Our cute little buddy- 6 months

It's a good thing that I gave my camera to my cute neighbors, Reese and Blakelee, so that they could take pictures of our kids! These are some cute shots that I discovered when looking through my pictures. Thanks girls!

The work begins...

These pictures pretty much sum up the last two weeks...

I wore the same "Happy Holiday" sweatshirt for a week (I washed it once). I think people at home depot started to recognize me as the "Happy Holiday" girl.

18 ft ceilings...very fun to paint. Want to do this again...NEVER!

Picture taken from the upstairs

I still look this way. Exhausted!

Finding a house

This is our family with our lender, Patti and our realtor Kathleen at closing. They said it was the fastest signing they had ever been to since we were trying to get all the paperwork turned in so we could close the next day. Because of one paper (not our fault), we had to wait the weekend to close, which was a bummer!

The story on finding our house: We started the housing search towards the beginning of September. Everyone that knows us knows that it just was never the right time to buy a house. We are both so glad that we didn't listen to all the advice and buy when houses were super expensive. Let me tell you, we heard a lot of "Now is the time to buy" but it's not if you are not ready or don't feel like it's the right thing to do. So anyways, I was chatting with my friend Jamie and she had mentioned that they were starting to look for a house and were hoping on getting the $8000 tax credit. After the conversation I had with her I just really started thinking about it and wondering if it would be the right time to buy. I talked to Phil and we both started feeling really good about it. We prayed and felt like we should move forward. Our friend Danielle recommended a realtor that worked in her office, Kathleen, and we couldn't have been happier. We searched for months for a house. There was a lot of disappointment. We put in about 6 offers for different houses and always seemed to be outbit or something. We had looked at this house, but it was listed well out of our price range and so we put in a very low offer which they countered at $2000 less than asking price so we dropped it. Finally, the week we actually got the house, Phil mentioned to me that he felt like this was going to be our week to get a house. I think I said "Yeah right." We had looked for 5 months already and it just didn't seem like it was ever going to happen. To make matters even more frustrating, the owners of our house that we had rented were coming back from their mission and we needed to find a place fast. It was a very stressful time thinking that we might be stranded.

So that week, the beginning of February we decided to up our offer on the Idlebury house since it was still on the market. The bank (since it was a foreclosure) came back 3 days later and finally accepted our offer. So now we are the proud new owners of our house!

This is our family on our stairs when we got the keys to the house.

Haircuts

Before and after haircuts (in Zachary's case, hair-chop! Oops!)

We bought a house

We are the proud owners of this house! It's 4 bedroom, 3 bath, 2300 square feet. We closed escrow on Monday and have been painting, moving and going crazy ever since. Thank goodness for Sunday, the day of rest! We are so happy to finally have a home after 6 months of searching!I'll post more pictures of the inside before and after later.

Kaylin the model

Kaylin wanted me to take her picture last saturday...multiple times...with different poses. Here's what we came up with.

Kaylin turns 5!

I was in mouring last week thinking that I now have a 5 year old. Where has the time gone? It seemed only yesterday that she was 2 or 3. She has really grown up this last year. We keep telling her to stop growing, but she doesn't listen. She is so excited to start kindergarten in the fall and is already talking about riding the bus. She knows all of her ABCs and loves to do "school" and learn. I think that she'll be a very enthusiastic student. We have just loved having Kaylin in our family and couldn't imagine life without her. Happy Birthday to Kaylin!

She wanted a blue cake with sprinklies....Mommy delivered! Gluten free chocolate cake that was YUMMY and cream cheese frosting. It was great!

Little man is eating solids!

Jared ate solids for the first time at the beginning of the month and LOVES them. His favorite is sweet potatoes and squash. I skipped the rice cereal because, let's be honest, it's nasty and babies much prefer sweet potatoes!