On the Move

Our life is definitely "on the move" these days. We literally are preparing to move! Most of our friends and family know the craziness of the last few weeks. We put our house up for sale on Monday, May 18 while we were at the beach. We've been actively preparing for that since about March (remember painting week?) but the last few weeks of April and May were very busy with de-cluttering, organizing, and cleaning. So we went to the beach and on Friday (4 days later) had an offer on our house! We were totally surprised based on the current housing market. We had not even begun looking for a new house, so we had to start doing that immediately once we got back from the beach. We looked at 14 houses on Memorial Day, I saw 4 more that Wedsnesday, Jay and I saw 9 more on Saturday, and then I saw 10 more the following Tuesday. That's right--about 35 houses in 8 days. It was exhausting!

On that Tuesday, I saw a house that I thought I liked. It was a very different floorplan than the "traditional" homes we had seen and I wasn't sure if Jay would like it. We agreed that he should go look at it that Friday. We also had been seriously looking at 2 other houses and were having a really hard time determing priorities of space/function, price, location, etc. Well, on Wednesday morning our realtor called and said that someone else was putting in an offer on the house I had just seen the day before. If we were interested, we needed to decide that day and make an offer. We all went over around lunch time and had about 30 minutes to decide if we wanted to buy this house. Jay said he thought we should make an offer, so we did and they accepted it! We're now in the home inspection/repair stage of things and will soon get to the actual packing stage. We are very excited about the house. I really do think it's will be great for what our family needs.

It has truly been a crazy few weeks. I have no idea why God decided that it all needed to happen so fast. That was definitely outside of my comfort zone. He used the process to reveal a lot of my own sin to me (for example, what we need vs. what I want, my selfishness, etc). In the middle of the house searching process, I had a complete meltdown. I had lots of very patient family members and friends who talked me through it every day, and I'm very thankful for that. I still sometimes have slight moments of panic and think "what are we doing?" and I don't feel emotionally ready to say goodbye to our house, neighbors, and neighborhood here yet. But I know that this was all in God's plan. There's no other way to explain how it all happened. So I'll keep trusting Him with that and take one step of faith at a time.

And since you read all of my ramblings, I figured you may want to see Catherine and Will. We've been going to the park lots in the afternoon (I will really miss being able to walk to the park).

Catherine now likes to ride her tricycle to the park from our house. I think it's super cute.

Climbing all by herself. She's gained a lot more confidence with that sort of thing. She's even started going down the really big slide at the "big playground" all by herself.

Will going down the slide. He looks like such a big boy!

He loves to play and climb!

We also had our first ER visit with Will. He fell off the steps at the playground at church on Sunday and hurt his arm. He wouldn't use his arm after he fell and couldn't hold onto anything or even bend his arm to put a cracker in his mouth. He kept crying and crying--that "hurt" cry. It made my insides hurt. I was worried that maybe he had fractured or cracked something, so we went to the ER to check it out. Thankfully everything looked okay on the x-rays. The Dr said that he may have dislocated his elbow when he fell, but then it popped back into place on its own. His arm did still seem sore on Monday and Tuesday and he was reluctant to use it, but it seemed much better today. I feel like we're "officially" the parents of a boy now that we went to the ER!

We'll keep everyone posted on how things go in the next few weeks. We have VBS next week, will be out of town twice in July, need to pack and move all by July 24th. It's going to be really busy!