Third time's the charm!

Our house is under contract!  We can hardly believe it and are so excited.  This has been a long road for us.  We had our house on the market for eight months in 2010, six months in 2011 and seven weeks in 2012.  That is a whole lot of cleaning up and hiding toys people!  I am still amazed at the people that would give 10 minutes notice or even better, just show up saying that they thought the home was vacant even though there clearly is furniture in the house in our photos.  I would love to have been a fly on the wall to see what I looked like in full speed clean up mode.  I would calmly ask them to give me five minute since I have small children in my house, close the door and the races were on!  It's exhausting and I have promised to give people a days notice when I am out looking.

I had to take some sanity breaks from having my house for sale over the past two years and we are thrilled that it finally has happened.  Now we just have to hope that it closes when it is supposed to in the end of June.  We had nine showings since we put it on the market this year and most people told us the same thing, they loved the house but not that we were on a busy road.  We had one person come back twice to see the house and they asked to see our property disclosure and asked tons of questions about our house so that was by far the most interest we have had in the past three years.  Out of the blue, we received an offer a week and a half ago.  To our surprise, it was not from those people and it was from someone who had looked at our house early on in the process.  They never came back to see it more than once and they never asked for our property disclosure.  It was a low offer so we decided to contact the people who had shown a lot of interest and they decided to make an offer too.  We could hardly believe we went from zero to two offers in the matter of a few hours, so fun!  The stressful part is that all of this happened while we were leaving for our 5th anniversary trip to Niagara Falls two weekends ago.  We received the second offer right before we were about to board our flight and they wanted an answer just a few hours later!  We asked them for an extension since we would have barely landed by the time they wanted a response.  It was a crazy weekend (another post for that) but we are happy to be on our way to another house.  Now we just have to find another house, pack up all our stuff and be out of here in two months!  No small feat for us!  Dan remembers fondly of the days where everything he owned consisted of a few suitcases of clothes and a guitar.  My how things have changed!

We went with Duffy Realty this time and were pleased until we got to the contract phase.  We had a hard time getting someone to return our calls and emails which was more than frustrating!  At least we aren't paying them much so that helps us feel a little better.  The day we sent in the final contract, the sign feel over in our yard.  It was as if the sign knew his hard work was over and passed out from exhaustion.  I feel ya buddy!

Easter Pics

Warning...tons of photos ahead.  We had a fabulous Easter, I hope yours was great as well!

Cheese!

Hello my baby!

I can't take the cuteness.  Such sweet cousins.

Whap!  Didn't see that coming.

Silly faces.

Ride em cowgirls.

Lots of love from Maw Maw.

I really wish I knew how to turn this photo. If you know how, please tell me. She had a lap full!

Maw Maw with her great grandchildren.

Shanna did this amazing braid in MB's hair.  She loved it!

The tongue helps her concentrate.

Pretty eggs!

Look mom!

My kids were totally not in the mood to take any pics on Easter morning before church.  We took tons of the four of us and they all turned out horrible.  The grandparents decided to give it a shot and they got tickled because they were having the same amount of luck as us.

This little sweetie slept through some of the picnic, that is until I took this picture and woke him up.  Oops!

Ben did not want to have his picture made at the hunt lineup.  The girls were super concerned about him.

She was into finding the eggs more this year than last but still left early to go bounce.

Yay for finding some eggs.

My and my buddy, could he be any cuter in this little hat?

Drake passed out during the hunt and was just so sweet. 

Family photo.  MB was so over it!

Fun Birthdays

Our grandmothers celebrated some special birthdays recently.  G-Mother turned 90 and she had a big party a few weeks ago.  Maw Maw turned 85 and we were able to celebrate with her over Easter weekend.  We love these ladies so much!

Four generations

Ben was ready to party!

The poor little fella didn't get any attention at the party, so sad!  :-)

This guy really loves his great grandmothers.

Maw Maw with all of her great grandchildren.  She had a lap full!

Monthly Dates

So some of you may remember that I gave Dan 12 surprise dates for part of his Christmas gift.  We have had so much fun finding out what the dates are for each month.  I have already forgotten the order of the dates so they have been surprises for me too.

In January, we went to the Dialogue in the Dark which was so great.  Details were in this post.

February was dinner and a movie at Studio Movie Grill which was perfect because it combines some of our favorite things, eating and going to the movies.  It was great timing because a Groupon came out the Thursday before we had planned to go so it only cost us $10 for two tickets and drinks.  I got to pick the movie because as Dan says, "you get to pick the movies the rest of the year so why would Valentine's Day be any different?"  Ha!  He is so right!  So I picked The Vow and I really liked it.  :-)

For March, I had picked something way out of my comfort zone...Rock Climbing!  We went to Stone Summit and took a 1.5 hour Belay class and I have to say, I really enjoyed it.  We learned all the proper ways to tie the knots to the harnesses and after we took a test to make sure that we wouldn't let each other crash to the ground, they let us start climbing.  I was so nervous and really didn't want to embarrass myself.  I was able to make it to the top and I was so proud!  Dan was amazing at rock climbing as I knew he would be.  I liked belaying him more than I liked the climbing.  The finger and foot grips were so tiny, I practically shimmied my way up!  I really recommend this place.  Although it smelled like stinky feet at first, the place was absolutely amazing and we had fun watching the professionals climb, it was really impressive what some of them could do!  Just a note, remember to take socks.  I was so busy getting things lined up for our kids while we would be away, I forgot to change shoes and I showed up in flip flops.  You rent the shoes and all I can say is that was the worst part of the evening.  Yuck!  This was such a fun date and it is hard to beat going on a date in your work out clothes.  Here are some pictures to document the date.

I told y'all it was a big place!  Do you see those "rocks" on the ceiling?  Yes, people were somehow climbing on those while hanging upside down.  Crazy!  Photo via their website.

This was right after I belayed down the summit!  If you pretend to speak the lingo, surely you know what you are doing, right?

The man with all the forearm strength in the world!  He flew up the walls.