Early Christmas

We opened presents with the Butterbaugh's this last Sunday night and Allison was such a hoot! I'm working on trying to figure out a different way to post videos. It takes forever through blogger, so I'm doing a little research on the subject. She had the present idea down after the first one. She would come over to me and get a present then go in the middle of the room and open it, then play intensely with it. ADORABLE!

Her vocabulary has started to really take off. Some words are totally off the wall, for example "ouf" means flower. But most of the other ones are pretty close. It is so much fun!

We leave for Michigan and Illinois on Friday. This is Allison's first 20 hour car ride, so it should be interesting. Grammy has a bunch of toys that she has never seen before and we are planning on moving Allison between cars. I'm excited for her to play in the snow, although part of me expects her to feel it and go back inside. But it's 2 full weeks with Jason and Allison and I can't wait.

Baby Boy Jacobs is growing wonderfully. I'm 21 weeks and my belly is huge! We have been slacking off on the belly pictures this time around, but I can post the sonogram pictures. Enjoy!

Oops!

Well I changed my background but forgot to change the font color if anyone tried to read it over the last 24 hours. But it's fixed now and I'm working on uploading some videos!! (I tried last night but no success)

Videos, Pictures, and new words

Allison continues to amaze me. Tonight she said Baby Bop and Elmo. Well, her version of those words anyway. And my mom said she said Zoboomafoo today also. What a ham!! Here are some more recent pictures and 2 videos.

Just playing with her toys

She has not been a big fan of her highchair lately. Looks like we need to get a booster seat!

YUM! Ketchup!

Watching Barney with Grandpa at the cabin

She loves to play in the dog crates, we didn't set this up, she did!

Wow, so those videos literally took hours to post. Good Grief!!

Lest 2 months goes by....

Oh dear me, where does the time go??!! I suppose when you are moving, growing a baby, taking trips, and keeping track of a toddler it just goes!


Our house is fabulous, still nothing hung on the walls, but we are settling in quite nicely. We love the room and the dogs are enjoying it as well. (although they still haven't gotten the hang of the tile floors quite yet and sometimes look like scooby doo trying to chase each other)


Allison is growing leaps and bounds every day. Her vocabulary started taking off a few weeks ago and every few days adds a new word to her repitoire. She is starting to appreciate the value of a hat, and even leaves her hair bows in for a few hours at a time. She is still a great sleeper and is more flexible than we could ever ask for. She is absolutely IN LOVE with Christmas lights and asks for, "Mo, mo" as soon as we pass a house that has them. She can't get enough! The, "OOHHH, and WOW!" that is emitted from her sweet little mouth is so adorable it makes me want to just drive around for hours so I can hear it again!


My belly has grown exponentially in the last month. I wore a sweater last week that I have a picture in when I was pregnant with Allison around this same time 2 years ago, no comparison! I'm at least 3 times bigger currently. It was so nice of Allison to stretch out my body so it expands this time with no problem. It reminds me of a balloon, after you blow it up once the next time isn't nearly as difficult. Oh the joys of pregnancy. (and I love ever minute of it! well almost)


Our last little tid bit of news if you hadn't already heard was Friday was our sonogram and we found out our new little peanut is a HE peanut! Allison is going to have a little brother!! We are so very excited (and I told my mom this means I get to go shopping again! :) ) and Allison still doesn't have any idea what is coming down the pipe! But I know she will be mommy's big helper and she will give her brother a run for the money. i.e. Yesterday I had to stop Allison because she was head butting the dogs. sigh, what a bruiser!


Ok, well here's a few pictures to tide you over for now.

Here she is wearing a shirt of mine, she insisted! Pulling the wagon in the backyard

Daddy and Allison waiting in line to ride the Merry Go Round at the State Fair

Her usual 2

TEETH!

Cute bits of scrumptiousness

Her new baby doll. Sometimes she thinks the bottle is for herself, but occasionally she does share with the doll. (that is until the bottle had an unfortunate run in with our 4 legged children and no longer exists. sigh)

Sisters just waking up one Sunday morning. Look at that hair!!

She loves to put things in her car. But sometimes they don't fit so well. Her head has to stick out through the hole in the front to fit!

She got a little carried away coloring

Her Silly Hat that she wears quite frequently. (a Barney song) The funniest part is that she can see through it so she walks around with it over her head like this.

And here she is eating like a grown up :)

Tupperware

Just wanted to let you all know that I was getting bored and didn't think I had enough to do so I signed up to sell Tupperware. (ok this is definitely not the reason, I just love their products!!) So if you are interested in the good deals they have or just want to browse the catalog let me know! The picture above is a link to my website or just send me an email and I will include you on the monthly specials I send out.

I have a bunch of cute pictures to upload, there just seems to be 100 other things that demand my attention when I get home. (including the little one that all those pictures are of!)

The Pregnancy is going well, I told all my students a few days ago and a few of the girls said they had noticed my growing waistline! :) We are going to use the same Midwife that we used last time, but this time we are going to have the baby at home. All those car rides during labor was for the birds!! We are going to find out what we are having around Thanksgiving. I would love for Allison to have a sister close to her age (I never had one at all!) but a little boy would be a dream come true for Jason. Someone to follow him around and fix things with, I can see it now!

We hope to go to the Texas State Fair this weekend so we will have lots of cute pictures to show from that too. I think Allison will love all the animals and the food too. I have some pictures of her eating like a big girl, it cracks me up.

Ok, pictures to come!!

In case you hadn't heard...

Allison is going to be a Big Sister!!!

Changes on the Horizon

I'm guessing anyone who used to read my blog has probably given up on me ever updating it again on a regular basis! Sorry! I can't hardly believe I used to write almost once a week. Goodness that was so long ago. Well I finally got a good video of Allison doing all her tricks and we are closing on our house in 2 days so I thought I should write a little something. Yes I did just say in 2 days we are going to be home owners!! In my last post I was writing about what a disaster our house search was, and here we are just over a month later and we are about to get the keys to our new house!!

The whole process has been totally God and even today I recieved some more news that further confirmed this being our house and it being what God has for us. We have prayed through out the whole thing that God would show us if this wasn't supposed to be our house. Even though we absolutely love it and think it's perfect, we were open. So here is a little synopsis of our process.

After waiting on God and being obediant with our finances we finally felt the ok to go out and look again. We went to 5 or 6 houses in Lewisville. The last one was one we skipped over the first time because it was too wierd and was a burn out. We didn't really know what that meant and when we drove by the house we said absolutely not! It was peach first of all, and such a wierd layout that we didn't even want to consider it. (God has such a good sense of humor!) Well after looking online the more we saw the inside of the house the more interested we became. So we decided to go look. It was perfect! At the end of the day it was the only house we were interested in, and it was exactly what we were hoping for price wise.

Well we had both sets of parents out to the house to check it out and they said it looked good so we put in an offer. Later the next evening we came to an agreement and so began the paperwork. We had the inspection and the guy suggested having the foundation looked at. When we had a foundation company out they said it needed lots of work. We though for sure this was going to be the end but the seller agreed to fix it all!! He also agreed to everything we asked as far as repairs go.

See the house got struck by lightening 2 years ago and this guy bought it and totally re-did everything. He finished in March of this year and it had been on the market since then. Mom asked why I thought no one had snatched it up and said very simply that God was saving it for us.

So here we are just a few short weeks later and the house is really about to be ours! There were actually some delays because we held off on the apraisal in case the seller didn't want to fix the foundation so I didn't think there was any way we were going to keep our original closing date. But when God does something he does it big, so not only are we keeping our original closeing date, but we got the final numbers for our mortgage payment today. Now let me explain the difference between where we are living and where we are about to move to. The house we are currently in is 1400 sq ft, 3 bedrooms, old, needs lots of repairs and updates. It served us for a time but at this point the only thing we like is it is a roof over our heads and it is close to my parents. (we will miss that!) However, our new house- brand new on the inside, 2200 sq ft, 4 bedrooms, and just plain beautiful!! The downstairs is all tile which will be wonderful for dog and kid accidents. (we have had plenty of those!) So with all that being said get this-our payments will be $25 more a month!!! YEA!! (our original numbers were not this low!) It's all been so easy and so God that we are just amazed at how good he is.

So with that here are a few photos of the house:

The formal living, just to the left when you walk in the front doors

The master sinks

The kitchen looking into the formal dining and formal living

The beautiful real wood staircase (the floor is really wood as is the upstairs hallway)

And here is the video of the not so baby Allison

Is it August already??!!

Where does the time go? My my. Well I start school next week (kids don't come for another week) and I can't hardly believe summer is comming to a close. It has been a rather relaxing summer for the most part, just Allison and I hanging out, running our errands and playing with toys. We got to eat lunch with daddy most everyday and Allison thinks "DA" is home everytime she hears a noise out front.

We have switched to 1 nap that doesn't last long enough most days, but I will take what I can get. Some mornings I can drag myself out of bed early enough to be ready by the time she wakes up, but many times a shower and some reading is all I can get done before she gets up.

She is still quite a ham. Any store we go to she waves at everyone as we are leaving and blows them kisses, and recently she has started reaching out to complete strangers wanting them to hold her! She has an old purse of mine that she loves to carry all over the house and sometimes when we go out. Anything that has handles immediately becomes a purse as well. She loves to have her hair fixed but usually pulls it out in the car or within a few hours. (even though she still loves to twirl it while sucking those middle two fingers)

She loves going to church, the bath, shallow water, (still not a huge fan of deep pools but if she can walk in and out she is in heaven) dogs, purses, talking, and sucking her fingers. She is our little angel and I am having so much fun watching her grow up!

Jason's parents finally moved back to Texas at the end of July and we are so glad to have them close. (although Granbury is still too far in our opinion :) ) But it's for sure closer than Chicago! Alyssa turned 19, I mean 13 at the end of July also. She only has 1 more year of middle school left, how is that possible??

In other news we found a house we like and are hopefully going to "start the process" this week. It's all a little daunting but we are trusting God and trying to let him lead. I'll keep you posted.

Her new hair-do. I think she looks like Red from Fraggle Rock.

Her classic sucking the fingers twirling the hair pose

We start em young!

ok just kidding, there wasn't anything left in the cup, I was just trying to get her to hold still so I could get her picture, so cute! (although the flowers in front of the ponytails were an easy way for her to pull the whole thing out!)

Allison helping Pa Paw

No it's not a laptop case, it's a purse!

Allison helping sissy with her birthday present

Alyssa with her b-day present from MaMaw and PaPaw

Allison in her special chair

Coloring with daddy and going off the paper

A guest who overstayed his welcome, Jason ran over his friend 2 nights later

We are very independent now and like to feed ourselves :)

What's wrong with this picture?

(scroll down to see aforementioned picture)So how about once a month? It's summer and I know I'm supposed to be "off" with nothing to do so my blog should be updated 3 times a week right? Something like that! Allison is quite the needy one right now in our family, she now has 3 molars, one more bottom tooth in the front and is still working on the last molar to complete the "set."

Jason went on his Quest at the end of June and it radically changed all of our lives. I registered for a Heart Quest (the first one available is in November and now they are filled up through the end of this year for Heart Quests) Anyway, absolutely completely radically transformed Jason and subsequently me and our family. God has shown us his love and mercy like never before and we will never be the same! I am expecting great things for my Quest and I am excited about God's timing for it all.

I officially only have 4 weeks of summer left, boo! We are trusting God with my "work future" but are hoping that this will be my last year of full time teaching. We are praying about continuing to expand our family (both in number and house) and I would like to be home more if and when that does happen.

As I mentioned above we are now looking to purchase our first home! We are currently renting a house a block from my parents and while we love the location the house itself leaves a bit to be desired. So we are currently about half a step away from getting our finances approved and have begun looking for the future Jacobs' residence. The first day we looked solely in Coppell at 6 houses. We were sorely disappointed and decided maybe Coppell would not be where we would purchase our first home. We prayed and felt a lot of peace about looking a little north in Lewisville, or possibly Grapevine. We did try and look at a few houses during the next week, but everything went wrong! Seriously. I have the realtor 7 addresses to look at, 4 of them went under contract the previous day, 1 of them she couldn't get ahold of, and the 3 that we did see....... 1. People had gotten the call during dinner but didn't pay attention to it so they were very surprised and the house was strange. 2. We got there and the people said they are going to go with the contingency contract. Weird. So we didn't see that one. 3. Everything started normal enough, but then when we got to the master bedroom the door was locked. Weird, but we continued. They upstairs we heard something coming from a room. That room was locked also and there was someone in there watching a movie. (the sound got louder as we tried to open the door) Hello people??!!! Do you want to sell your house or not??? (we didn't like the house anyway)

So at that point we surrendered to God and said, Ok not yet. Our Realtor is going out of town this week so we told her we would just look again when she came back. We both have peace about this but are still very excited to see just what God has waiting for us!

Ok, now the part you probably just scrolled to anyway :)

Below is said picture. See anything wrong?

Apparently Miss Allison decided she did not like the restrictions of her diaper while napping the other day and I was quite surprised to look up and see a full moon staring back at me! Needless to say she now wears shorts to nap in too!

Being a ham. I was trying to get a picture of her new little "pebbles" ponytail on top of her head. She loves to twirl it while sucking her middle two fingers. (pictures to come)

Daddy got her a new balloon, her pride and joy!

Daddy bought me some beautiful flowers!

My new do

Ok before they were a stretch but now they are real pigtails!

And here are 2 videos for your viewing pleasure

Coming soon: Allison showing you her body parts and immitating different animals.