Grammy and Grandad's Visit

Grammy and Grandad came out to our new house for William's birthday and just in time to help us move. We had a lot of fun with them. Here's the kids and the Grandparents in their Sunday best. Poor Anna was a little off balance on the sofa.

Moving On

We're really doing it. We're moving to the new house. Things got a little tense there at the end. On Tuesday we went to the "signing" and learned that the buyers of our house had somehow lost their loan. Our super-amazing realtor promised to try to work a miracle and get us in the new house anyway (without their purchase of our house, we had no money to put toward the down payment on our new house). Wednesday there was no news. Thursday I took off for a trip to the coast and the outlet mall with some friends because I couldn't take the pressure anymore. I mean, everything was scheduled - the rental truck, the electricity to go off here and on there, the water, the gas. If our buyer's new loan was a day late, our sale would most likely not go through until Tuesday and we wouldn't get to move until then. We would have to make a million phone calls and deal with a ton of stress. That day (Thursday) the realtor told us the buyers had a new loan lined up and it would probably close Friday. If there were a miracle, our purchase loan would close that day too. If not, she would work out a back-up plan to get us in our new house. Friday the new buyers' loan closed but they didn't get the info to our new house people in time, so our loan wouldn't close. Because of our seller being an attorney, he wouldn't let us rent the house without a statement from our insurance-provider stating that we claimed all liability in relation to the house even though it was not officially ours. Our insurance agent is notoriously difficult to contact and this was Friday afternoon before a long weekend. I had a sinking suspicion that he would be out of town. I was right, but he had an assistant! Hooray! The assistant drew up the required paperwork and we got the keys at 5:00. We spent the evening moving clothes and the kitchen into the new house and Kip and some friends moved a first load of stuff into the garage. Hopefully tomorrow will go as smoothly as possible. After the emotional rollercoaster of this last week, we would enjoy that.

Our new house won't have internet connection for the next few days, so it will be a while before we post again. And we head to San Diego on Friday of next week, so stay tuned for all the adventures to come!

New Roof

Our prayers were answered and the sellers will be replacing the roof. Now, Kip and I are deciding the shingles to use. We went by the new house the get pictures to help in color selection. Here are some sunny spring-time photos to enjoy. The back yard one shows the two windows that are in the master bedroom and the bay windows that are over the jetted tub in the master bath. I know, we're really going to suffer in this new house...

Easter Kids

These are a little late, but check out our cute kids in their Easter clothes!

Rainbow

This is a picture we took one night (April 12) while working on spreading bark dust to prepare for putting our house on the market.

Our new house

Our house sold. We had 2 offers, one 4 days after we put it on the market and one the next day. We accepted the second one. Then we were faced with the frightening situation where we had to be out of our house in a month and we didn't know where we were going. I found this house on the web.

I thought it looked pretty nice, but the price was a little high. We checked it out on Monday and someone else had made an offer on it that day. I fell in love with it immediately, so we worked with our realtor until 11pm to put together an offer to try to outbid the other family. (Sorry, whoever you were!) Our offer was accepted! Hooray! Then began the stress of addendums, disclosures, inspections and waiting for signatures and appointments. I've had a lot of migraines in the past weeks. We finaly got the inspection done Friday night. We got a long list of repairs to make, most of them fairly minor. There were two biggies, though: a new roof (we were afraid of this) and a new back door. So, we've put together a request for the seller to cover the two biggies. Now, we have to wait while they get bids and decide how to counter or accept our request. Kip's nervous, but for some reason I really think it's going to work out fine. That doesn't mean I managed to go without a migraine this weekend, though...

Here are some more pics from their sale posting. The ones I took at the inspection were OK, but I didn't get any outside shots because it was rainy.

This is the kitchen. The linoleum unfortunately goes through the kitchen to the family room. We'll have to change that when we've had time to recover from the financial shock this transaction has caused us.





This is the back yard as seen from the back door.

"I di' it!"

Anna has been amazing me lately with her use of language. When William was the age she's at now, he could hardly say a single word, let alone full sentences. Anna, in true girly fashion (I've heard they develop a lot of skills faster than boys), is using five word sentences at 21 months old. I went into her room to get her this morning and she looked up and me and said "I jumping on the bed!" Who can reprimand someone so cute? Her favorite phrase lately is "I di' it!". She's extremely independent and very proud of her little accomplishments. I taught her to play Peggles today (a computer marble-shooting game Butch got us into last week) and each time she clicked the mouse and had the ball shoot across the screen she cried "I shoot!". It was very cute. It was even cute tonight when we were sharing a bedtime snack to look up and see two of her dollies on the table getting salted. She was pretty proud of herself for that one, too.



Meanwhile, William has reached the "Why" phase. He asks 'why' about everything I say and he follows it up with 10 or 20 more why's. And if my answer is "I don't know," he says in a very exasperated tone, "TELL me!". He won't accept the fact that Mommy might not actually know WHY something is the way it is. I know he'll get over that someday and I'll miss it, but for now it's a little annoying.