WE ARE MOVED IN!

We are finally moved into our new house. We moved on Saturday (9/13) and it was a feat, lemme tell ya! While Greg has accrued vacation time from work, he was unable to take any days off for our move. That being said, the first order of business was to get our home office set up by Monday afternoon so Greg could work. He & Josh immediately pulled up a section of carpet in the loft and began installing a wood floor where our desks would be.

Later in the day, Greg met hired help at our storage unit and began loading our belongings to move into the house. Here are pictures of Greg, Josh and the movers, moving us in.

Even in the midst of moving, we cannot neglect snack time, which is about 10:00am and mom better be prepared!

Greg and I seem to have a lot of 'stuff' so just imagine chaos and mayhem and you have an accurate picture of what our lives are like during the process of moving into a new house. As you can imagine, the disorganization drives me insane, seriously. So upon move in, I become this human distribution center, in constant motion, tearing open boxes and moving the contents around the house. While I'm figuring out where things are going to go in the new house, I'm also simultaneously creating functional process flows with our stuff as I imagine our day to day living. What that means is I could spend hours in our master closet as I put things away and also try to figure out if the hampers should go by the closet door or by the dresser or by the hanging clothes, etc. It's like this for days until I get it all done. It's physically and mentally exhausting...but I can't stop myself. I work tirelessly until I pass out at the end of every night. Only to wake up the next morning, still exhausted but driven by this need for order and protocol. I know alot of people who live with boxes packed in their garages for years after moving into a house. That is not me.

The first picture was taken on Day 2 (Sunday) and shows the progress on the office. The second picture was taken on Day 3 (Monday), Greg was furiously working to get his desk and computer set up to begin working at 1:00pm, during the same time period Greg was also providing VCR support to his dad over the phone, that Greg is Amazing!

Limited progress on the Kitchen and Family Room...stuff everywhere!

Fortunately, Nathan has not picked up my neurotic neatness tendencies, he had no qualms eating breakfast amidst half unpacked boxes and packing paper everywhere!

For the next 2 days (Tuesday-Wednesday) I worked tirelessly trying to put things in order and as a result I forgot to take pictures. On Thursday, I had to return to work. Then on Friday, we left our house in complete disarray in order to attend my brother's wedding in Virginia!

To be continued....

Hull Home Videos!

For some reason, that I have yet to figure out, I haven't been able to post videos directly to my blog, like I used to be able to. So once more I am trying another 3rd party service to test the quality of the videos that I post. I 'think' this might work better...let's see.

This is Greg playing drums at church this past Sunday. I had to stop the video short, as you will see.


Nathan at Espee Park, sticking his head in the water...

Playground steps...


Taking a walk...


Reposting the video from Labor Day because the quality in the original was pretty bad...

Take me out to the ballgame...!

Greg finally got to play softball today and the fields he played on were not your average fields. He played at 'Big League of Dreams', a sports park containing multiple baseball fields that are scaled down replicas of major league baseball stadiums. There are also batting cages, restaurants, and an indoor soccer arena. I read that the entire complex cost $36 million to build.

Here's an aerial picture I copied of what the complex looks like from above. If you look at the center, where the fields all meet, that is a polygon shaped restaurant/snack bar that has huge glass windows overlooking each one of the 4 fields. You can literally watch your teams game from inside the restaurant. I really thought this was brilliant.


Each field has the same features, such as the seating behind home is stadium seating and the back walls all have cheesy people boards so it looks like there are 'people in the stands'.



Greg in action...he's a beautiful creature...


Nathan in action...he's a cutie, patooty.


Pictures of some of the other fields....
1. Los Angeles, Big A in Anahiem 2. Boston's Fenway Park, Green Monster.


1. New York Polo Grounds


St. Louis Sportsman Park

She·nan·i·gans

While we are anxiously waiting for our close date and the ability to move into our house...we are surprisingly content and just going about every day life.

On Tuesday of this week, Rockpoint Church, the church we attended before leaving Arizona, called and asked if Greg could play drums this coming Sunday morning. We knew that the September schedule had been made in advance, so we thought it would be a while before Greg would play again. Looks like God had other plans! Greg had to dig through the storage unit to find his drums and equipment and has temporarily set up shop in Gary's office. Thank goodness the Nortons are in Africa right now! (and Norton's if your reading this, I promise we will put everything back in place before you get back!) :) It's been a little while since Nathan has heard live drums so he had to be right in the thick of it while Greg was practicing. Standing at the door was not close enough, he wanted to sit in Greg's lap!



Speaking of music, before we left Texas I bought this little keyboard for $8.99 at Kid to Kid. Nathan loves this keyboard and plays with it nearly every day. I'm convinced we have a mini-musician on our hands with the level of interest that Nathan seems to have in music. The oddest thing is that Nathan wants to play this keyboard sitting on top of Greg. Here are pictures of how Nathan prefers to compose.



The next set of pictures are truly shenanigans by definition. Nathan is just a little infatuated with the contents of the refrigerator door. He sneaks into the refrigerator and takes all the bottles out and surrounds himself with them. For him it's a very serious project which he performs very quietly but he is oh so proud of his accomplishment when done, as you can see in the picture.



This last one was just me being silly, I pulled Nathan's shorts as far up as I could, trying to picture how Nathan would look in some 'Sansabelts'.

Aquatic Activities

Does it seem like we have alot of water pictures already? Well, when it's summer in Arizona...that's what you do-so here's some more! San Tan Village Mall about 9:00 am on Tuesday, day after Labor Day, 90 degrees. ;)





This is the bad mommy picture...instead of catching Nathan at the end of this slide, I was snapping pictures and poor Nathan landed on his bottom quite shocked at the suddenness of it all.

Happy Labor Day 2008!

I think it's 'Arizonaian' tradition to hang out poolside on Labor Day...it seems like we've done it every year we've lived here. So thanks to the Dercks for a fun afternoon and great cookout!

I was hoping to capture Nathan having fun in the pool, on video, but it didn't work out. Nathan was pretty laid back, as you will see, while Greg added entertaining audio (blowing water bubbles).



Pictures....this first one shows a mouth FULL of teeth! (click to enlarge) . Nathan is crying in the first picture because he got scared and Crazy Aunt Lynn was right there to comfort him...but when Nathan gets frightened, he only wants his momma!

Espree Park, Chandler Arizona

Today I was looking for something to do that was fun and most importantly FREE! We ended up at Espree Park, a public park with a playground and small water park.








These are my somewhat 'artistic/creative' shots...


You can actually see the water droplets in these pictures, which I thought was pretty cool...click on them to enlarge and see.