the road".

I found this cute Hawiian name thing.

Your Hawaiian Name is:

Haimi Haleigha

What's your Hawaiian Name?

Anyway, until next time...

oogle bop!

I can't believe how time flies sometimes....

The family is finally getting better after a long bought of illness. We thank the Lord that is over. Now, we need to concentrate on packing and moving. I can't believe we have less than four weeks left until we move. I am starting to get nervous about it. I am also getting a little excited about the new adventure we will be embarking on. Since I know in my heart that this is God's will then I know it will be good. This is helping me to move on with this. Things at home are a little scary with my grandparents. My grammy has cancer, B-cell lymphoma and my grandfather finds it harder and harder to breath. I want to be here for them but God knows and they are saved and I know that God will take care of them. God is sending us to Florida so I have to trust that my grandparents know that I want to be there and since I can't I will be praying for them everyday.

We head for NC soon for Jenny's graduation and that will be fun for us and the kids. We can't wait. When we get back we will have little time left to pack so we are getting a lot of the little things done now that always seem to take the longest while packing.

It is a beautiful day today and I think I may take the kids to the park after Caleb gets out of school.

"But let all those that put their trust in thee rejoice: let them ever shout for joy, because thou defendest them: let them also that love thy name be joyful in thee"
Psalms 5:11

Health update:

Well, the pneumonia is gone and I have been finished the antibiotics for a few days now, so why can't I breath and why am I in so much pain?

I went to the docs on Tuesday to get these questions answered and they did x-rays and blood work. They got the results back today. They found I now have (and have probably had for a month now) inflammation from a virus on my chest wall. That is the reason I feel like I am having a heart attack with the squeezing of the heart feeling and the radiating left arm pain. Taking a breath is a huge chore and very painful. It is good to know what is wrong and know that I am not crazy but I can't wait for this to go away.

A couple ladies at church were very sweet and made a meal for me and I appreciate that so much! What a blessing. It is hard sometimes to stand for a long period and try to make dinner. Other chores can wait but you have to feed the family.

I am taking a low dose pain killer. It ok but doe not take all the pain away. It is still very hard to lie down, especially on my left side.

Anyway that is my update for anyone who wants to know. :)

Caleb had a fever last night and stayed home from school today but seems to be feeling better tonight. I can not wait to be rid of all this sickness in the family. It is driving me crazy!! :)

Ken has reminded me that we have 49 days until we head out for FL. Not a lot of time. We start packing in 2 weeks. We found a good moving company that will pack, load and unload our stuff for us for a good price. That is one less thing to worry about. Although, we should not worry about anything, right? :)

We have seen some samples of our new website design and we are very pleased with it. Can't wait for everyone to see it.

My cell phone now has a FL phone number so anyone that has my old number, it doesn't work anymore.

Have a great Easter everyone! JESUS is risen!

ugh, pneumonia!

I have been unable to breath well for about a month now. I have also had some chest pain and just felt awful. My doctor assumed it was anxiety without even seeing me and prescribed meds for that purpose and said to see her soon. The meds never worked and I know a panic attack and this just did not feel like one. I finally went to a walk-in clinic a couple days ago to see what they would say as they do not know me and have no preconceived notions as to what this could be. They found that I have bacterial pneumonia. Finally! I have a diagnosis. I am now on antibiotics and starting to feel a bit better but it is still hard to breath while lying down and doing too much (even loading the dishwasher) takes a lot out of me. But I do what I have to do.
My daughter broke out in hives on Saturday. The docs on Sunday said that it was systemic and it does not appear to be anything she ate. ( we were at a leadership conference at church on Saturday from 8am until 3:30pm and Kelly was in a "construction camp" all that day with other kids. We brought her lunch but I hear the kids shared food so we were concerned she ate something and reacted badly) The doc said it could have also been caused by a cold virus which Kelly had a couple weeks prior. I am hoping it is the latter as we still can not figure out what she would have eaten that would cause her to break out in hives. She was so swollen. That is a scary thought because if we do not know what she is allergic to then we can not keep her away from it. The doc put her on some allergy meds and Benedryl and that helped her to stop itching and he hives are clearing up.

Caleb is nearing the end of school and his first graduation. That is exciting and sad at the same time. He will be leaving a great Christian school only to move on to another but we are prayerful that the new school in FL will be just as good.

We just reserved our room for the hotel in Spartanburg, SC for Kelli's wedding. That will be a lot of fun. UC and AJ will be staying in the same hotel. This will be Caleb and Kelly's 3rd wedding. They love it and are so well behaved.

We have a new website provider and designer. When we move to FL we will have Karolyn (Dunhom designs www.dunhom.com) redesign the krbrobstbuilder website and make it really great. We will be sure to let everyone know when this happens.

Until next time..

Sold the house!!

It took 5 whole days to sell the house! WOW! We thought it might take a couple months so we started earlier than we planned. It went onto the www.jacksonteamre.com site on a Saturday and by the following Wednesday it was under agreement! It is funny too, I have been unsure of whether this was God's will for us to make such a huge move and I have been praying for this for a long time. I prayed that morning on Wednesday, "Lord, if it is your will for us to move to FL then sell our house tonight for what we are asking." That night after dinner at church, we got a call from our realtor that there were some buyers that wanted our house real bad and are offering what we want for the house. They wanted to know if we would accept the offer. Ken said "YES!" I guess I got my answer. God works fast sometimes!
We close on May, 26. That is the last day of school for Caleb and his graduation. So many things are happening at once. We have a rental house we saw that we like a lot and when Ken goes to FL soon, he will see if we can sign the agreement for it now. We will have a PO Box set up soon and in about 8.5 weeks we will be all moved out of here.

It is very sad. This was our first home. We made it what it is. It was a dump when we bought it and now it is a beautiful house. We had our children while living here. There are a lot of memories here. We are leaving friends and family. That will be hard. We will also be leaving one the the best churches we have ever been to, with some of the most caring pastors and church family.

We will, of course, be here for at least one holiday a year and we will be at the beach house every summer. In fact we will be there this summer soon after we have moved. *hint, hint to anyone who wants to see us!*

We also have gotten ourselves a new web host as our old one was wayyyyy too expensive! My friend Karolyn who runs and owns Dunhom designs with her husband will be doing it. It is so affordable and includes all the web design and other good stuff. They are really good and anyone who reads this should check our their site. I have it here in my links under Karolyn's website. Or, you can just go to www.dunhom.com Be on the lookout for a much more improved www.krbrobstbuilder.com soon! :)

What a night!

There were category 4 hurricane winds recorded n MT Washington last night! We had a rough night too. My grandparents had no power for 13 hours and we lost power for about 6 hours before we were able to leave here. We live in a lake community and there is only one way in or out of here. A huge tree took a couple power lines down and the fire department blocked the road out of here off so no one could leave or get in unless they left their car at the block and snuck through the woods to get home or out of here. We were getting really cold and were afraid our pipes would freeze as well as freeze ourselves so we wanted to leave here. We reserved a room at a local hotel but we soon found out that the fire department would not let us out of here. I called my dad at the Sheriffs department and he called everyone he could to try to get us out of here. (It was not only us but everyone who lives here were trapped. I hope there were no emergencies last night needing medical attention STAT)Anyway, my dad was able to find out that the fire department was leaving the scene at around 11:00pm and if we wanted to risk crossing the block then we could try. Ken went to the block and saw where some lines were down about a 1/4 mile up from the block and he also saw cars going through the block. (Theses were people that did not know what had happened) so Ken came back to the house and said we were going through the block. When we got to the beginning of the block and were almost out of here we saw a whole bunch of cars and trucks lined up and people and their dogs walking around with no clue how to get home as they saw the block as they came into the area. It was just an insane scene. I never saw anything like it. People were panicky and cold. We had called the electric company to see how long it would be before they could shut power to the live lines down around here and they said it would be 24-48 hours before anyone would come out to do that as there were 30,000 people without power in just their company. The other company had approx. 39,000 out.Ken told them this was an emergency as we not only have no power but we were trapped here with no way out. We could deal with the power loss. We thank God that he provided us a way out of here when He did.
We got to the hotel and snuck our dog in. We later found out that dogs were allowed. Good thing as katana barked at someone walking past our door at 6am and we were afraid they would kick us out of the hotel.
We called our house and got our answering machine at 7am so we were happy that the power was back on.
All is well and this is just reassuring my husband that moving to FL is the best thing. Although I do not know why as FL deals with these hurricane force winds on a much more regular basis. I do have to say that they are more prepared for such a thing though. We have way too many trees hugging the power lines, it is no wonder the lines come down all the time.

Windy but beautiful!

Boy New England is always full of surprises! Today and yesterday were absolutely beautiful days with temps in the 40's-50's!I was able to drive with the window down today and I had a door open to let some much wanted fresh air into the house yesterday for an hour or so. Today is also very windy. It started out pouring rain and then there was an electricle storm with some thunder and by the time I got home today it was so windy it felt like the trees were falling on our roof! I saw giant flag poles down with the wood splintered to bits and power was out all over the place. Our power was only out for a couple hours, thankfully. I saw on the news that there were gusts of wind on MT. Washington clocked at 123 mph! Yikes!

I really do love it here. You never know what kind of weather you will get. But, I am sure I will learn to love the south just as much!! :) I can always come home to visit, anyway. :)

FL plans moving fast!

A bit too fast! Ken was talking to a friend the other day and said that this is exciting but also a bit scary for him as he has never done anything like this.

We are busy tying up loose ends. We paid off our home equity loan and my school loans. Ken is only taking work up until June 1. And we are slowly packing up the house, getting ready to show it.

We got a call from our architect in FL and she said all is set for us to apply for permits in FL. She even offered to do all the footwork down there for us to make it a faster process for us! We told her we would pay her and we are grateful for her generosity to do this for us. We told her we would like to use her as a contact for architectural jobs in SW FL when we need one.

We just found out recently (Front page news in the local paper) that houses on a hill with a lake view (our house, our house!!) are a hot comodity now!! We were thrilled to read this. I guess lake front properties are rare to find now and people that do own them are not letting them go so people with the money to spend are looking to the next best thing, lake view. They want privacy that lake front will not give them and the convenience of being near the lake and still have the view. The paper mentioned that specifically people are looking for the house up on the hill as it is more private and better view. Our house is exactly what people are looking for!! We are thinking of contacting the realtor that was quoted in the article as he said he knows the people who have the money to spend and want these properties. We are so excited about this!!

The kids are doing well. Our son is reading now and our daughter is writing "words" on papers and having daddy and I read them. It is pretty funny. She is not really sure what she is writing and when she is done she will come up to one of us and ask us to tell her what it says. We read it the best we can. Here is an example. "foopy glepptly doooppleeer..." She laughs so hard when we read her "sentences" to her.

It is a slow Saturday but not for long. We are in the process of painting Our sons room and the bathroom today. We got a new toilet for the downstairs bathroom (I know you needed to know that) and we still have to retouch the kitchen wall paint. The house is looking better than ever. I have a ton of flowers I planted in the gardens this past fall. I can't wait until Spring when the flowers bloom and look beautiful and smell great!

We will add updates periodically and when we move we will keep up this blog so that our friends and family can still keep up with us. :)

new, new, new...

I know, I know..after reading the last post some of you smart people out there are saying to themselves, "Self, what are they thinking?!" yeah, yeah, yeah. We realized, after a good friend reminded us, that we can not use the oven now that we have used a fire extinguisher in it. My husband said he knew this in the back of his mind but just wanted to get the fire out. Well, I cooked in the oven last night but I will be throwing out the food today that I saved and froze from last night. We are getting a new oven today, but... we are also getting a new kitchen!!!Yup! We were thinking that it will raise the value of our home when we sell and we will get our money and back and then some so we are tearing out the old caninets and countertop and putting in a new set of cabinets (My husband got them last night) and a granite tile countertop!! We are excited to see the tranformation. Now our house is almost new again. We have put hardwood all throughout the house and the kitchen and downstairs bath are ceramic tile and now we will have a new kitchen and stove! We are excited to see what the realtor will say as she has not been here since before we had redone the kids bedrooms, masterbedroon and the kitchen. Plus, we are repainting the den and the kids rooms. Busy, busy. We hope some of you will come to visit us and see the new things here before we sell it.

30 meals in one day!

I have to start this post by saying that I did not actually cook 30 meals in one day. I only prepared 16 meals plus 14 lunches for my husband in one day...Oh and I set the oven on fire.

I read about a thing called the 30 day gourmet. It is a really neat idea of cooking up a months of meals in one day and then stocking it all up in your freezer so that you do not have to shop much or cook again for a few weeks. Sounds great to me! I bought the books and used the worksheets from the books and planned and shopped and yesterday was my cooking day. I was not feeling too well as I have a cold but I managed to get through it. I only planned for 2 weeks of meals and 2 weeks of lunches for my husband as I did not want to get overwhelmed by a days worth of cooking. I finished the cooking around 1:30pm and that was with a couple breaks and the fact I pre cooked some of the beef and the chicken the night before was a huge help.
It was not that bad. Half a day of cooking was pretty relaxing...Except for the fire. Oh, let me tell you about the fire. I was on the recipe for meatballs. I had made about 4 meals already (triple recipes so that it made more than just the 3 meals) and I was feeling pretty good as I was almost done. I know that you cook meatballs in a dish with a lip or a cookie sheet with a lip and I am not sure why I did this (maybe I was tired and the cold I have affected my brain), but I placed all the meatballs (all 60) on 2 baking stones and placed them in the oven. We have a gas oven and I did place some tin foil on the bottom of the oven to catch the drips of grease. (again, lapse of judgment caused by cold and tiredness...Really!!) The meatballs were doing well with the occasional sizzle of the grease hitting the foil once in awhile. I checked every now and then to see that there was nothing major wrong. There were about 2 minutes left until they were to be done. I saw that there was an unusual amount of smoke coming from the oven fairly fast so I opened the door to the oven and WHOOSH!, I was met with an oven full of flames. I quickly shut the oven door, told my son to get out of the kitchen and yelled FIRE!!!! My husband was upstairs and heard me yell. I ran t the basement door and grabbed the fire extinguisher and ripped it off the wall (it would not release easily) and ran into the kitchen. My husband was still not there so I yelled for him again. My son was screaming and yelling "Ken! Ken!" My daughter was in her room playing. (I told her to get out of her room and go to the front of the house) My husband finally came downstairs and opened the oven himself and took the extinguisher from me (he wanted to be the hero) and just looked at the fire. I was frantic as it is a gas oven and I was afraid the flames would somehow cause an explosion. I kept telling my son to get out of the kitchen and all my son was concerned about at this moment was that his sandwich from lunch was still on the table. He was screaming and walking further and further into the kitchen as I was telling him to turn around and get out. He had to have that sandwich before he got out. I was furious and upset but that is another issue. :)
Anyway, Ken had a bright idea to try and save the meatballs from harm and use a rug in the kitchen to try and put the flames out instead of just using the extinguisher. He took the rug and whipped it into the oven and of course that just made things worse. He then sprayed the fire with the extinguisher and put the fire out. He sat there looking into the oven at the ruined meatballs and then laughed. Once it was all said and done it all was kind of comical. Caleb yelling Ken instead of daddy and Kelly playing in her room as all the commotion was going on and Ken trying to put out a grease fire with a rug, oh and then there is Caleb trying to save his sandwich. Brother!
I was still able to use the stove top so I finished the rest of the meals and cooked dinner in the toaster over we have and later on that night cleaned the stove of the extinguisher powder. Today you would never know any of that happened. We are thankful for that of course. God is always with us and watching.
I am still planning on doing the freezer meal thing but I will not cook while sick and tired again and I will never put meatballs on a cookie sheet without a lip again!!
All in all we had a good dinner last night and I have a freezer of meals and it was all done by 1:30pm. Pretty good. :)

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood...

WOW! That is all I can say, wow! It is so beautiful outside! It is January but the weather is so great. It is about 50+ degrees and the sun was bright and shining. I wore only a t-shirt with my windbreaker today and I had the window in the van down while driving. It is such a great feeling when it feels so nice out after the cold weather we have had.

We are preparing to move. We have found a nice house to rent and the realtor that is in charge of it said she will be on the look out for one that will be available to rent in June for us as this one was just taken. We are hoping for the same development as this is a great house with a pond in the back. It is beautful and the house is big with a garage for us. The house is in the town we will live in so that will be super!

Well, I can not spend a lot of time on the computer on such a beautiful day. Ta for now!