Boosterthon!

The last two years I have served on our schools PTA. When I attended my first meeting, I was shocked that there were only 4 moms at the meeting. Since that time, those numbers have dwindled.

We live in a community full of helicopter-moms, so I was quite shocked. But, it is what it is.

Last year we did a Fund Run- it was the second year they had done one. A mom volunteered to organize it, and she did a great job. In the end, we raised about $6,000- which is a lot for our school (which is REALLY sad, because the school literally a quarter of a mile from our house has a PTA that raises over $65,000, and some other schools in our district raise well over $100,000 a year. We raise about $13,000 a year and somehow can't break that barrier).

Anyway, this year I sat in a PTO meeting with me and one other person, and we looked at each other and said, "We can't do this." So we partnered with a company called Boosterthon. They told us that we would profit over $18,000 from this one fundraiser if we went with them. Yes, we would have to pay them (the $18,000 was after paying them), but we would still profit way more than we did last year.

We decided to give it a shot. After all, if it didn't work, we simply wouldn't use it again- but why not give it a shot?

So we went with it.

We are SO glad we did!!!! This company was AWESOME!!!! They did EVERYTHING! And, we stand to profit over $16,000- which is less than they originally thought, but $10,000 more than last year and we didn't have to do anything!

It was really great- and of course I took plenty of pictures to prove it:

They had a tunnel for all the kids to run through and before the race Claire went and ran through and danced in it. She felt so special.

 It was so fun to see the kids dancing and getting excited for the run. It was a great time!

Camille danced to the music the whole time- she was incredibly well-behaved

Here is Audra's class after the race- they all did a fantastic job!

Camille Turns 2!

I guess I need to state the obligatory mom comment: I can't believe my baby is already two years old!

We began the festivites with Camille's favorite food: Pasta and bread!

We had a simple celebration with family tonight. Claire insisted that we play games, so we hung a big picture of a cake and played "Pin the candle on the cake." The Birthday Girl wouldn't play, but the other two sure loved it!

Because we have her and Audra's Birthday so close together, I opted for a fruit pizza instead of cake. I loved it, but the girls not so much.

Camille started acting silly- she loves to be silly. She stuck her fork in her mouth and started swinging her head around.

 Now for the presents! The older girls were very helpful!

 She got a pair of shoes from Grandma and Grandpa M. and she went around for about 5 minutes showing them off and saying, "shu! Shu!"

 She was pretty excited about this toy:

 This is the best we could do for a family picture. Notice how Claire has her arms wrapped around Camille's legs- this is indicative of how Claire is always needing to touch Camille in some way:

 Then we headed outside where Camille could show off her new dress and play with her bubble toy:

At age 2 Camille continues to delight our little family. She has definitely started in on tantrums, but they are usually pretty short and she quickly moves on. After having dealt with Claire, I can handle whatever Camille brings.

She LOVES cheese. She ALWAYS wants cheese.

She is talking pretty well now with one syllable words. She says, "cheez! cheez!" or "shu!" (shoe) or any other number of things. In the past couple of months her language has really started to take off.

She loves playing with her older sisters (though she is wary of Claire because Claire constantly insists on smothering her). She thinks that whatever they can do, she can do as well. And for the most part, she can. She keeps up quite well with them, and definitely holds her own.

Camille absolutely loves dogs. She has an uncanny ability to spot dogs wherever they roam and will always say "ruff! ruff!" when she sees one.

She is very polite. She always says "tank you" until you respond with "you're welcome," and sometimes she just says it over and over and over again and you just have to keep saying "you're welcome" about a hundred times until she stops.

She is emphatic. If one of the other girls is crying, she'll go give them a hug and say, "sorry!"

Around smaller kids she can be a little bossy- we have started to notice that. We think it is because she is used to being the smallest one in our family, so when somebody smaller comes along she wants to assert her "big kid" role.

She still takes one nap. It usually last about 90 minutes long, and hopefully she won't outgrow her nap for awhile yet.

She is another fashionista- that makes three for three with our girls. She wants to choose her clothes (and she often chooses her footy pajamas) and really likes to play dress up with her older sisters.

We LOVE LOVE LOVE her curls! I hope they never go away!

She loves bath time. She races to the tub as soon as we say "bath time!"

She LOVES dolls- especially Audra's dolls. She takes Audra's doll and undresses her and loses the clothes, which makes Audra upset to go to school for fear that Camille will find her doll. It has become quite the doll-tastrophe.

She doesn't like socks. Like Claire, she has a foot fettish and if the sock isn't on exactly right it drives her nuts. The problem is that she gets dry, cracked, and bloody toes because she doesn't wear socks.

Every nap time and bed time I read her four books- they are always the same: "What Can Simon Be?", "Daddy Hugs", "Olivia Counts," and "Barnyard Friends." Then I sing her a song, give her a kiss, and lay her in her crib, where she immediately falls asleep.

I asked Claire what she thought of Baby Camille and she said, "Camille is beautiful. And cute."

I asked Audra the same question and she said, "She's good."

Overall, she is pretty awesome. Sweet and fiesty- she is a good mix of both Audra and Claire, and we sure love having her in the family!

Baking With Claire

We got a nice, fun blast of snow to the tune of over a foot yesterday and today. We had to pull the winter clothes out again. This is the winter that never ends. Blah.

So Claire and I made some muffins. The girls help me bake quite a bit, and it was fun. I think I need to make more muffins- they turned out so yummy!

Mother's Day

 My Mom By: Claire Age: 4 1/2

My Mom's Name is: Christina

My Mom is: 71 Years old

My mom weighs: 7 pounds

My mommy's job is: To work on the house

My mommy laughs when: Someone sneezes

My mom like to do this in her free time: Handstands

My mommy is really good at: Working on the house

My favorite meal my mom makes is: Pancakes

My mom always says: Let's go!

My favorite thing to do with mom is: Play Candyland

I love my mom because: She gives me hugs

My mom loves me because: I give her hugs!

 Let me tell you about my mom. Her eyes are pretty. Her shoes are shiny. Her hair is nice.

She loves daisies. Now you know about my mom.

Flip Or Flop?

I have been a little slack in my posts recently- so I will make up for it by having a really long post today:)

There is a very good reason I have not been posting cute pictures of my kids as frequently: I have been busy. REALLY busy.

Several years ago I decided I wanted to try my hand at landlording. I have a dear friend who is incredibly successful and has over a dozen income properties, and for years she talked to me about getting into the game. I was willing to give it a shot, but Ben had absolutely no desire to do so- he was worried about maintenance issues, bad tenants, crashing housing markets, etc. All good reasons, for sure, but I wanted to take the risk while he did not.

For years we went back and forth on this. Finally, last year, we decided to get a place. For the most part, the house was in great condition and we literally posted the house for rent the day after we bought it. After six months, I asked Ben if it was worth it, and even he admitted it was- everything with that unit was/is going perfectly as planned.

It is a row house in a little subdivisions with 12 row houses all together.

A couple of months ago one of the other owners contacted me and said she was interested in selling her units (she has two) and she wondered if I was interested in buying one. Ben was not. I was.

I went and looked at it- and it was in HORRIBLE shape. I mean, HORRIBLE. It is a 2 bedroom, 1 bath and it had about 12 people living in it. From 30 yards away you could smell the cat urine saturated carpet. Lots of pot smoke as well. Mold, rat poo, you name it- it had it. Absolutely DISGUSTING.

I fell in love! I knew there was GREAT potential! Thankfully, Ben was not with me as there is no way he could fathom just how bad it truly was. I don't think there is any way he would have let me buy it if he had seen it before the day of closing (in fact, he didn't see it until most of the renovations were done)!

After much persuasion (and it really did take my best persuasion skills) I convinced Ben that this was a good buy.

Here's the deal: I don't want to go back to work. EVER. I loved teaching while I taught, but I don't ever want to go back. I LOVE being a stay-at-home-mom! I LOVE the options that being at home affords me.

But realistically, I know there is a possibility that I could at some point in my life be widowed- and the time could possibly come when I would need to be responsible for the financial needs of my family. That's just life- things happen. And if I never need to be financially responsible for my family, it is still really fun for me to have something on the side that doesn't require a huge time commitment (i.e, I can still be a stay-at-home-mom full time), but still brings in some fun vacation money or whatever. It's FUN for me.

With this house, I knew I would need to WORK full-time for a good three weeks before we could put the house on the market. And, three days after closing Ben went out of town for two weeks. UGH!

We thought about flying my mom out to help me out with the kids, but she works so that wasn't really a possibility. Instead, I called in every baby-sitting favor anybody owed me and relied on Ben's parents A LOT.

Basically, I realized why I don't ever want to go to work! It is REALLY hard to balance work and kids! Huge kudos to all of you who do it!!!

Anyway, I went to the house constantly and worked harder than I have in a really, really long time. Manual labor, elbow grease, blood, sweat, and tears. It all came out! I had not been so sore since forever. It was a butt load of work.

But on Wednesday we were able to post our house for rent, after 3 weeks of impossibly hard work. Tomorrow we are having lots and lots of showings (the response has been amazing so far!) and we should get a signed contract tomorrow. The Denver rental market is insane right now, which is great for us.

Ben still isn't thrilled we did this. He is still leery of the land lording business, and with good reason. It is a risk. But, as I hope you will see from the pictures below, it is a risk that I am perfectly capable of handling! Well, I will let you know in 20 years if it was all worth it or not. In the meantime, I promised Ben that I would not buy another house for at least 4 years. This one just about did me in!

Before:

 Old paint, cracked concrete, pretty DUMPY looking- right?

Their dog had scratched up the front door super bad

 The carpet was so disgusting that you could smell the cat urine

saturated carpet from 30 yards away- I'm not joking.

Would you ever want to live here? GROSS!!!!

My only thought was, "HOW can people live here like this???"

It was beyond disgusting. Pictures don't do it justice.

 You can see the dark, dank feel of the entire house- the walls are filthy and have tons of holes. The dog scratched the paint from the outside door off so you can see the medal. Every door in the house was breaking or completely destroyed.

 Mold around the tile in the kitchen (above) and filth under the laundry (below)

 The tub was surrounded by mold- the darkest, most disgusting bathroom I had ever seen:

 In several spots the ceiling was falling down:

The previous owner was a slum lord, plain and simple. She admitted to not doing anything to the house for years, and we could tell.

Ben and I have NO desire to be slum lords. We want rentals that we would be comfortable living in.

So this unit needed the Christina Touch.

I brought it- and here's the end result:

 Nice, open, bright- concrete stained floors (those took 3 days of hard, physical labor, but they turned out fabulous! Perfect for pets- because if they pee on the floor, who cares?)

 Red brick accent walls

 Updated kitchen

 Both bedrooms have access to the back patio:

 CLEAN bathroom- that was a gross job. I'm glad it's over:

 Updated lighting in the dining room:

 Fresh paint outside (oh, and I built the gate all by myself!):

 Back Patio

What do you think? Is the Christina Touch alright?

Even though Ben won't admit it, I think he is proud of what I have done. I caught him bragging about the house to a co-worker, so in his own quiet way I think he is 10% glad that we bought the house and he has something to brag about his wife about.

Hopefully we will get it rented tomorrow! Showings are the scariest part for me, but Ben is surprisingly calm and AWESOME at showings, so we make a great team. It's been really fun to get to know him as a business partner and to be working on the same team. Wish us luck!!!

Audra's Dance

Ben attended Audra's dance class and got to see Audra's Birthday Dance. His phone took better video- it even includes sound! I'm not sure what happened with my phone and why it didn't do video, but that's OK. I'll get it figured out later.

Here is Audra's Birthday Dance:

Claire's Dance Class

At the girls dance classes they do a Birthday dance. I don't think you can hear the audio, but it is still pretty cute- especially for Grandma's who live far away. Because Claire's Birthday is in the summer time, they did her Birthday dance early. My favorite part is when they all give her a hug and she is about 6 inches taller than everyone. So cute!