Northwood!

By Tiffany George
Andrew (2 1/2 years) and Natalie (8 months). Notice Andrew's hand around his sister. Too cute!

Moving in December?!? Yes, that's right, Pete and I made the plunge to move to Northwood just over a week ago. We did a lot of research into school systems, and a lot of soul searching to decide what we felt was best for our family, and Northwood came out on top. We decided that we only wanted to move once, and we like the school system the best here, so here we are in Northwood, NH. We were not intending to move at this time of year, but this house just came along and took us by storm! Our house is just what we were looking for and the kiddos seem to be adjusting just fine too. We are probably most excited about things like a big silverware drawer, a dishwasher that works well, having a basement, a garage...and did I mention a basement and garage?! Not having to scrape ice off from the van in the freezing cold the other made me incredibly grateful already!

One very cool thing about our house is that through our backwoods there is a farm with horses. Andrew thinks this is unbelievable, and riding his horse Butterscotch has really taken on a new meaning!

Andrew was fine with leaving Dodge Street. I spent a lot of time prepping him for the move and it seemed to go as well as we could have hoped. That first day he kept saying "no go home, no go home" as nightfall approached, and he was saying it in a hopeful way, like please let us stay here. It was priceless. Since then he has asked to go back to Dodge several times, mainly if we are in the car and we are headed home, but he seems to be okay with living at the new house now.

Here he is carrying our flag as we left Dodge Street. You can see him waving good bye with his cute little hand.

Not surprisingly, Natalie was her little cute happy self about the move, as usual.

He seemed a bit perplexed by the new house at first, but both he and Natalie certainly like their new playroom. Katie and I worked very hard to get the playroom together on Thursday before the kids got to see it on Friday, so I'm glad that they love it so much.

This pretty much sums up the kids' reaction to new playroom that first day:

I don't have a picture of it yet, but you can see these little square mirrors on the wall behind Natalie. She loves to smile and giggle at the cute baby in the mirror. Sometimes she seems to be looking behind the wall to see where that baby is. She is so adorable.

Aside from 2 1/2 days of having no power, life is pretty much carrying on as usual here in Northwood. Thanks to Mom, Dad, Pete, Gail, and Katie, we were able to get most of our stuff unpacked over the first few days. Most everything is put away where it belongs aside from the office, craft room, and a few boxes in our bedroom. We have realized that hiring a moving company was probably some of the best money we could have ever spent! I'm sure our relatives agree :o)

Though we didn't need help in moving all of our boxes and furniture, it still took A LOT of help to get our house to its current state! From babysitting and box moving to our own meals on wheels, our families really came through in the clutch! Also, thanks to our good friend Todd who helped Pete haul a ton of boxes the day before the moving company came!

To keep some normalcy to our lives, we of course had to get our Christmas tree. Despite the rain, Andrew picked out a perfect tree, and he had an absolute blast decorating it, as the photos show. Natalie wants to attack the tree, but she is learning.Do you like this ornament Mommy? How about I put it right here? (D here, as he likes to say for some weird reason)

Wow! I did it!In our attempts to keep Natalie away from the Christmas tree, she loves to play with the play table. Since crawling is now old-hat for her, she is now mastering pulling up to standing!Here are a few other Christmas shots that I took in an attempt to get the perfect shot. I feel that they are all just perfect, so I am sharing lots. Enjoy!Gotta run! Please let us know if you want to come check out our new pad. Andrew loves to show it off!