Before and After Apartment Pictures

 This is our dining room in our old house with our laundry room.

This is our new dining room with our laundry area off to the side that you can't see.  This room is narrower but it is longer and our laundry room is smaller. 

 This is our kitchen in the old house the last day we were in it.  We came back to play baseball in the empty place and while the kids and Todd were doing that I was taking pictures for one last time.  Let me just tell you that playing baseball in the house took on a whole new meaning when the apartment was completely empty and they didn't have to worry about breaking the 5th picture frame!

 Our new kitchen.  Did you just do a double take?  Looks the same right?  Look at the cabinets- they are the same.  The one major difference is that our counters are about 10 inches SHORTER!  Yes this is standard height here... well I think these are even shorter than standard.  Every time Todd walks into the kitchen he calls it "the kid kitchen".  He can sit on the counter top like a bench and the kids don't need step stools to help me cook anymore.  They can even reach the faucet and wash dishes now.  But the kitchen is a little bit longer than the other one.  In the 3 apartments we've lived in here this is my largest kitchen yet. :) (It's probably as big as your walk-in closet)

Here's another shot of our old kitchen from last Thanksgiving.

 Old living room

New living room

It more narrow than the old one but it has a "sun room" as I call it in the back.  If that wall wasn't there this room would be the same length.  The "sun room" is one of my favorite parts of our new house. 

Home School Room Pictures

Took a little trip out of the city

We spent the day watching horse races and hanging out with friends while enjoying the beautiful blue sky and sunshine! 

Home school

We just finished our 5th week of home school.  This week we added art class back into our schedule with a local teacher who comes to our house.  Ev loves art class and even though I am sad that she would rather have the other teacher teach her than me I think it is best.  Right now Ev and Elijah have Chinese class 2 days a week and Art class.
I also started studying this week too.  My days are full of home school in the morning and then right after lunch I have class for a couple of hours 3 days a week.  

 I love using the internet to find activities or ideas and using pinterest to find fun home school ideas.  On pinterest I had seen someone using sheet protectors and took apart a workbook and put it in a binder so they can use the workbook over and over.  Here we can buy binders that have sheet protectors inside of them so I've been using them a lot.  Since I will teach Kindergarten back to back to back,  and I figured I will save a lot of paper this way if I only copy it once.

 This is Hobs practicing writing letter A with play doh and dry erase

 These are Ev's sight words- She uses home made letter tiles to write the word again and then with dry erase.

I have a phonic workbook for Ev that I made and it is great to do with her and then for her to do on her own.


 

Where Have We Been?

Once we got back from our vacation in August we hit it hard looking for a new apartment in our complex since our landlords had told us in July that come next July we needed to move out.  This caught us off guard we were not planning on needing to move for a while.  We decided to start looking now since we really wanted to stay here and literally the day after we got back from vacation we began the week long trek of looking at apartments.  Thankfully on Friday of that week when I thought we were going to have to settle on one I just wasn't sure of we found one.  We found an apartment one building away from where we use to live which was also on the second floor and it has almost the same floor plan.  We jumped on the apartment but the master bathroom had never been completed (it was just a concrete shell) so our landlord quickly started working on fixing it up.  That was finished in 3 days.  Then we cleaned and prepared the house for it to be painted.  It got painted and then we cleaned after that and were able to move in two days later.  We didn't really start packing until the day before we moved since you never know when you can get things done around here and so it was fast and furious but we got moved on Wednesday and completely out of our old apartment in the next couple of days.  We had our handy fix it man come and install light fixtures to every room and fix other odds and ends.  We had him take out the kitchen cabinets we had bought for our old house and had him reinstall them in our new house.  And we had our Internet company come out and install our home phone and Internet in our new house.  Things went amazingly fast.  From finding our apartment to being fully living in it it was about two weeks.  We didn't have home school last week due to moving so this week I've been working hard to get to it done each morning.  So that is why I haven't taken any pictures yet, hopefully I can find some time tomorrow.  Be looking for those pictures to come soon! :)