Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Good news alert! (aka It ain't just us)

I got a call yesterday letting me know Tiana got a spot in Kindergarten at the school we were hoping for :D :) :D :) :D :) Abbey's cousin Anthony goes there, as will his little brother and hopefully Abbey too. It was very welcome news as now we can relax a bit and start planning for the beginning of the school adventure!

And what I was REALLY wanting to say was:

So over the past few weeks we've been listening loyaly to either random Disney movie songs, or Do-Re-Mi from Sound of music in our jaunts to and from school/work. This particular CD has every song from The Lion King for some reason, and of course Tiana loves to belt it out when it's on (although The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room is her favorite). What I've noticed is, that when Hakuna Matata comes on she has noticed something, completely on her own by the way, that there is that one part of the song that involved "the Magic Log". I always thought this was a more adult take on the silliness of animation, but apparently a 5 year old gets it too, that this is an odd thing to happen. You walk across a log, shaking your head back and forth happily, and by the time you reach the other end you are magically grown up!

Hmmm...

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

New car, new house, new kid

Well I"m happy to say, although I'm a stingy money nut, we've managed to get a house, two new cars (well, used - one 2002 and one 198-something) and we're planning for a new addition. Tax returns look good this year so if we are wise we might get caught up and be about 95% debt free, and possibly have enough to register said new cars. But enough of that. I've spent the past couple weeks panicing about how we could possibly afford a new car and fix the old ones and afford a day or two of daycare and so on and so on - so I'm gladly breathing a sigh of relief until I get my W-2.

So now on to the new car. A Honda 2002 Odyssey with 100,000 miles on it. Luckily, Honda's last much longer than that :) It has nifty feature such as two side doors (that open electronically, so Tiana can open/close it by herself by simply pulling the handle, or we can open via the push of a button from the front seat), a deep 'trunk' space so the back seats can fold down into it - a wonderful feature if you've got a car where you have to actually take the seat out to use the extra space - and a post-purchase tv installation. I say TV because it's supposed to be a DVD, but the past owner changed it for a VCR instead (kinda humorous). The TV screen part itself is broken though - just the plastic hinge that holds it to the roof tho not that whole thing. We might look at repairing it someday :) And now, a stock photo (correct color but an '07 )

Aaaaahhhh, isn't it beautiful. Other perks: It has a CD player (very awesome). Other drawbacks: it won't pick up AM for some reason. My world is now in chaos *cry*

The other one is some old suburban Walter found somehow...he's going to pick it up today. He said it's in pristine (sp??) condition and the odometere only reads 15,000 miles. Never mind of course there is no room for a 1 to tack on to the number so it could really be 115,000 or even 215,000 for all we know. But he said it's beautiful, runs well, and we can easily pay it off when we sell the Altima and have money left over. Yeah, it's that cheap too :) Plus registration and insurance on it will be next to nil. I'ts not a drive everyday kind of car, just an 'extra' in case he can't get the Festiva running, or it breaks down again - or we just want to take a drive and not put the miles on the newer minivan. It all fits together well! I even finally made it to the DMV to change my name (mostly I needed to change my address tho!) and we're working on 'officially' changing Tiana's name. Word of advice....don't be possesive and egocentric over your name only to change your mind and decide feeling like a 'real' family is more important years later. It REALLY sucks trying to get that rectified....

Let it also be known that I finally changed/fixed my links :)