Annalee's Blessing Day

What a special day it was! 

I am so thankful to be married to a worthy Priesthood holder.  There are few things more precious than handing your sweet, innocent, sleeping daughter to your wonderful husband and then sitting with your arms folded, eyes closed, head bowed, and tears creeping down your cheeks as you listen to a dedicated disciple and servant petition the Father for a blessing upon His daughter, our daughter.  It was truly a glorious occasion.

Troy gave Annalee a beautiful blessing.  All the while, I thought it was being recorded and it appears as though our recorder wasn't working :(  So sad!  Next time, we'll be recording with several recorders.  I am grateful for the things I remember from her blessing and really need to sit and write it down.  We will not forget the sweet spirit we felt, as that blessing was being given to her.  Hopefully we will have a miracle and that voice recorder will kick into gear and we will have it after all.

Enjoy the pictures.  She is such a beautiful girl!

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I saved my garter from our wedding day for her headband on her blessing day.  The idea came to me as I sat in the Bride's Room in the Logan Temple prior to our sealing.  A headband for her blessing, a hair tie for her baptism day, and her garter on her wedding day.  Much like the three dresses.  I like it.

I have more pictures of our family with Annalee after the blessing, but they are saved on another drive.  I will post them soon.  Have a great day!

Mortgage Free

Troy and I have been discussing future employment opportunities for him once he is done with school.  We have made a plan to pay off all student debt and our current mortgage in 5 years (2021).  Our children will still be small and we are already used to living on a tight budget.  When I came across this article this morning on Yahoo! I decided I wanted to hang on to it.  I think it has some great ideas for cutting costs and applying money to a worthwhile place.

We're paying off our mortgage in less than 5 years

 

 

 

I am not a financial genius by any means. At times in my life, I've maxed out all available credit and found myself in debt up to my eyes. But as of June 7, 2013, my wife and I are mortgage-free. That's four years and 10 months from the day we made our first payment.

Why we're paying off our mortgage

 Shortly after being married in 2006, my wife and I had a new home built less than 10 minutes away from our jobs. We moved into our home in July 2008 and had our first payment due the following month. Our original mortgage was in the amount of $156,780 on a 30-year fixed-rate loan at 5.875 percent, which gave us a monthly payment of $927 (before insurance and taxes). This meant at the completion of our 30 years of dedicated payments we would have paid $333,868 (give or take) -- and $177,078 of that would go to the lender, just for having let us borrow money. 

Initially we had no intentions of living in our home for more than a few years, so we only made the minimum monthly payments during the first year. The goal was to finish our attic and basement, build a deck, and then sell the home and downsize. But after the birth of our first child and deciding to have a second, we realized the house did meet our needs and we wanted to raise our children there. Once we decided to remain in the house, we knew the sooner it was paid for the sooner we would be free from the shackles of debt; the sooner we would have the ability to use our money for more than just monthly bills.
We devised a plan to pay off the mortgage and "suffer" for a few years while our children were young. We figured while they were babies and toddlers we wouldn't want to have many adventures away from home (Disney with a 1- and 3-year old, no thanks) and they wouldn't require many high-dollar necessities (play dough and crayons provide nearly endless entertainment early on).
How we did it

 We pooled resources. This meant taking every penny made and concentrating that beam of liquidity in the direction of our mortgage debt. Our household income is quite average, but when we closely examined our finances, we found that we had much more than we were putting forth to pay toward our mortgage. I'm an analyst for a day job and of course I deal with numbers a great deal, so I created my own budget sheets and amortization charts. In the end, there were several contributing factors that helped us pay off our mortgage in less than five years:

• We made bi-weekly payments and ensured the extra payment each month went directly to principal. Once the bank started receiving an extra full payment every two weeks they immediately started applying it to our account as a future payment; we learned this lesson quickly and after that made sure the bank coded our account to only apply one payment a month and put everything else toward principal .



• We refinanced. After 26 months of payments on our original mortgage, we had only whittled it down to a little over $147,000. In November 2010 we refinanced this amount to an interest rate of 4.375, staying with a 30-year fixed mortgage. Our new payment was $737 (before insurance and taxes). 

[Ready to refinance your mortgage? Click to compare rates from multiple lenders now.]


• We lived well within our means. Goodwill saw the majority of our business.



• Anytime we had extra money we applied it to the mortgage. This was everything from an unexpected tax refund to finding opportunities for overtime at work.



• We lowered our savings contributions. Our 401k contributions were originally set at 15 percent, so we cut this down to 5 percent and still received our employer match of 5 percent. We also had monthly allotments going toward 529 college savings accounts for our children; after realizing our pooling efforts would only require these contributions to be discontinued for a few years, we decided to stop them temporarily until the mortgage was paid off .



• We avoided other forms of debt. For example, our two paid-for reliable vehicles meant we didn't have car payments absorbing our income. We decided not to purchase a new car unless one of the current vehicles died. Thankfully, they held on.



• We originally had separate his and hers spending accounts that allowed us each to make minor impulse buys without acquiring the blessing of the other; these were cut out.



• We reevaluated our monthly bills. After a number of phone calls and negotiations I was able to lower our cable, cellphone, and car insurance bills. We eliminated our home land line entirely, and we also had our home security service disconnected.



• The tax man was getting more than his share each paycheck, which meant every year we were getting a substantial tax return. We reconfigured our tax deductions with a goal of never owing but trying to gauge our return as close to zero as possible. This added that much more each payday to our bank account. In the few occasions that we received lumps of tax money back, of course those funds went directly to our mortgage, down to the last penny.



• Lastly, we looked at ways we could shrink our utilities. For electric savings, we installed programmable thermostats and lowered the heat temperature and raised the air-conditioning temperature; in the winter we bought mini oscillating heaters (with safety shutoffs) for each bedroom and turned off the heat from 7 p.m. until 4 p.m. the next day; we closed the vents in any room that was not in use (including the basement, attic, bathrooms, and laundry room); as incandescent light bulbs blew out we replaced them with compact fluorescents. All of these changes decreased our average monthly electric usage by almost 50 percent, from around 1,800 to 2,000 kilowatt-hour to where we are now at approximately 1,000 kwh. We also applied a few water conservation rules as well -- opting to take showers at the free gym facilities available at our places of work, enacting "if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down," washing all dishes by hand, and purchasing energy-efficient front loads -- that dropped our water bill down to an average of only $25 a month, which is as low as it gets in our area.

We had some unexpected items pop up during these years. There were post-Christmas 50-percent-off sales that we couldn't resist. We were affected by the derecho storms in summer 2012. And we did have a few events arise that required us to travel. Even though we cut back so much and were applying a lot of our income toward our mortgage, we still found enough money to spend somewhat freely on food and little luxuries like Dora the Explorer stickers and dinosaur fruit snacks.

Life with no mortgage

What next? We plan to take our 401(k) contributions back up to 15 percent, resume our monthly allocations toward the 529 accounts, and start saving to our discretionary accounts so we can finally begin making a few impulse buys without generating a position paper on how the need outweighs the cost to sway the opinion of the other party (that's in marriage terms). We will most likely keep the remaining savings practices we've adopted and possibly work toward reducing our monthly obligations even further. I have been bitten by the energy conservation bug during this endeavor and have pitched plans to include some solar and thermal additions to our home.

I wish I could say we are going to do something extraordinary -- like an extravagant family vacation -- to celebrate our financial conquest but as for right now we have no plans to do so, since our children are still young enough that they are much happier running through the sprinkler in the yard than riding in a car for 10 hours just to pile in a hotel or stand in line at a theme park. But in a few years, once we have two potty-trained non-nap-taking children, we plan to go all out and take a Disney cruise.

Three Cute Coulson's

Wow!  I am a SLACKER!!  Big time.  Well...since my post in August 2012, we've added a sweet girl to our family.  I cannot believe I've not blogged about her thousands of times by now.  But, truth is, having a new baby is an adjustment.  It's busy.  It's the most amazing thing ever.  It's hard.  It's rewarding.  It's hard.  It's full of adventures and surprises.  It's hard.  There's a reason the Young Women are told so many times that they can do hard things.  Being a mother is absolutely, positively the most amazing experience in the whole entire world.  But it is hard. 

We have adjusted and love this little bug and have enjoyed every minute of having her.  She is such a joy and a happy girl.  We have a good routine and get along well :)  She had her first ear infection this past week (SO sad!!!) and is teething now, so she's had a rough week.  Things are looking up.

Troy has been working like a mad man since last fall when he started Pharmacy school.  What a blessing he is to us!  He takes such great care of his girls! 

Well, here's to introducing our new baby girl (who is now 7 months old!)
Annalee Faith Coulson was born on October 31st, 2012 after a wonderful pregnancy and a diagnosis of Pre Eclampsia with incredibly high blood pressure, lots of protein spilling, and a whole lot of swelling for this mama.  Not to mention the nasty Beta Blocker I was taking.  The last 3 weeks were not fun, but so very worth it.  I spent the last weeks on bed rest (which I thought would be so great to have your doctor tell you that you need to rest and cannot do laundry or dishes...wrong!)  Troy was fabulous and kept up on all the house work.  Needless to say, I never nested.  Thankfully we were prepared for her arrival long before she was due. 

Her due date was actually November 14th, but due to my inability to continue being pregnant and my worsening health, I went in to be induced on October 30th.  I'd had a feeling things were going to be really rough and a C-section lingered in my mind for months before she was born.  I talked to Troy about it prior to going to see the doctor the last time before he sent me straight to the hospital.  I asked his opinion...should we just schedule a C-section?  I felt so sure that is how we would end up delivering our miracle, and I didn't want it to be absolute chaos and have the fear of an emergency.  We elected to go forward with induction and have faith things would work out.  We had been doing appointments, NST (non stress tests), and BPP (biophysical profiles, which is a super ultrasound) every couple of days for some time by then.  Prior to my appointment, I went in for more of this testing on October 29.  Things didn't look good.  It was SO scary.  I don't think my heart has pounded so hard or tears flowed so freely when I watched my limp baby on the ultrasound screen.  Keep in mind, this was my active, wild baby on every ultrasound...now hardly moving.  It was heart wrenching.  I wanted her to be delivered.  And now.

I talked with the nurse when I got back to my room, still a hysterical mess.  I should add, Troy went to every appointment, every test, every scheduled event the entire time I was pregnant.  Except this one.  Everything was always so good and normal and very time consuming and he had a test to study for.  I encouraged him to study and I would call him if he needed to come.  He needed to come alright.  I called and told him what I had seen and how horrifying it was.  He was concerned, but thank goodness, was able to put his faith in Heavenly Father and calmly reassured me all would be well.  We had so many spiritual experiences prior to finding out our little Annalee was coming and during my pregnancy.  How could we doubt now?

As I talked with the nurse, she heard my concerns (I hope I was a nurse who people remember as being caring and compassionate.  I truly appreciated it from her.)  She called my OB, Dr. Carlson, and told him of our situation and my fears and concerns.  He told her to send me home, monitor baby because he felt she was more than likely napping during the test, as her heart rate was stable and she had been very active a couple of days prior, and see him the next morning.  As scary as it was to go home, I did.  Troy had been monitoring my blood pressure for awhile by then and was a pro.  It was always super high, so we became quite used to alarming readings.  Nothing changed as the afternoon, evening, and night went on.  Annalee was more active later in the day, so I was able to relax a bit.  Bed rest continued.  I laid on my left side for 2 weeks.  I was SO excited to think of having my baby soon to be able to snuggle and kiss her, but to also lay in a different position.  For those who may not know, because of the position of our heart and the pressure of the baby during pregnancy, laying on the left side releases pressure from the aorta (the part of your heart which sends blood to the rest of your body) and allows better perfusion to the tissues...and hopefully helps the lady with outrageous blood pressure to bring it down a bit, or at least ease some of the stress on her heart.

October 30th came, we saw Dr. Carlson, he told me my labs looked much worse than they did the Friday prior, so it was time to have a baby.  Neither she or I were safe to continue with pregnancy.  At this point I was 37 weeks 6 days, so she would be born at exactly 38 weeks.  Full term, but still early.  I've learned from one of my good physician friends since then...the time between 38 and 40 weeks is when babies learn to suck and breastfeed while in utero.  No wonder we had such a struggle with breastfeeding.

We went in to be induced and I went in to labor on my own without any help.  Then I knew we'd made the right choice.  It was time.  After a long, painful back labor, we were told our princess was face up and was stuck.  In all of those hours, I completely effaced but only dilated to a 4.  Ugh.  Troy was an amazing labor coach.  He was breathing and grimacing, and his hands willingly took a lot of squeezing.  Labor hurts.  A lot.  Because Annalee's heart rate was going down (also called decelerating) with contractions and my blood pressure continued to be through the roof, it was time to change the course.  We were not in immediate danger, so Dr. Carlson said I could continue to labor and we could wait and watch and an emergency C-section was always an option if it got to that point.  Because of the promptings I had had, the discussions Troy and I had prior to being induced, and our baby's current struggles, it did not take any thought at all.  "Let's go!"  I didn't care what they did to me.  I didn't think about the pain it may cause.  All I could think about was my sweet baby's rhythm strip on the monitor next to me as her heart rate dipped down.  That fear I had felt during the last ultrasound returned.  I have had a lot of really great conversations with my Heavenly Father in my life.  That walk in a hospital bed, while my husband changed into surgical clothing, with an anesthesiologist pumping me full of medicine, my doctor preparing for an urgent cesarean delivery, and my baby still moving within me, was very long and rushed.  But the fear subsided as I talked to my Father and felt the Spirit bring peace to my mind and heart.  My baby girl was okay.  Everything would be fine.  "Be faithful." 

Annalee was born at 1:20 in the afternoon on Halloween.  She weighed 6 lbs 14 oz and was 21.25 inches long with an amazing cone head from being stuck for so long.  Amazingly, her cone was 4 cm around and she shrunk to 19.5 inches with a short amount of time.  For those of you who have had children, you can picture my OB pulling out a measuring tape to see just how big around that cone was.  "Well," he said, "We were right.  You were dilated to a 4."  Then he chuckles.  I guess I didn't realize there was any doubt.  I am so thankful for such a wonderful physician.  He recognized and respected my nursing experience and Troy's experience with medicine.  He listened to us.  And told all of the nurses on the L&D floor that they were to call him immediately if we expressed any concern because "she's a nurse and he's a pharmacy student.  They know when there is danger."  I am glad he heard our concerns.  And I am grateful for our educations.  And that amazing nurse I mentioned earlier....she's the one who told us he had told them that.  Too funny.  She was great and such a giant help!  She was not my nurse on the day I delivered, but we passed her on our way to the OR and she was genuinely interested in what was happening with me and our baby.  Troy filled her in and then she came to see us after she was born.  Love her!

I spent awhile in recovery after Annalee was born while she was off to the nursery with the nurse and her daddy.  When I finally got back to my room (incredibly drugged) and saw her, I was completely overwhelmed.  She was beautiful.  A miracle.  The love I felt for such a little human was indescribable.  Joy.  Love.  Contentment.  Gratitude.  I thought of how much I loved Troy.  And what a blessing this sweet baby was.  We assisted God with a miracle.  There are no words to describe that occasion, but I will not forget it.  Amazing.

Originally, I was supposed to be in the hospital until November 2nd due to my labor and my cesarean delivery and my crazy blood pressure.  I improved quickly and though I experienced a great deal of post partum pain, I was able to get up and moving around pretty soon afterward and was released on November 1st. 

I was completely comfortable with the thought of going home with my spectacular husband our precious girl.  I knew he would take care of us.  Then I realized I still couldn't get up by myself.  It hurt to sit or stand.  I couldn't walk very well.  I had to have a tremendous amount of help.  Troy went above and beyond to make sure Annalee and I were taken care of.  He was truly amazing! 

For those who might wonder...the first night at home with a new baby is quite an experience.  It is great, but it was a bit scary for some reason when we were there and on our own.  Troy had a test on Monday.  I couldn't do anything myself.  Annalee was dependent on both of us.  So...we all sat down and cried together.  Then we got ourselves together, made a plan, and had many wonderful bonding experiences as a family.

Now, Troy is done with his first year of Pharmacy school.  I have regained my independence.  Annalee learned how to nurse.  I love staying at home and being Troy's Wife and Annalee's Mom.  Troy is working for the summer and looking forward to his second year of Pharm school.  Annalee is jabbering, saying "Da-da", learning to crawl, sitting up by herself, rolling all over the place, and still melting our hearts. 

In summary, we are truly blessed!

Just in case you were wondering, the hospital bed was super uncomfortable but the food was delightful!  We didn't find out about the Tru Moo chocolate milk until our last day there.  Boo.

On our way home.  Such a sweet girl!!

 We talked about her big feet at our 19 week ultrasound.  Love those feet!

 

The Poop Face

We were in Twin Falls for Troy to work for Christmas break.  We went to the mall to see Santa and while we were there....

 We pierced Annalee's ears!  She was 7 weeks old.  It was the best decision.  She only cried for a few seconds and she didn't fight us to clean them or turn them...and now she doesn't bother them.  We realize there are different opinions, but this worked well for us.

 

Our Christmas card and Annalee's birth announcement.

 Those first social smiles were the best!

 Tummy time--not a fan.

She loves her toys! 

 

 

 

 

She started to grow so fast once we mastered breastfeeding. 

 

 

 

 One year ago on St. Patrick's Day we found out we were expecting this precious girl!

 Family pictures---May 2013

 Oh, we are so grateful for the many shopping trips like this we made.  We got so many cheap diapers, thanks to couponing!  It's been so nice to be able to have them and not worry about running out!

We have some really great pictures of Annalee's blessing day....coming soon!