Chaotic Joy: ~ this old house ~

It’s been awhile, but I’ve been busy making this old house our home ... again J

We are SO, SO happy to be back in Charlotte and in our house! And we jumped right in with the projects, natch. We took the bar out of the man cave and made it into an office area for Patrick since we’ll need the old office for a guest room as the old guest room becomes the nursery. This called for new paint and carpet in the guest room and new paint/closet shelving, a ceiling fan, and crown molding in Aubreys room. I'll put up photos of that soon with other nursery stuff.

Our biggest project since moving in has been tackling the backyard though. There was ivy completely overgrowing the patio as well as the rest of the yard. So we uprooted all of the crap everywhere and planted shrubs surrounding the patio/mulched. We also added a walkway down the other side of the patio to the yard, planted a weeping cherry tree, put up our birdhouse FINALLY (we bought it three years ago!) and basically just revamped the whole look of the yard. I’m kicking myself for not getting “before” pictures, but the important thing is, it looks amazing now.

we have literally 200 of these bricks in our backyard now... I swear they prob weigh 20 lbs each so you can imagine how long it took to get them all from Lowe's, in the car, back home..

but it's worth having a decent looking backyard now!

of course, a certain someone loves the ivy :)

I don’t know if it’s because I’m pregnant and get tired more easily or if it’s because he’s just a work horse, but Patrick is literally a machine when it comes to house projects… he will literally just work for 6, 7, 8 hours straight… it’s insane! It also helped that we got to employ my parents for a weekend with house/yard help (which I’m sure is the one thing they didn’t miss when we lived in TX, ha!) We're still working on some little things like changing light fixtures and such and getting ready to start remodeling a bathroom and putting new floors in the laundry room... I definitely missed house projects!

In baby news, I’m pretty sure I’m getting bigger by the day ;) I have my diabetes test at my appointment this Friday, so I told myself I’m not eating ice cream this week… which is killing me. It’s only been three days… and it’s killing me. I think that’s a sign of a dependency problem :/

Also, today we had our 4D ultrasound and it was so incredible… I am just amazed at what technology can capture! I’m sure most people don’t really care about our ultrasound photos, but I just can’t get over how much you can see… we’re thinking she definitely inherited the “Boyle” nose and it’s kind of amazing to see something that resembles you, even if it’s just slightly and in an ultrasound! She has her right hand up by her face and is constantly moving it, waving, covering her eyes,