May...you exhaust me!

May is here...an exciting month FULL of fun, travel, and exhaustion!  Curtis is wrapping up his first tee ball season on the 15th.  It was a ton of fun and a great learning experience for him.  We are so glad that we signed him up and will definitely be playing more in the future.  Curtis also just joined his very first (of many hopefully) swim team.  He has always been our little fish and LOVES the water.  He truly enjoys swimming and is really excited now that he can actually swim some laps.  I love it when he turns to the swimmers next to him and says "wow, that was exhausting!  we did two laps!!!!"  One of the reasons I put him on the team I did was because of the head coach.  He was my coach in HS and I knew he would get a kick out of coaching a "little Schwartz".  Curtis has improved already in the first week of practice and we can't wait to see how much more he will improve before their first meet.  Nicholas is such a trooper right now, following big brother and waiting patiently during his activities.  I try to make it worth while for him with lots of special snuggle time, digging time, and of course lots of stick throwing :) oh and of course some M&M's if mommy is desperate!   I am constantly reminding Curtis that in a few months he will have to sit through gymnastics/swim lessons/or some other kind of class for his little brother and he better remember how patient Nicky is being now....

Jacob has been and will be a weekend guest at our home this month.  His project in Albuquerque is (prayerfully, hopefully, fingers crossed, hail mary pass pumped and ready...) coming to a close this month.  His hard deadline for travel is June 1st (thank you Andrew) so unfortunately, he will be practically living there until then.  We keep discussing how quickly this pregnancy is going to be over.  By the time he stops traveling we will be full term and ready to go.

Jillian is BIG and HOT :) loving feeling Andrew and all his antics in-utero.  33 weeks and blossoming in the heat of the summer...oyyyyy!

We had a wonderful weekend with my parents Cinco De Mayo weekend and stayed in the Woodlands to catch the Casting Crowns concert.  We really love them and it was a perfect first concert for our kiddos.  Everyone had a blast and it was definitely something we would all like to do again soon.

Friends

We were fortunate enough to be able to spend some awesome quality time with our dear friends the Groves last week.  We miss them terribly since they moved back to Georgia.  We were thrilled to be able to meet sweet baby Katherine for the first time.  She is beyond gorgeous and it was just heavenly to have a newborn around here again.  It definitely made all of us even more eager to welcome baby Andrew.  Shirley's sister Ginny stayed with us a few nights as well. It was wonderful to have a house full of kiddos (10 total).  Sounds like mass chaos doesn't it?  Absolutly not!  Their children are so beautifully and wonderfully gentle, sweet, well mannered, helpful, and delightful.  Seriously.  It was downright ridiculous how fantastic they all behaved.  It was such a joy to have them all here!  We are just so very thankful to have them in our lives.  Can't say enough about what an inspiration Shirley is to me.  She has such a joyful and encouraging spirit about her.  Her beauty is contagious and she truly enriches everyone she meets.  And her beautiful and well mannered children speak loads about her amazing diligence in raising them.  Every time she walks out of our home I always feel a bit of a "Shirley high" and find about ten things I should add to our routine to increase the discipline and holiness in our home.  She is absolutely infectious in her duties as a wife and mother.  Here are just a few of the pictures from our visit with our dear friends.

Game Ball

Curtis was awarded the game ball tonight by his Tee Ball coach. He really did a great job at pitcher and was pretty darn proud of himself. He had lots of plans as to what kind of pictures he wanted with his special ball. Perhaps mommy takes too many pictures of him?! If you can't already tell we are all loving tee ball around here!

Celebrate

All work and NO play...thats our motto these days. But yesterday we finally took time to celebrate!! Selling one house, buying and renovating another, my 29th birthday, and we are 28 weeks along with baby Andrew. Our entire family made it out to Pappasitos to celebrate with us and then joined us for Oreo Cream cake at our house afterwards. One of my favorite moments of the night...when the mariachi band sang me a birthday song...TEQUILA...hysterical! Perfect birthday song for a super prego lady! We love you all and are so thankful for all of your help!

Goodbye Pearland

Its official. The house is no longer ours. Don't you love the "five year old attempt at a picture" we kinda look like we are a two armed four leg person...awesome. But it captured the moment. The last time we walked out of the house. And here we are the first time we walked in it...almost newlyweds...7 years ago.

Honestly the hardest part was saying goodbye to our amazing neighbors. We were very blessed to have made some lifelong friendships on Linden Place. We know this isn't goodbye but its hard to think about not being right across the street anymore. We are so thankful that we only own one house again. We are all thankful to be done with the driving back and forth and feeling torn between two places. Tomorrow night we celebrate...Pappasitos with our family...too bad I can't get a margarita...I feel like I deserve one (or fifteen) after the chaos that was this month :) We are so blessed!

MOVED

our living room now...not going to keep all the decorations where they are but I wanted to get stuff out of boxes and onto shelves for now...plus its exciting to make it look like a put together room
new living room...aren't those floors awesome?!
playroom...obviously in need of some more furniture but the boys love it.
our dining room now this room and our guest room are the only rooms with boxes left in them. I consider that a huge success seeing as how we have only been here for a week and Jacob was out of town all week.

Thanks to our amazing friends and family we are officially moved into our new home. We have been super busy with all the renovations and we just got our wireless internet set up today. I wanted to put a quick update on here but I will have to wait until later this week to get more new pictures up. We can not believe that we have gotten so much done in such a short time but we are so thrilled to have made so much progress..Ill up up more "after" pictures soon Check out some recent pictures...
My amazing new dishwasher...slightly better than the one that came with the house that even after twenty different Pintrest dishwasher cleaning ideas still made my dishes dirtier than when they went in :(
Here are our dusty new floors just after we had them installed and before we got to clean them all up
another view of our dusty floors
look at all the dust flying around...
Jacob left for ABQ on Monday after we had just moved in on Saturday so I suprized him by painting the half bath, adding curtains, a rug, painting the mirror, replacing the toilet paper holder, replacing the towel holder, painting the cabinets, and switching out the hardware through out the room from gold to silver. I had lots of fun working on this room and only shed a few tears through all the installation :)

Home Update

Our first decorations are up! Our Papal blessing seamed to be the perfect start!!
The boys rolling around on our clean new carpet! Thank God the PeePee carpet is gone!

formal living room painted and new blinds installed...this will be the boys playroom
new carpet up the stairs and freshly painted balisters
formal living room painted (took forever to get all that beautiful trim painted! so worth it though!) the main color in the house is on the bottom and the new "blue/green/teal" is on top

Here are some more pictures that capture our progress on the house so far. We have completely finished the painting upstairs and the new carpet is absolutely beautiful. The formal living room and formal dining room have been painted and will get new floors on Wednesday. The tile has all been removed from the main living area and Jacob is working on removing the rest of the residual grout and leveling the floors before the installers come Wed. We are hoping to get the entry way walls painted before Wed too (a HUGE task as these walls are at least 20 ft high!!!) and possibly the main living area too. We took a leap as far as paint colors go and choose a blue/green/teal color for the kitchen and top half of the formal dining. We weren't sure if this was going to turn out okay or not but we both really really love it so far! I'm excited to have tried something other than red and khaki. We officially move all of our stuff on Saturday the 24th. We will have a busy week wrapping up the floors and painting in our new house and packing/preparing the Pearland house for the move day. We are all really ready to be in our new house full time...as much as we love our pearland house...our new house really is starting to feel like home!