Our Family Project

Maryanne has this thing with music and dancing. Even when she hears a little music on a toy she starts to shrug her shoulders. It's really funny in church because she'll start to dance, then she'll stop and start leading the music. I'll have to get a video of that one day. But, most of all, she loves to dance to upbeat songs that her siblings start dancing to as well.

We've been pretty busy the last two months. Here's a short recap of what we've done "other" than stuff concerned with moving. Andrew had his sixth birthday the day that we arrived in Phoenix. We had a small dinner and Jon went to the store and bought a cake. We did our own little family celebration that night, then we did another one on Saturday with my mom, and another one a week later with Jon's brother and his family, and Jon's sister and her family. It was so nice to see all of our family here within a week or two! The above cake is one of the two that I made for the get together with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. The second cake was only a single layer, but was decorated the same. During the next few weeks we looked for a house. And, in case you missed that drama, click here . Near the end of March we made the 12 hour trek to Utah for my older sister's wedding dinner. She was married the week before, and then had a small dinner for her imme...

Eliza turned 10 today. It's crazy! I don't feel old enough to have a 10-year-old. But, I do ... and I'm so grateful I do! She's to that pre-babysitting age, so it's been nice to leave her home with the children while I run to get the mail (or more recently when I ran to our old apartment [in the same complex] to pull things out of the freezer when we were moving). I know I'm not the best mother out there ... and hopefully none of you will turn me into the authorities ... but, there have been times when I've left all the children at home, in their beds asleep, and gone to the grocery store. Of course, Eliza is awake and watching tv or something, and the store is only three minutes away. Anyway, I had forgotten this year to do our birthday posts ... so Adam's, Maryanne's, and Andrew's will be showing up in the next little while to make my blog book complete (although they'll be post-dated, so if you really want to see them, you'll have to l...

Wow, after a few days of confusion and decision-making, and a few days of being jerked around treated not-so-nicely by the seller, we decided to walk away from the house. On this last Monday we had the inspection performed on the house. The inspector found a few things that needed to be repaired (the electrical was all messed up, lights and fans not even wired to the switch on the wall, and other things as well), and the termite inspection showed that there were termites in the house. That same day we heard from our loan officer and found out that in order to get the loan we wanted the seller would have to prove that he'd put $40k into improving the home (he was an investor and had bought the home in December for $70k less than what we would have bought the house for). Turns out that he could only account for $15-30k. So, we couldn't get the loan we wanted, which meant we had to get an FHA loan. In order to get the FHA loan we needed to push back the closing date 45 days. So, ...