I got to see this...or something just like it on the other side of town.

After small group James needed to spend a few minutes inside talking with someone after I had left to go get the boys. So when I pulled back up to the house we were meeting at with the boys we decided to stay in the car and watch the show. Here is an example of some of what we saw minus the tall buildings. INCREDIBLE!

1308 Silver Maple Dr (pictures from listing)

These will become the "before" pictures which I will update after we are settled. (why is everything I'm typing showing up underlined! argh! I added a link a while back but the line WON'T GO AWAY!

Consequences of a missed day of school.

Jonathan is in Kindergarten. Words cannot express how proud I am of how he is doing in school. After a bumpy start he is just thriving. Jonathan gets mostly "great", "terrific", and stars written by his teacher on his work. The other options are check and check minus which usually are followed by "Jonathan I know you color better than this" or something like that. This usually follows a day where he is just tired of doing the same stuff over and over again.

He also remains in pretty good health most of the time so he hasn't missed much school.Tomorrow we will be taking him out at lunch time since we are leaving for a camping trip with our small group!!! woohooo! This makes me think of the last time he missed a day of school I think it was in January or February. The following picture is a result of that single missed day...Take special note of how nicely he has drawn the lines between the numbers and how carefully he colored the nice brown hair. Yeah, I'll admit that the last g needed to be a little lower. So it seems to me that the only reason that he got a check instead of a star would have to be his choice of skin tone? Peach.... could it be that he missed a key lesson here in that one missed day of school? I can't tell you how long and hard we laughed upon opening his folder and seeing this picture. How do you tell your son you got a check on your work because you colored this guy the wrong color... He does have nice red lips though don't you think?

T - 21 days and counting...

.. until we close on our new house! I just need to take a moment and explain what type of woman is selling this house to us.

1) A tree branch fell in the front yard during a storm a week ago. She reassured us that it would be cut up and picked up by the city and she would have someone come out and clean up the break so that the tree would heal properly. Who does that on a house that is practically already sold.

2) I asked if she had any sort of regular pest control company that she used and would she recommend them. She mentioned that she treats it herself 2x per year and usually that is in November and May and this has always taken care of anything on the outside of the house and kept out anything from the inside. I just received an email stating that she just treated it. Now all this is post contract, so she has no obligation to do any of these things.

3) She has also stated that she will be cleaning out the gutters, if she has time she will fertilize the yard. She is facilitating and paying for half of a brand new roof, before we move in!

4) She is also going to take the time to show us around the house and answer any questions we have (we did this on our last house and it was HUGELY beneficial).

So anyway, all that to say we think she rocks!

Thunder Rolls.

I can't begin to describe what last nights thunder storm was like but I will attempt. Most of the evening/ night you couldn't go more than about 45 seconds between flashes of light and there was almost a steady stream of thunder. We were suddenly awoken when a flash of lightning that must have either been directly overhead or landed somewhere near by, this was simultaneously accompanied by the loudest thunder I have ever heard. It startled us both awake, it shook the building and set our car alarm off... twice. I of coarse was so impressed, I love it. Jonathan was not quite so impressed. I went to his room after hearing him call my name and as I got closer to the bed he lept from his top bunk and clung to me like a monkey. I didn't even need to hold on to him (although I did) as we made our way back to my bedroom where he was nestled in between mommy and daddy with his hands firmly squished up against his ears. Ian on the other hand our light sleeper (jonathan being the heavy sleeper) didn't make a peep and slept through the entire thing, which I account only to the fact that he was soooooo tired from the previous day.

I didn't mention the hail. Before we headed to bed we heard the unmistakable pounding of hail outside on the car ports which just reminds us that we only have one covered space and the van is currently in it. So James puts his heavy coat on (in 70 degree weather mind you) to protect himself from the hail and braves the worst of it to go move the car to a vacant covered spot. All the while there are flashes overhead and thunder pounding. What a shame it would be to get hail damage a month before we move to a house with a garage. The hail we received last night was about 1/2-3/4 of an inch. Apparently they consider it large if it is 3/4 of an inch or bigger. I was starting to think that it wasn't large unless it was golf ball or softball size which we have heard of nearby recently, but have yet to see with our own eyes.

Well needless to say I'm a bit tired today but my day begins at 5:30 whether I like it or not. I'm hoping to sneak in a nap when the little ones nap today but we'll see.

Enjoy the day!


So there you have it that was our night, oh and the power blinked so my bright idea to use our cell phones as alarms last night was brilliant (pat pat pat on my back). So I read the forecast for the next couple days and it does say more of the same except with the addition of tornado's which for some reason doesn't scare the tar out of me like it used to.

Moving Forward. A New Roof Over Our Head, Another Year Goes By

I'm sitting at my computer listening to the midnight thunder roll through. I have always loved the sound of thunder, we rarely had it in the NW however, when we did you could always find me perched at a window waiting to see the next bolt of lighting.

Today marked the end of our option period on the house, so up through today we could have backed out of the deal and lost only our $100 option fee as opposed to the $1600 that is our earnest money. Before the day was over we were able to negotiate a new roof for the house we are buying. The one thing on the house that wasn't quite up to snuff. Now that being said, there wasn't really anything wrong with it, it was just old. Older than much else on the house. We have chosen the company, product and color and the seller will have the work done. Woohoo! It is even going to look more fantastic. It has new or newer carpet, countertops, cherry kitchen cabinets, windows!, pull out shelves in the kitchen, sprinkler system, landscaping etc etc etc. It is a modest house that has been well taken care of in a nice neighborhood. I'm hoping, Lord willing, that we will be able to settle here for a while.

James and I met the roofer there on Monday to get an estimate and it was the first sunny day we had seen the house. I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. Even more in the sunlight. With the last house we were looking to buy, each time we would go there I would have more and more questions and hesitations. With this one I have just noticed more and more things that I like. I'm sure reality will come crashing down on me at some point but for now I'm blissfully overjoyed.

I celebrated my 31st birthday yesterday. I have to say it was a terrific day. It seems that with each passing year I become a little more content with my life. Right now I can honestly say I'm 31 and proud of it. I'm happy with where my life has taken me and I'm happy to see it going where it is. I'm blessed to have a wonderful family, great friends near and far, a church I love to serve in and be a part of and relatively good health that is getting better by the day. I'm also thrilled to see that this season holds some new challenges and opportunities to possibly work but more exciting is an opportunity to help influence the women of the church in worship. I have a passion to see them free to praise there king with reckless abandon. To be free from the bondages of self doubt and pride. I want to share with them some things that the Lord has revealed to me about worship and how to get ourselves out of the way so we can be changed by His presence in a more consistent and real way.

Ok seriously this is a HUGE lightning store... IMPRESSIVE!!!!!! Better get off the computer is blipping.

1308 Silver Maple Drive.

Well our offer was accepted and the inspection is scheduled for tomorrow. I don't anticipate anything big coming up but we will see. I'll see if I can take some additional pictures while we are in there for the inspection. Not sure how that works with the seller still living there.

More on all that later.

Scratch that. House buying take 2.

Last week we exercised our option to not buy the first house we were looking at. While the payments would have been a dream, it just had too many issues under the surface that the seller was not willing to work with us on. And, since it had a nice little crack in the brick work on one side it was going to need a structural engineer report at which point the odds were that it would need to be addressed before purchase and the seller wasn't willing to do that so we would have wasted about 2k at that point and we wanted to cut our losses and move on.

We set out Saturday morning to look at 3 houses in the next 10k category.First one was in a great neighborhood but the floor plan looked like something a child had put together... it just didn't work. The second one was in a great neighborhood, nice curb appeal, impeccably maintained, new cherry wood cabinets, wonderful landscaping with little gardening surprises around every corner etc etc etc. So we loved this one, it even had all the little pull out shelves in the kitchen. There were little extras throughout the house. So we put an offer that was just slightly below asking price since it was priced a little higher than the other previously sold homes in the neighborhood. So how did they respond? ... they flat refused the offer, no counter with a higher price. well hm! So we wrote up another offer for full price and sent it off Saturday night. And we waited, waited and waited. We hadn't heard anything as of noon Monday so we checked in with our Realtor and at the same time she was checking in with the sellers Realtor. Turns out despite the fact that the offer was faxed and emailed... it was not received. The sellers had been thinking that since so many people were looking over the weekend that they would get other full price offers. As of Monday noon, we were the only one and they had refused it... imagine the mental turmoil that must be going on in their heads! hahahaha. OK so we resent the offer Monday and it is currently Tuesday morning. We'll see what today brings.

There was a third house we looked at that day, but after seeing the second one we didn't spend more than about 2 minutes walking around it.

In the meantime, a friend who is looking to get in on a sweet pre-forclosure deal may need to sell in a hurry and just happens to be in a neighborhood we have been looking in and is a touch larger than the house we put an offer on. So it all seems to be some pretty interesting timing but we'll wait it out and see.