Getting Settled

My beautiful princess got her first major haircut this week. . . she hated it.

We were looking at the magazines while we waited and she chose the most outlandish and ugly haircuts as her favorite. One thing they had in common: long hair.
I felt bad, but it will grow out. :)
That being said she's super excited about the prospect of wearing bows and barrettes now, so I think she'll be fine.

We're settling nicely into our home. I realized the other day (thanks to Jason) that I haven't posted anything on here for quite a while, so I figured I'd better make up for my lack with pictures and interesting things :)
So firstly Alisabeth: She's finally situated enough to be okay with pre-school. She still cries on her bad mornings, but on the rest she goes right in and joins the other kids!! They're making a farm this week. Tuesday she came home with a farmer and a pig and they walked around the preschool with goat masks on that they had painted and colored and pretended to be goats.
She's amazing.
She's really into climbing now, thus the picture above. She also climbs to the very top of her playset in the backyard which is at least as tall as our roof. She climbs pretty much anything that holds her weight for a moment. At the mall she wants to climb to the top of the tree, but luckily they designed it so that there's no place to get enough of a grip to do that. . . thankfully.
She's excitedly anticipating our upcoming trip to Colorado and recently enjoyed a visit from her cousins and her  best friend Paige from Boise. All in all she's having a marvelous time.

Jason is wrapping up his first semester back in school and doing a great job. He'll be re-taking statistics another semester, but it's not from lack of trying. He's impressed me with his renewed determination to accomplish his goal.
He's also made a few good friends and study partners at school, so that's been nice for him. One more week and then he'll be done with this semester. Oh, and in case you haven't already seen his class project:
http://jatflannery.net/individual/template/indv-home-page.php
In his personal life he's having a blast with his new garage. He's established everything where it belongs and always has some project or other going on. I don't mind at all because the projects are generally housekeeping items.
While the Raybons were here to visit he forced Brian to help him install a nightlight into the livingroom and together they attempted to hook up the water line on the fridge (unfortunately there was a leak and too many broken parts, so that didn't happen).
He's also installed a light at the bottom of the stairs, put in a vent from the heating into Alisabeth's room for when winter comes, torn our a wall where we found mold and replaced the entire thing including mudding and taping all within the same day. Outside he's helped get the lawn into shape and spray for bugs (of which we have millions), get the watering under control and set and drilled through a door lock when the bathroom was accidentally locked with no one inside (there were two doors in our house that had actually key locks on them. The bathroom was one. It now has the door handle from the downstairs pantry on it.)
I'm sure there are a bunch of other things that he's accomplished thus far, but they're too many to count.
Oh! and he also dug up about 1/2 of the weeds which we have ignored since moving in.

I forgot to mention another of Alisabeth's accomplishments: She found a rose! It was in one of those sections of weeds that I had been ignoring. Suddenly there was a beautiful pink flower right in the middle. She plucked it, as usually, and brought it to me and suddenly I realized I have not one but two rose bushes hidden over there. So I spent about two hours digging them out. It probably wouldn't have taken so long if we hadn't had a spider incident earlier in the day and the literally dozens of spiders in that patch didn't make me a little nervous.

Me: Work is going well. Our only other experienced auditor quit and finishes up his two weeks on Friday. That leaves the two partners with Nick and I who don't really have a ton of understanding/experience. It's going to be fun as we move into the heavy part of audit season. Galusha has been attempting to hire one or two experienced auditors, however everyone with experience who applied wasn't actually interested in the job, they were just fishing. Instead we'll have another unexperienced person starting Monday. This is going to be fun. On the plus side I've received an excessive amount of praise at work in the last month or so. :)
Personally I finished my book, waited months for people to get back to me on edits, they never did, so I chose two new friends (well a friend and my mother) and they finally got enough back to me for me to finish up the first 10,000 words which is the required amount to send in a manuscript to a publisher. So off it went yesterday. Now I'll wait six months to see if they even notice it.
I've already got the second book mostly written (just trying to figure out the best spot to end it in) and the third (and final) book started with a pretty good understanding of where it's going. It's way exciting. . . wouldn't it be nice if we got enough money to finally start the college fund for Bitsy?!?!?

And finally our home: It is doing well. It seems to be settling well and has definitely helped us out. The plants are growing and so are the insects.

Seen below are all the cool things that are growing right now.

Butternut Squash - planted by Alisabeth.
There were twice as many starts in this
spot, but I cut them down. . .

Carrots. . . yes they need to be thinned
No I can't bring myself to do it.

Peas. . .only one blossom so far.

Zucchini. . . One little orange blossom
just starting. . . so exciting. 

Our apple tree. . . this is after thinning. . . jeeze!