a house, garden dreams, HOP

so we are having our house built (yay) and i've been looking around at other floor plans of houses in our neighborhood/D R Horton communities, to see if there was anything else that compared to what we have...and sadly there is none. i look becuase i realized just how much i'm not going to like our brick color that we didn't get the option to pick out...and wondered if it was worth changing houses...well of course not. we really like our floorplan for the price we got it for and i'm just going to have to deal with it. 

but i have made a blog just for the house, (for those who care) so i don't clog up this blog with all my crazy pictures. those who are interested click here. 

for a quick update, they have been building for a month, and they have all interior walls done, they are waiting for an inspection on plumbing, HVAC and electrical, and then they will insulate and sheetrock it. of course all the interior will need to be finished, the brick has been delivered, windows and exterior doors put in, so they are seriously rolling. anyone who has built with D. R. Horton before, how much longer are we looking at waiting til completion? our guess is 2 more months. end of august. we'll see.

of course now that we are finally getting a house, i can unleash the gardener at heart (and let kathryn's gardening love expand) so i have lots of wishes of things i'd love. of utmost importance...a vegtable and fruit garden. only thing is...walker has clay for soil. so does anyone have any luck with gardening out in walker? my dreams are for:

• carrots
• tomatoes
• bell peppers
• celery
• broccoli
• lettuce
• zucchini
• cucumbers
• grapes
• strawberries
• blueberries
• bananas (i would LOVE)
• pineapple
• cantelope

anyway, i know that is quite a list, but i'll take what i can get... lots of these can grow in pots etc. we shall see. i can see myself (with my little helpers) out in the garden daily... oh the fun to be had!

so as most of you know, kathryn has speech issues. i finally got in touch with the school system in livingston about her evaluation and they have it finished, only thing is, they only do speech therapy during the school year. so she won't start until September. there is a private sector of speech therapy, but with us trying to build a house, we don't need to go broke before we get in trying to pay for the speech therapy...so sadly at this point we can't afford it. so i have looked into other options of things i can do at home while i wait...and i've come up with the Hooked On Phonics program for Pre-K. has anyone tried this with any success? it's only 35 dollars, so better than buying that Your Baby Can Read program ($200) which she got bored with very quickly. i just hate sitting waiting on someone else to fix a problem...

we've tried to watch our mouth move in the mirror, but she wasn't interested and i didn't have the patience to catch her attention... so, i am at the end of my rope with this one. it's really hard hearing her say words wrong when i know she is capable of saying the specific letter sounds... (ex. she says the "f" sound perfectly, along with the "ox" sound, but when i ask her to say "fox" i get "box" i tell her it starts with the "f" sound, so she says "FFHbox". or saying "umma" instead of "open" when she has said "open" on command before) what can i do???