Life

Life in the Shaffer house has been busy the past week; too busy to have had time to take any new photos of the kids.

Cort is growing up so fast. He is 31/2 months old and pretty advanced on his development-if you ask me of course. He began rolling over from his tummy to his back very, very early, around 2 1/2 weeks old. He started to roll back to front at around 2 1/2 months. He coos so loud and smiles all the time. Last night, he was sleeping and I kissed him and he laughed and smiled. So cute. He is the perfect baby during the day, but is not so cute at night. Typically, he would wake up once or twice a night and go about 4 1/2 - 5 hours at a time without waking up. This past week, he has been waking up about every 2 hours and I am so exhausted. Normally, I would just ask Chad to help, but Chad is up until about 1am studying every night. Hopefully, this phase will be over soon and we can all get back to getting a decent nights sleep.

Creighton is the funniest little kid I have ever met. We all laugh at him so many times during the day. He is so smart too-I think he is going to be an architect like his dad. He has always been really advanced in his fine motor skills. He had a pincer grasp (holding a pencil correctly) when he was about 9 months old and he began snapping his fingers at 1 year old. All of my kids have met just about every developmental milestone early, but he has surprised me the most. Kiley was really advanced in her language skills. When she was two, you felt like you were talking to a 4 year old and it was easy to forget how young she was because she always seemed so mature. Creighton is really advanced in his fine and gross motor skills. He was pulling himself up on furniture at 4 months and walking around it at 5 months. He began to walk at 9 months and was running by 10 months. He is so inquisitive and always trying to figure things out. I took him to the Educational Administration office with me one day and in the lobby were all these professionals waiting. Creighton was under a chair trying to figure out how it was put together. He went over to a gentlemen and asked for his paper clip. He then took the paper clip over to the chair and laid on the floor and was trying to fix the chair with the paper clip. I am pretty sure he will be an architect. I wanted to name all of our boys with C first names and P middle names so that if they all become architects, we can open an architecture firm with my husband and our sons and name is CPS and Associates or CPS Architecture and Design-you get the point. Creightons cough is much better. The Dr.'s office forgot to send in his lab work for Pertussis, but we are pretty confident that is not what he has. He has had all his DTap vaccines and noone else in the house has a cough. I couldn't put him through the test again when I don't suspect that is what he has. He has to go back to the Pediatrician on Friday. I still am not sure if we will need the inhaler all the time or if this was just a virus. I don't think they know yet either.

Kiley is getting older very quickly. Last night, she was on the phone with 3 different friends for 2 hours after school. I think I am going to have to start putting restrictions on the phone. They were chatting, helping each other with homework, and TALKING ABOUT BOYS!! I am not ready for this. Kiley already knows that she can informally have a boyfriend at 13 and can go on unsupervised dates at 16. No sooner. She has a pajama party for her school on Friday. I had planned to take her, but then Chad invited some colleagues over for dinner that night. I am in the process of talking to some of her friends parents to see if she can tag along with them and then the girls can come back here and have a sleepover. I don't typically do sleepovers and I did tell Kiley we wouldn't have any until she was 10 because little kids need a lot of rest and I keep my kids on a very strict sleeping schedule. We had one sleepover when Kiley was in 1st grade and the kids stayed up until 1am and Kiley was so crabby the next day. I told her that until I felt she could be responsible and still go to bed at a reasonable time, we wouldn't have sleepovers anymore. With the new house, I can be two levels away from the girls at night. If they are loud, I won't even know. They will be in the basement and I will be all the way upstairs. Nothing can happen though with out security system. No one can come in, no one can go out. If there is a fire or carbon monoxide, anything, our system will go off and automatically call for help. We will see how this weekend goes.

Chad has been very busy studying for his licensing exams. His work is pretty slow and this is really the only chance he will have to study and take the tests. Once his work picks back up, which we are hoping is soon, he will be too busy to get this stuff done. He has already taken and passed 3 of the tests. He has 4 left to take. He has 1 scheduled for this Friday morning. He is taking the exams because in the next 5-10 years he would like to branch off and start his own firm or self-contract with other firms. There is also higher pay for being a licensed architect. Currently, he gets a salary plus paid overtime. He can easily double his salary with the overtime and that has allowed us to live pretty comfortably without me working. When he gets licensed, I believe he gets a significant increase to his salary and bonuses, but loses the paid overtime. Currently, his firm is still slow but is getting some contracts in. Hopefully that means they will reinstate the 40 hr. work week (right now he is at 32 hrs because there hasn't been much work), pay raises, and overtime. We took about a 60% pay cut since last July. We had about 25K in our savings but took all but 5K out to buy this house. We haven't been able to build that savings back up yet, but hopefully we will once his work picks up. We were really fortunate that we didn't have to touch our investment accounts or retirement accounts and those seem to be doing pretty well right now. We are always talking about how excited we are to be 5 years down the road. We enjoy the kids so much right now and can't imagine our babies growing up, but we would like to have more time for us and to go on dates and vacation more. We have decided to put off having a baby until next Feb. We were going to try in April or May of this year, but decided to wait longer since the firm is still not completely recovered. I will plan to be out of work for 5 more years and go back to teaching when I am 33 and our youngest will be around 4. We will just hire a nanny for that year or two until he/she goes to kindergarten. I don't want to put my last child in daycare and for about the same cost we can get a nanny. We have strongly been considering investing in a vacation home. We live completely off of Chads salary and my salary-which is nothing fantastic, only about 40K a year starting out- but that will be extra money. We know we will be selling this house about that time and moving. We don't necessarily want something bigger because this house is 3500 sq. ft, but something nicer with more architectural design. We are drawn to either a small time share in the mtns. to go skiing or buying a house in Ogallala, NE. on lake McConaughy. This is one of Nebraska's best kept secrets. It's a white sand beach with crystal clear blue water. You can go boating, jet skiing, swimming, etc. It's gorgeous and real estate is not badly priced, compared to what we are used to in Denver. We like this idea because it's a 3 1/2 hour drive from Denver and 4 hours from Omaha. We could easily go every weekend and have family come up from Omaha as well. Some relatives have even expressed an interest in investing in a home there with us and using it as a rental property when we are not there. The idea of getting a vacation home came to us about a year ago. Family members expressed concern about the number of kids we are planning to have-which is only 4 or 5, not 15. We do recognize that by giving our kids the blessing of having a lot of siblings and being a large family, we will not be able to travel as much. We thought a vacation home would be an investment and give us an inexpensive alternative for family vacations. It will be several years though, but we are excited for all the changes that will come our way in a few years.