New Beginnings

A lot of new stuff going on in my life, none of it huge, but most of it amounting to something good.
First off, we moved into a new place. The catalyst for moving was that we could no longer afford our rent and bills at our old place. So we had a month to pack up a house-full of stuff and find a place. I was pretty nervous about the house-hunting situation. There seemed to be nothing in our price range that would allow cats. We eventually found a 2-bedroom townhouse that we were approved to move into. It is much smaller than our old place so we had to get rid of a lot of stuff. Trashing and purging was great but somehow a bunch of crap made it to our new place. I'm still working on getting rid of stuff and toss out or donate something every day. We have nice new laminate floors and tile downstairs so it's a whole lot easier to keep clean than carpet and run-down linoleum. I decided that when we moved into the new place we would be a cleaner, improved version of the Mountain Clan and so far I think I have been living up to my end of the deal. My family is a whole other story though that I don't want to get into right now (trying to focus on the positive right now). Our new place has a little patio and a tiny yard connected to the big yard/playground that the complex shares. I spent the afternoon out there today with my girlfriend and her toddler and it was wonderful. I never once spent time outside at my old house because the yard was just so much work and I never wanted to pay attention to it. Our new place only has 2 bedrooms which is a little hard but the bedrooms are upstairs and the living area is downstairs which leads to a nice divide and you can still get some peace from each other. The stair topic is a little touchy though which you will hear about soon.
The second piece of news is that James is working for my dad! I didn't mean to marry an iron worker but apparently I did and I have to say it's kind of sexy. I'm so proud of him that he's getting out of the house every day and making some money. He has been working from home but the pay is so scattered that he refers to it as "volunteer work". Unfortunately he fell down our new stairs last weekend and has been in a lot of pain since. He's done something to the ligaments in his ankle and has an appointment with a specialist tomorrow so he missed today's work and he'll be missing tomorrow as well. Tomorrow he's doing something else though which leads me to my next piece of news:
We are actively trying to figure out why we haven't conceived yet. I had my first blood tests last week and James is going in to get his little buddies analyzed. My first tests came back good (meaning I am in fact ovulating) so I'll go for my next round of blood tests some time next week. If those tests don't show anything and James' doesn't either then I have to go get my tubes checked out. I'm not really very excited about that since it is apparently quite uncomfortable but if it helps us figure out what is wrong, then it is definitely worth it. We have names picked out so the next step is just to insert baby right? If it is a girl she will be "Lyric Maggie" and if it is a boy he will be "Finn". The catch is that they will not be Mountains though!
Our final piece of news is that we are changing our last name. Our new last name is O'Callaghan which I think is pretty damn fabulous. O'Callaghan is a family name of James' so it's not like we just picked one out of the air. We no longer want to have ties to James' father so we are getting rid of his name. Not sure what James' kids will do with their names but our future children will definitely be O'Callaghans.
That's all the news in the Mountain/O'Callaghan house. Maybe someone will eventually read this. Maybe I'll just keep tying for myself. xo