Check it out! As you can see, this blog is undergoing a change! I am going for a cleaner, easier to look at blog, so please bear with me for a few days, maybe weeks! With everything that is going on with my family these days, I am strictly living in the now moment.
If you are new to Check it Out! with Dawn, you probably don't know that I don't do a lot of personal blogging. Oh, sure you get a glimpse into my life through my reviews, but I never post about personal issues. I don't know if that decision helps my blog or hinders it, but either way, this blog is continuing to grow. My stats have been steady, and slowly rising, and I have been working with some amazing brands and companies. Although this blog doesn't produce an income, it has given me an amazing amount and array of products and services to try, keep and sometimes share!
I haven't been able to round up as many review and giveaway items, but with the overhaul of this blog you can expect more in the future!
So on July 4th 2012, we lost our home and all of our possessions to a fire. The fire that started in the gutter and spread through the attic, was started by a bottle rocket that came from a neighboring subdivision. We we're asleep, had been asleep for two hours, and were awakened by neighbors pounding on the windows. We all got out safely, although it was very close, with only our pajamas and my cell phone, which was in my hand to call 911. Although we had a sprinkler system, our home was considered a total loss, and insurance would not pay for recovery of any items.
Many lessons have been learned since that night, and our lives are forever changed. We are currently still in temp housing, which happens to be an extended stay hotel, and yes, hotels are fun, for a week or even two, but 6 months.....not so much!!!
About a month or so after the fire, my husband got sick with what we thought was food poisoning....turned out he had a tumor in his colon. After surgery to remove the tumor and part of his colon, they found he has stage 3 colon cancer. He is currently undergoing Chemotherapy treatments, and has just finished the first of 5 rounds.
There are countless times we miss our home, but none more than after his surgery, coming to a hotel to heal really sux!!
During his sickness and trying to rebuild some sort of normalcy for my family, I have been searching for a home to purchase. Due to a whole other story, we were left with not enough money to rebuild. Fortunately there are a slew of foreclosed and short sale homes available for some amazing prices. At the end of October, while out canvassing some of the listings, I found the house, that I knew would be ours and in fact put an offer in that day. It took a few weeks to find out that we got the house at a great price and up until yesterday, we have been waiting to close. So yesterday I got the key to our bought and paid for home. Not new, but almost double the size of our old home and plenty big enough for all of us.
So along with moving comes all the other things to do, like utilities and deposits. Hopefully we will be moved into the house by the end of next week and get back on that road to normalcy. Don't forget we also homeschool, so we have some catching up to do.
So that's the personal side to what's going on around here and hence the changes to my blog. It's a brand new start all around for me, so I wanna start 2013 out with a new look. I will be adding and updating tabs and pages, just as soon as I get a computer cord....seems one of the furbabies likes to chew cords, and I came in to a severed cord and a dead battery. Thanks to my Kindle fire, I can access my blog, but I can't do very much more, like post photos and links, so again bear with me and be sure to keep check-in it out with Dawn!!
Please take a minute and let me know, if you like the changes and/or have ideas on what you would like to see....I would love to know!!!
