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.

House 4 Sale!

Kris commissioned me to write the blog while the kiddos do cooldown with Charlotte's Web after dancing the night away to an Internet Radio Techno Latin station.

I was going to post last Monday that our house went on the market and start a guessing game for how long it would be before we got a visitor, and how long before we got an offer, and so on ... BUT in the last 5 days we've had 6 showings, there are two scheduled for the weekend, and we've had one low-ball offer. All that's left is to bet on when we'll accept an offer and when we'll move. Any guesses? Closest person wins a nifty prize.

We are going out house hunting the first time tomorrow.

Days of Music

How many days of music do you have? We recently went digital by ripping our 350+ CDs to mp3. It took FOREVER! Now we stream them to our living room stereo on our Apple Airport Extreme and control the music from there with a little usb remote! Thanks Chad for guidance on the airport.

This is one of the two boxes we filled to the brim. Say goodbye to our CDs!

The Votes are In...

According to blip.tv (which is generously hosting our Super Mario Trombones video) we have had 12,907 viewings!

Out of those viewings, we received comments from 33 people who had gmail or blogger accounts and are outspoken enough to write their opinions online. We had comments from Ohio, Utah, Florida, Oregon, Nebraska, California, Minnesota, Quebec, and Australia (plus a lot of unknowns). Survey says...

7 negative
3 neutral
23 positive

Judging from our small outspoken crowd, I'd say 8,995 people loved the video! Way to go bones!

Super Mario Trombones

Click to Play

This Sunday (March 19th) Oregon Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra performed at the Mt Angel Performing Arts Center.  The Trombone section took the opportunity to perform a Super Mario Theme music arrangement made by one of the members of the trombone section of our sister city's orchestra in Sapporo, Japan.  Sorry the camera moves around.  I wanted an unobstructed view so I stood but I didn't have anything to keep the camera steady.

Happy BIRTHDAY!

To me! Thanks everyone who contributed to my present which finally came today - a Canon PowerShot SD800 IS! It totally rocks! What can I say... less than a second from hitting the 'on' button til it's ready to shoot pictures. And the image stabilization lets me take shots in room lighting (no flash) and still get sharp images - not that blurry mess I used to get. So here are a few of my first photos with the camera - all with no flash. It only came with a 16MB memory card so about 8 shots and it is full. I'll have to remedy that situation soon!

A self portrait:


A different kind of self portrait:



And Butch gave me an Asian Lung to build...


Pretty good shots, eh?

Snow!

Kip didn't go in to work on Tuesday because he was sick. And it had snowed! A whole 2 1/2 inches! We don't get a lot of snow here in the Portland area, so this was quite an exciting event. Anna enjoyed walking around in the snow until she fell down a couple times and got too cold. Then, she went in and left me and William to play. He never wanted to come back inside. Unfortunately, he wasn't much help with the snowman, so I didn't make him very big. Some neighbor kids decapitated him on Thursday when school started up again.

Utah After-Christmas Continued

We also had fun playing with Kristin's side of the family. Grandad and Anna got to know each other better.



And William enjoyed playing with vintage toys.

Utah After-Christmas Trip

We had lots of fun in Utah after Christmas. Grandma was very helpful, showing us how to dance on the musical dance-mat she gave us.








The kids really enjoyed giving their Great-Grandma toys to play with.







And Uncle Cory got some big hugs.

Disneyland Blog... been done before

As Chad told me, "the Disneyland blog has been done to death". But Kristin says that if I'm going to be on the computer now I should be doing something productive.

For those who don't know - we had a Killpack family reunion in California. It was a blast! We entered the park and first thing - William HAD to ride the train. We rode that train quite a bit for the 3 days we were there. The next two rides we tried were a disaster and I think it kind of ruined Williams trust in us - he'll be scarred for life. First the haunted mansion was really loud and dark, so we had to bail out before the car part. And then splash mountain freaked William out. So the rest of the time we stuck to the mellow rides (even though William was tall enough to ride any ride he wanted).

Rather than a play by play of all three days I'm just gonna put up some of my favorite pics...


The last ride we did was Autopia - Anna and I were in front - and I took this while driving...
















The raft ride out to Tom Sawyer's island

















Anna on Tom Sawyer's island
















Loungin' around on TSI. This is also where Kristin was breast feeding Anna when the big boat came around the corner and all the people waved.
















Tea-cup ride - we didn't spin it like madmen































Anna didn't particularly enjoy the train ride

















William and Grandma did
















The C

Day 2 in San Jose

The second day we rode the train to a small playground near Kevin and Jesse's place. I caught a shot of William as the train approached... does he look excited?


Part of the playground was under construction and the workers kindly left their roller out for the kids to play on. Everyone had to have a turn:



After the park, we went to the San Jose Children's Museum. That place rocked! It puts our Oregon children's museum to shame. There was a section with water AND balls - William and Anna were in heaven. I especially like the shot of Anna with the splashing water and the balls balancing on the top of the water streams.



I was going to leave it out, but I had to show this water tornado that the kids would throw balls in. They would get sucked down and then pop out the bottom to float down into another section...
It was a lot of fun seeing Kevin and his family. Lots of thanks to them for showing us around the area, suggesting fun activities and good food, and letting us hang out at their place for yummy waffles and lots of kiddie toys.

Guess Whose Footprints

California Dreamin'

We went to California last week. Our first stop was San Jose to visit my best friend from high school: Kevin Anderson, and his wife and daughter Jesse and Evelyn. It was great to see them. Especially to see Evelyn and Anna play together (or fight together as it seems most toddlers do).

The first day we went to the Zoo - and then to the beach. This is Jesse, Evelyn, Kristin, Anna, and William at the Zoo.











We rode the zoo train - which William loved!



After to zoo, we headed to the beach and had a blast there - Evelyn got to go home and take a nap, so we went without the Andersons. It was a LONG walk down to the beach...



We waded into the water even though it was pretty cold. It was about like summer at the Oregon coast.