Well is everyone ready for the 4th of july weekend? Allan has to work tonight. He traded working tonight so that he could be off on sat the 3rd. So he still wont be home on the fourth but that's okay we are going to celebrate on the 3rd. I plan on cooking fried chicken ( liz's recipe.. thank you liz) and ky sweet coleslaw ( thank you sandy mcalister it's the best slaw i've ever had) and some mashed potatoes with ranch and sourcream and cream cheese that i have perfected a recipe for now... what else.. i'm not sure. I think anna is going to bring over a big thing of banana pudding. I found a good recipe for that too the other day but i'll wait and see how her's turns out before i give mine a whirl next time. So yeah we are cooking some all american food and going to celebrate with friends. The guys have a fight to watch that night on UFC. I'm going to see if there are fireworks on the 3rd too. I"m betting somewhere there will be. Phoenix is huge.

What else? I'm all done with my ATI class. I finished all the tests i have been taking and so now i can take the predictor test again. It is suppose to tell you how you will do on the actual NCLEX. I still take the NCLEX on the 10th. I plan on just taking my time and looking around for a job. They are kind hard to come by for new grads out here though. We thought it was going to be great and well if i had a year of experience it sure would be. There's tons and tons of nursing jobs but they all want experience. I did see some that were open to new grads. I really want to get a job at a hospital i think. I would do a clinic too.. actually i think i would do anything to just get the year under my belt but that's why i'm going to take my time looking cause i don't want to get stuck in a job cause i took the first one that came my way.

What else?? Lilly is being a good girl for the most part. She said her prayers with me for the first time last night. We laid in bed together and i would say a prayer then she woud repeat the sentence after me. So just about everyone we know got prayed for last night.. lol. she went on and on for a while. oh she has aslo been into the spanking thing.. yes she wants to give you a spanking if you have done something bad. I think it's kinda funny but i'm trying to not let it go to far. So when she gets a spanking from me or her dad she has a habit of crying and she will run to whoever else is around and say " my daddy ( or mommy) hit me!" it sounds so pathitic coming out of her little mouth that i'm almost positive if she told a stranger they would take pity and try to have us arrested. lol.. I can't portray the way she says it on the computer but it's quite sad.. just imagine the sweetest little whiny voice and face saying "my daddy hit me.."

Okay well i'm outta here but you other lady bloggers are slacking!! yeah i'm putting it out there.... where is everyone else's postings? geez you would think you guys are busy or that it was summer or something.. lol

Linda LOU!!!

YOur message came in just fine! I"m glad you like reading the blog. It's such a good way to keep up to date with what's going on in people's lifes. I'm hoping when mom gets down here we can take a trip out to s.d together and maybe i'll get to meet you finally. I don't remember knowing you cause i was probably lilly's age then huh? Anyway Enjoy our blog glad to have you following!

so..

WE got our truck back already. That was way fast. The price was a coupel hundred more but i guess it was from tax that they didn't tell me about when i asked for the quote. BLAH!!!! Anyway We are going to head over to our friends jeff and anna's tonight to let lilly play with zane (who she still calls jake after her cousin) she only gets his name right about half the time. Ive been studing my butt off now. I took another quizz from ATI. I did not do great. Tehy like a 60 and i got a 55. boo.. it was over OB stuff which you would think i would do okay on but n there is a lot to know in that area. I have never done well in that area though so i'm not too concerned. I spent the morning doing a critical thinking exercise on it that was about 45 questions i had to look up to find the answers to. So i'm going to take another test on it and i'm sure i'll get over a 60 on it the next time. I have t get a 60 to go on to the next subject. i have like 3 more after this one before i do thier predictor test.
Lilly has been a funny thing today. She is happy just playing and running around. I put her in this little cherry dress that her grammy got her and she just loves it. you can tell she thinks she looks "pretty". It's very cute. We are still working on potty training. We have moved to pullups and cloth training pants. She apparently does just fine at the daycare still but she comes running in her to tell me that she needs to potty which means she already did in her pants.. yep so no such luck here.
Tomorrow Emma is coming back over and we are going to wim with her mom and aunt autumn in the pool around 6 oclock. It's too hard for me to work on swimming with emma when i have lilly and allan is at work so i invited jenn to come use our pool with us and help her learn how. I'm sure she will be more trusting of her own mama.. she thought i was trying to drown her. lol.
anyway happy saturday!

Just saying.. ?? lol

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UGHH where do i start?

Well emma was here for a few days and lilly and her had such fun. lilly is very sad to see emma go back to her mommys and doesnt quite understand. We took emma to the doctor. well jenn took her and i went in cause i was there dropping her off. emma has had some stomach issues for a while now and so the doctor wamted to rule out the easy stuff first like lactose intolerant so she isnt to have any milk for a week. we also have to get three stool samples so that was my job for the first two. i have to say though emma hasn't had the issues in the last couple of days since we took her off all dairy. hopefully that is it and we will have gotten to the bottom of it. Emma is back at her mom's now so i don't know hw it is going now.
Lilly has been amazing with her teeth since we went to the dentist. i gave her a bath and she sat very still while i brushed her hair tonight. then i said time to brush your teeth and she tried to fight for a second but when i pushed and made her tip her head back she opened her mouth and let me brush them. This is a big step cause before she acted like you were literally trying to kill her. so BRAVO miss lillypad!
Emma got a tough love lesson in swimming from me. I can't even begin to descirbe the look of fear when i made her swim to me in the deep end and i kept moving away from her. I could have grabbed her at any second but she definetly didn't think i was going to... The amazing part is she kept her head above water and was totally ticked at me for about an hour and trying to tell me she was never going to go swimming again and that her mom and dad didnt care if she swam or not but i told her we were movign to a house with a pool and that she was going to learn how to swim before that or i would make her wear a lifejacket everytime she was outside. She didn't seem to care until the next day we went swimming and i put a lifejacket on her.. yep she didn't like it at all! so she was begging me and allan to help her swim. She can doggie paddle quite effectively now. i'm pretty postive that if someone pushed her in the deep in she could swim to the side so that is an acomplishment! BRAVO Emma LOU SUE!
SIO what was so Bad you might ask about the week?? well today the transmission in our new truck went out. It only has 50k miles on it. Seriously i don't think we will ever buy another dodge in our life! I am put out. So that is going to cost us like 2000 dollars to fix. so that and lilly's teeth pretty much toook what we made on our house sale. Oh well i guess easy come easy go! I'm glad that we have it to pay an that we don't have to do payment plans or go forever with only one vehicle. The truckis in the shop till tuesday or wed the latest. This stinks for me cause i'm either stuck at home with no car or i have to take and pick up allan cause he started his 5 days on today.
Oh did i tell you that we negotiated the furniture down to 5500? yeppers we get the whole house with all the furniture in it. It's exciting. I love it. I just htink it was decorate perfectly for us. There are a few things i don't want and will probably sale on craigslist later but jsut about all of it will stay. so that is our good bad and ugly for the week. hope everyone has a great weekend. I'm off to study. I rescheduled my exam for the 10th so i got to get crackingn on it. so far about 8 people have taken theirs and i only know of one that hasn't passed. i do not want to be the second one..

So we have a new money pit..

Because we don't like to keep our money and we like to deposit it into gapping holes and basically just throw it away.. we found a new pit to throw ours into today.. lol. Lilly's mouth. Yep she went to the dentist today.. The good news is that she did soooo awesome. She even let them take xrays. Sat in the chair with the big heavy apron and bit on the film and everything. Then she let them look in her mouth and really only cried and fussed when the dentist put her head in his lap to look. She would have let the female assistant do anything she wanted. I was sooo proud of her. However with that being said.. She has to get knocked out on the 12th of july to have one tooth that has been hurting her completely pulled and she needs at least 3 capped and i think white crowns for her front teeth too. They gave me a page that basically had a goo dhalf a page of procedures she needs. They can do them all at once on the 12th. WE have to pay for the anesthesologist ( sp) which isn't too bad i think it's like 650 bucks or so. But the rest of it is like 4600 and our dental caps at 1500 a year. fun huh? booo.. It's fine we have the money to pay for it. We were going to pay off our suburban which we owe less for it than we do now for her teeth.. lol
Anyway So yeah awesome. We have new rules that our kids don't have any juice from now on. Ive been diluting her juice alot since we got here anyway but now it's water and milk only. We knew her teeth were bad but now we have a dollar price on how bad. It's ugly!!!
anyway, the other bad part about that is .. it's the day before my NCLEX exam. Allan also has to work so i'm not sure what we are doing about that but i don't want to take her to daycare the next day after she has all that work done to her teeth. So he is going to try to get the days off or my mom may end up coming back down here early for a visit. who knows.
keep us in your prayers the next few weeks lots of stuff going on.
Emma has her doctor apt tomorrow morning. Lets hope it goes better than lilly's dentist apt did.

Father's day

The girls mad eallan cards and they were pretty excited to stick them in his lunch box then lilly wanted to hand him everything in his lunch bo and call it a suprise.. she was a little confused. So thats what those pics were about. The other pictures are of the outfits their grammy sandy bought them. They match and they were very cute running around. We don't usually do matching outfits but emma liked it a while back so we did it again and they had fun and i've never seen lilly want to get dressed so fast.

Just want to wish my sweet husband out there a very happy father's day. He is sleeping today so he can work tonight and i just want to tell him that he is a great dad. He supports us so well, loves his children, hardly ever complains even when it's tough not too, gives his girls hugs and kisses their elbows when he needs to.. haha. ( lilly has a thing for saying her elbow or knee hurts and it needs a kiss) I"m just really proud to be married to such a stand up guy.

Also happy father's day to both of my daddyroo's.. lol. I think that i'm blessed to be able to have a good relationship with both of my "father's" mike and byron. They have both been there in different ways over the years and i'm thankful for both of them. love you all!

I"m going to go pick up emma today and have some fun with her. I htink we may try to go to the zoo sometime while she is here. Allan wants to plan something for his three days off but so far lilly has a dental apt and emma has a doctor apt and they are on different days. lol..

Here are some pictures of lilly. I'll take some more of her and emma after we get emma. It's just hard to get them to stay still together.. it's usually one or the other is being still. lol.








Below is a new toy we gave to emma for her birthday .. lilly really loves it. lol it took forever to blow up though so i don't want to deflate it quite yet.

OMG!!!!!

So my stomach is doing flips cause i just scheduled my nursing test.. yikes, yep i have a test date. Its July 13th at 8 am.. puke puke is all i can say cause the moment i scheduled it i felt sick to my stomach. It just stinks. i think they should give it to you before you graduate. lol.. Ive been studying but i just started really. so im nervous wondering if i have forgotten a ton of stuff in the last month or not. when you think about it say a prayer for me cause i'm stressed again now. I have to kick the studying into overdrive and get my nose back in the books.
on a different note.. emma comes on sunday. lilly had a bad toothache and i'm worried about her again. They haven't hurt her up to this point really but now they are. i put orajel on them tonight but she hated that. She was a pitiful little thing for a few hours. she has an apt with a dentist on tuesday but i'm hoping they can schedule her in to get her cavities fixed soon after that. i don't think they are going to be able to get her to open her mouth wihtout knocking her out but we will see. She let me brush her teeth without a fight tonight but i think it was cause they were hurting so bad that she was willing to try anything. poor girl.
emma has a doctor apt on wed so we are going to meet back up with her mom then and let her go to the doctor here in town. She has some digestive issues that her mom is going to talk to the doctor about. hopefully it's nothing. i think we are planning on taking jenn and emma to see the new house after that and to hang out and get some lunch while her mom is in town then emma is going to go backon friday. Lilly finally went to bed and i guess i'm headed there to now. Good night all!

we did it!!

Okay so we signed a contract for the house!! we don't actually get to move in till the latest is Oct 15th but they think it could be before that. Either way we have our apartment till the end of Oct so we are fine with that. We did get a better deal than we ever imagined on the house. We find out about all the furniture in it either tomorrow or the next day. They agreed to give us the furniture at 25% off the liquidation prices. So we don't know if we will pick out pieces that we like or get all of it rolled into the deal. It depends on what the apprasial of the furniture comes back at. We are pretty stoked about the whole thing though. It's a pretty amazing house. They have a new banner hospital opening out there soon too. I don't know when or if they will hire a new grad or not but at some point i'm sure i'll get a job out there if i don't find a doctor's office that i like better. So there are going to be a ton of details to work out on the house but the big ones are all done and now we know where we are going to live. It's exciting!!
Tomorrow i have a dentist apt. I'm pretty sure that either somethign is wrong with my filling that i got a while back or i have a new cavity. So time to get that fixed. Also tomorrow i'm going to call the state board yet again and see why they haven't released me to test yet. They finally said that they got all my information including my transcripts so they should release me to test now. There are girls already testing and passing so i want to get on with it!!! I started an ATI course to help me review . I guessit's ok. I like studying with my friends better but i have a teacher on there that sends me tests to take and then reviews them and tells me to anzswer questions that i missed and email the answers back to her so maybe that will help too. I've only taken one test on there and i scored the bare minimum that would let me pass that content area on the actual NCLEX. In my defense i took it will lilly in the room driving me crazy and i had to keep getting interrupted to get juice and other things. So i probably would have done better if i was concentrating cause there were a few that i narrowed down to 2 different answers and then i ended up picking the wrong one while i was fussing with lilly. So i think i can go on to the next test soon and see what happens on the next one. i htink it's over nutrition so that could be a rough one sincei haven't done much with that in a while. Maybe not it should be basic stuff too. Anyway i'm pooped after all that house stuff so i'm off to bed.

new photo site

We are patiently awaiting a phone call from the apprasial guy. We think we will get everything we want out of this deal We just keep hearing more and more good news about it. However, until we really hear from the apprasial guy who is out there right now doing the apprasial we don't really know what kind of deal we are getting. We are just really hoping it comes back at what they are asking or lower. I also wanted to mention that we got a new photosite. the link to it is .. www.allanandsarah7.shutterfly.com There are tons of old pictures and we will be putting new ones on their from now on. I am pretty amazed with their site i liked it alot. I don't like the way they make you upload to it but the layout of the site is great i thought. Go visit the site and see what you think. it has unlimited storage and they never delete photos.

allans off

allan is off today for three days. tomorrow we are going to go looka t the house again and take notes of all questions we have and furniture that we would like to keep with it. wed we are suppose to sign papers if the apprasial gets done in time. we are hoping it comes in a little lower. All the guys that he works with have seen pictures and they live out there and they all think its a heck of a deal though so we will probably go ahead and make a deal on wed. allan is inside listening to some waylon jennings (his newest cd). he put together a fan for our bedroom cause it has been staying way too warm at night in there for me. The rest of the apartment stays pretty cool but our room is the only room without a ceiling fan so we needed something to keep the air circulating so we don't have to run the cooler all day andnight. im about to hit the shower then bed. lilly is in her bed. she has been agood girl lately. she loves finding planes in the sky. she just lights up and says "see see see mama.. pane." that means plane for those of you that don't speak lilly. haha. anyway hope everyone had a good monday. We did.

pictures of our trip.

My great grandmother works out at bates nut farm 2 days a week still. She turned 90 this year. Anyway the barrels are full of different types of candy and lilly thought she went to heaven i'm sure cause there were about 20 of them and she could reach in the top and get some candy. My grandmother mazzie liked it so much she just gave her whatever she wanted.

Autn jan and her doggie buster that lilly just loved. Buster loved lilly a little too much and had to be put outside though. Guess he doesn't see kids that often.

Out at bates farm there were little animals that we could feed. So we fed goats, sheep, pigs, ducks, chickens, burrows?, geese, emu's. This is "papa" handing lilly food and trying to teach her to hold her hand flat. She ended up getting pecked by a duck but she didn't cry just was shocked and kept saying " that duck bit me" over and over. Lilly took right to her grandfather. She called him papa the whole time. It's funny cause she calls older gentlemen "papa' and if they are daddy's age then they are "daddy's" and from time to time she will call a girl my age " momma" not as often though.. lol

the big piggy.

That's mazzie.( lilly's great great grandmother.)

the goats that were ruthless when it came to the corn.

My great aunt Marla. Lilly liked her a bunch and wanted to run around holding her hand.

Marla and lilly at marla's new house. It over looks this huge canyon. It was so pretty. Took three years to build but i guess it was worth it. It's an amazing spot and house.

This is my dad mike's back yard. He had some gardens growing and lilly loved them. She helped him pic the oranges and put them in a bag and then she helped carry in two flying saucer squash.

My dad, mike, clipping some broccoli off to give to marla and tom. ( notice his fashionable ugg boots.. can you tell he is a true california guy?) lol.

lilly and "papa" carrying in squash.

mazzie and lilly discussing our truck.

The infamous turtle. This turtle has been around for around 25 years i guess. it was the first thing lilly saw in the house. She loved it.

Lilly liked picking the oranges but when she found out she could eat them and drink them.. oh boy she wanted to pick one every five minutes.. i think we are going to have to get a fruit tree at our house.

we are back home

we had a wonderful trip to cali. lilly just loved her newest "papa". she had so much fun. ill have to post a longer post and put pictures up tomorrow. after a 6 hour drive back and such a busy day i'm exhausted. she stayed awake right up till we got back into phoenix and now she is fast asleep in my bed so i'm going to go cuddle with her until allan gets home in the morning. night night everyone!

how gorgeous is it!??

The weather today was amazing. i gues we had what you would call a cold snap come thru today. I went outside today at 11ish and usually it is already burning heat from above! It wasn't today it was perfect. its like 77 right now at 11130 at night with a slight breeze blowing not like the crazy blow you over winds of casper. We went and hung out with anna and jeff and zane tonight and grilled out hotdogs. Lilly and zane were jumping on a bed at one point and bumped heads or i should say his head into her nose. She was crying one of those wrodless screamless cries before anything comes out and so i was trying to pick her up and comfort her and i saw blood drops all over the bed and couldn't figure out what was bleeding and if it was her or him.. It was her nose. Her first real nose bleed. She did pretty good though. She wanted to wipe it herself and didn't want me to pinch it or wipe it for her and definetly didn't want me to stick anything in there but we managed to get it stopped and then she was fine. She really handled it pretty good. i was suprised. Tomorow we are heading to fallbrook california to see my dad. I think we are going to see my aunt and my great grandmother too. Shoudl be a good time. I wish allan could go with us but it will still be a good trip. I need to get myself and lilly to bed so we can be fresh for the trip tomorrow. Ill ake some pictures and post them soon. Hope everyone has a good weekend.

seriously who does she think she is??

today has been long so i'm going to make this fairly short. lilly is in bed watching finding nemo after a long night of swimming in the pool and playing with zane. my title is referring to lilly... yes i took her to daycare today for the 3rd time. This daycare is big on getting them potty trained i guess. Anyway after the lst time she went she came home and amazingly took that poop in the potty. well she hasn't used the potty since then. she has sat on it but not went. today when i went to pick her up the head teacher said she had been really good and took a nap and told me all the stuff they normally tell you and then she she threme for a loop.. these are her exact words, " lilly stayed dry all day so i was goign to see if you wanted to put her in panties the next time she comes" i just stood there staring at her like she had lost her mind. then i asked "what do you mean she stayed dry?" thinking she didn't have any wet diapers and that maybe she was dehydrated. she said " um she used the toilet all day and didn't have any accidents" then i started staring at her again.. lol in astonishment. we talked about it and i told her that lilly has never peed in the toilet for me other than a few drops a long time ago that i don't even count anymore. So we agred to just leave her in pull ups for now and that we would play it by ear. Sure enough we come home and i ask her like six times if she wants to go to the potty and even try to get her in there once and nope nothing.. saggy diaper again. I'm sure that it's seeing all the other kdis pee in there that makes her want to and lilly did give me a high five when she walked into my bathroom while i was peeing so she nknows it's something good to do it. so besides the crazy toileting they also went on and on about how polite she is . they were suprised to hear her say " no thank you" when they asked her if she wanted to color.
Besides that we don't have much news. We are getting the house appraised on monday i guess and they may have the furniture in it appraised to see how much it is worth so we can make an educated offer after that. i told them we would wait to hear on both of those if they could get it done before wed when allan has to go back to work on thursday. We worked out having emma on fathers day even though allan has to work. We are going to meet up with jenn and pick her up and keep her for a week. Oh and i guess there is a crane crew out at allan's work that he is interested in. i guess its pretty simple work but physical. the key is though.. it's straight dayshift!!!! yep so he is going to ask more about it. not sure if its really somethign he would seriously consider or not but he is going to find out more about it.
we are still going out to california this weekend. I'm thinking we will head out on saturday and stay at my dad's house that night then head back late on sunday probably or early monday depending on if we get to see everyone or not. i plan on taking lilly to see her great great grandmother. i never knew my great great.

no sleep for the weary

I think I'm taking allans schedule to heart. Its almost midnight and I just can't sleep. I have thoughts about our hopefully new home in my head, and about someday taking my nursing test, and lilly potty training.. did i tell you that she pooped on the pot? i'm not sure if i mentioned it or not. She did once. they are working hard at the daycare training her to potty. lol.. anyway she did it and we cheered her on and gave her a cookie and high fives and hugs! anyway i just went out to the porch and it felt hot so i looked up the tem p and it says it is 90 right now at 1133 at night. yep.. ouch! We took lilly and her friend zane to sonic today and it was miserable sitting outside in the heat. almost unbearable. I guess that's why we are staying up late too. It's not unusual to see parents playing with kids in the park at 10pm here. It's the only time it's cooler i guess. it's strange but i guess people just do stuff later or earlier and try to stay out of the heat during the day. I feel wiped out i guess from the heat but i'm not sleepy enough to fall asleep. I guess part of it is not having allan home too. I never sleep good when he isn't home. I just am so use to having a routine with school for the last two years and always having something that needed to get done and now there is nothing that needs to get done, nothing demanding my attention. Iknow some of you would kill to have this kind of free time to enjoy but it feels weird to me and i just can't get use to it. I enjoy having time to hang out with lilly. I really do. tonight i rocked her and sang praise songs that i knew to her. I remember my mom doing this when we were little and i just loved it and felt so at peace and protected. I use to do it all the time when she was tiny and that was how i got her to sleep. it worked again tonight. it felt good to comfort her and make her relaxed. She has been such a good girl and she has taken this whole move so well. I feel really blessed to have such a good sweet kid. She has such good manners for a two year old. dont ge me wrong she is a two year old and is very familiar with tantrams and saying ' mine" and "share" telling people to share is her big thing right now. However, she has the sweetest little manners. She always says please and thank you alot. She also says sorry and excuse me. it's so cute and it catches people off guard i think cause i constantly get comments from strangers about how cute she is for saying "oh excuse me".
anyway i guess this was just some random thoughts before i try to close my eyes and make myself sleep. what is everyone else up too? anyone got any good or interesting news? i'd love to hear it.

a couple more pictures

Above is of one of the dining table that i just love the seats too.. it goes perfectly with the bluish color of some of the walls.

This one above is of the only thing i don't lik ein the house. it has this wall paper in here that i really don't care for. it's not horrible but i don't love it. Its the bathroom on the first floor that all guests would be using so yeah might change that up.

the pink bed above is the room we would be letting aaron use when he gets here... gonna have to make some changes to that room since it's so obviously girly. lol..but the walls are tan and the baby blue isn't horrible if we just matched it with more guyish things and got rid of all the pink girl stuff.
This room is lilly's and we think emma and her will share a room for the time being. We just don't want to hear them fighting and telling the other one to get out of their room or off of their stuff we want them to bond so they are going to share a room. We will probably get them some bunk beds for their room.

this is part of the master bath.it has two sinks in it and two medicine cabinets and a huge storage closet the sinks aren't together like a his and hers they are seperate in each corner but both are gorgeous. this is looking into the bathroom of the master from the bedroom. each of these closets are walk-ins. This is perfect for us because i'm always trying to take over allan's half of closet. This way he can have his own.. lol(if i don't take over half of that one)
this is at the top of the stairs when you come up them. Its a loft area. We actually like that it's a play area for the kids, so we will probably keep it like that but the other idea is to turn it into a big office area.
i love this little table.
and this couch is soo ooo awesome!the color doesn't come thru in the picture but it's really a pretty blue also that goes great with the paint color
a big huge pantry
and this is the front of the house!

pics of the new house we like..

these are pictures of the house. i'm not going to go thru individually and tell what each thing is but i'll let you see them for yourse3lf. OH and you guys must have been praying because we got the word today that we can go ahead and make an offer! we feel even at full price that we are getting an amazing deal on a brand new never lived in home! we really feel like god lead us to the perfect realtor that new all the right questions to ask i was a tad frustrated before with the short sales but she has donena amazing job with this. onmonday we are ging in to make an offer. they said they wouldn't do anything with it till then. We won't get tomove in till oct but that's when our lease is up so it is really just all working out. even the decor is decorated all most perfect for us! lol. there is one downstairs bathroom i'd like to change and one upstairs bedroom that needs to be changed but tha'ts it!