Quick Takes #13

1.  We didn't win the bid for the house.  :(  I feel like I'm on a bad episode of Hou.se Hunt.ers now!  I had a cry about it...yes, briefly, to get it out of my system....and we are continuing the house search.  The winning bid was over asking price, and well.....ours wasn't ;)

2.  So now I just thought I was anxious before.  We move out of this house in less than 2 weeks.  And we're really going to change things up!  When we move out, Rob will be staying locally with his mom, and I am taking the kids to temporarily live with my parents in the mountains....about 4 hours away!  When we initially devised this plan it seemed great...we can deal with being apart for the 30-45 days it takes to process the loan on a new house.  But now....it's very uncertain how long we will be apart.  We may end up coming back and renting an apartment.  But we thought it would be a great way to save money (no house/rent) payment in the meantime!  And thankfully we have very generous parents!

3.  Our purple finch baby birds flew the nest this morning!  So happy that they survived since the mockingbird baby didn't fare as well.  It was so fun to watch them.  At the bottom of our stairs is the window to the front porch and the bird nest was in the hanging basket right outside that window.  Every time I would carry Ian down the stairs, he would do the sign for bird!  It was so much fun for the kids to watch those little guys hatch and grow.

4.  Am I the only mom out there nervous about swimming lessons??  I guess it's because I hated swimming lessons as a child.  Isabel desperately needs them.  There are children younger than she is swimming across the pool and she is still in those arm floaties in the deep end!  Yikes!  I know I need to get on the ball with this!

5.  And yes, back to houses....(uh broken record?)  Well I think all of this may be another move by God to get me to relinquish some of my controlling ways ;)  Like oh, back when I used to think I could control when I got pregnant??   Well, since we are moving in 2 weeks, it is unlikely that I will be here to really "find" the house.  That's pretty much going to be on Robert to go out and look at houses (although I will be obsessively stalking real.tor dot com.)  And that is driving me a little bit crazy.  Because looking at homes is alot of fun for me.  It's really enjoyable to walk through a home and ponder what you would do differently, what things you would keep, what color would this wall be painted, which rooms would the kids get, etc... I guess God wants me to let someone else be in control of all that.  I mean, some people by houses sight unseen!  Now THAT is trust....or maybe a little crazy ;)

6.  With many toys already packed, the kids are having fun using moving boxes in mysterious ways.  Of course there is the moving box as house, moving box as tunnel, and moving box as car, but yesterday we cut up a moving box and made it into pirate swashbuckler swords and scurvy gold.  Okay, I have no idea if those words all make sense together, but the afternoon turned from packing into pirate-treasure-finding-adventure-fun!  Then I took the slipcover off an old chair that we have in the master bedroom, and apparently it was like a brand new (errr... too old for them to remember) piece of furniture treasure and they were all over it.  With Ian able to climb up on the couch and chairs now, life is really getting dangerous interesting!

7.  It's going to be HOT today.  We have an excessive heat warning and are expecting 104 today, with a real feel of 108.  Yuck. 

Quick Takes #12

1.  Packing, packing and more packing...that's what has been going on around here.  I am a planner/organizer/list maker by nature ;) and I am so thankful that I started packing WEEKS ago.... we decided to forgo the POD because renting a storage unit and hauling everything ourselves is cheaper...by HALF!  We just couldn't waste that much money to go with the portable moving containers.  So I've been slowly moving minivan loads of boxes to the unit.  Wow.  We have too much stuff.  What's funny is that now that the "stuff" is packed, I am not really missing anything that has been packed up, and half of it I can't even remember!

2.  I'm really slightly stressed at the moment because last night we got a call that the foreclosure home that we have fallen in love with is in a multiple offer situation at the moment, and if we want to make an offer, then we must submit it by Monday.  Yep....fantastic.  Now I'm really kind of nervous about this, because it seems like it is absolutely tailored to meet all of our needs, but God will really have to work it out for us, if this is in fact the house He wants us to buy, because we truly have a price that we cannot go over, and I'm very worried that if there are multiple bids then one of those is going to beat ours.  Ugh....I feel like an episode of House Hunters!  Did you hear that that show was rigged???
In my head I am repeating that the Lord is in control of all of this and He will put us where He wants us, but in my heart I am kind of battling it out with nerves and wanting to do crazy, irrational things like sell a car and all the furniture in my house so that we could put down extra money to guarantee that we get this house!  *sigh*....okay, not really, but...just....have...to....TRUST!

3.  This morning I took the kids to the pool and we have a play structure/slide on the kiddie side.  Well Ian proceeds to climb under the slide and of course I'm there but I'm trying to let him be a little independent since he's learning how to toddle around in the water (so I'm an arms length away) in the 4 inch water and he goes under the slide and is squatting.  I say, "watch your head!" and he stands up and bumps his head on the slide, then instantly goes down to the water -which of course gets his face wet and sends him jerking back up, which bumps his head again, and that in turn sends him back face down in the water.... can you picture it?  Okay so it lasted for like a split second but seemed like it was an eternity before I swooped him out from under the slide where he was caught in the vicious cycle!  Poor guy....he was very traumatized for about a minute, and then was okay.

4.  Now back to the house we want to buy...because clearly it is still on my mind.  You see, I just don't think all of this is coincidence.  This foreclosure that we want popped up the same day we got an offer on our house (which is the same day I buried St. Joseph!)....and on Thursday, Rob tells me that he talked to our real estate agent.  I then casually tell him that I would like to go back out to look at the foreclosure home one more time.  He then sets up the appointment without my knowledge for that afternoon.  I find this out after I had already promised Isabel a trip to the pool at that time.  So at that point I was a little frustrated, but decided he's made the appointment to see the house, so we need to go.  Then our agent just happens to touch base with the foreclosure agent that night and that is how we found out that we just barely have time to get in on a multiple offer situation.  All of those things had to happen for us to be able to KNOW it was time to make the offer.  I think that is God working, so I really want to believe that He wants this house for us!  I guess we really just have to make the offer and wait and see.  If you feel led, would you pray for us over this house situation? 

5.  This bishop of Raleigh celebrated the Mass to kick off the Fortnight for Freedom at our new parish, St. Joseph's, last night.  It was my hope that our whole family would attend, but Ian did not take an afternoon nap yesterday and the Mass was to begin at 6pm.  He usually goes to bed by 7pm and without a nap....ewww....you just didn't want to have him at church for that.  So Rob took Isabel and I stayed home with the baby.

6.  Speaking of the baby....he's not much of a baby anymore.  What baby dresses up like Mr. Potato Head?

These are clearly toddler antics.  *insert sobbing here*  Come on NFP, work for me!

7.  The new profile pics for our family were taken last weekend at my sister-in-law's wedding.  She got married on this beautiful farm in Chapel Hill, and she was absolutely gorgeous!  I'll have to see if she'll let me post some pics of her (she's currently on her honeymoon -so don't want to post without permission) ;)  But we had a wonderful time and are so excited to welcome her husband into the family. 

Quick Takes is hosted by Jennifer; go to Conversion Diary to read more!

Moving Out: Baby Bird and More!

Well, I don't think the bird made it.  We watched it get this big:

And then a few days later, the nest was kind of disheveled and the baby was no longer there.  Maybe it grew the rest of it's feathers really fast and flew the coop, but we are thinking something got it :(  Sad.  But within a few days we had purple finches nesting in the hanging basket on our front porch, so that has been a blessed distraction!

But really this post isn't just supposed to be about the birds.  It's really about what God has been doing in our life lately!  Our house has been up for sale since the beginning of February, and while we've been waiting for a buyer we've been praying for the sale of our home.  And of course I had heard about burying a St. Joseph statue in the yard....but this seemed like a lot of Catholic nonsense to me!  I mean, here I am making a point every time I speak to someone who may be unfamiliar with what we Catholics actually do to let them know that we don't pray TO the saints, we ask for their intercession.....and we DON'T WORSHIP Mary, we honor her as Jesus' mother, etc., etc.... Well, taking a statue and burying it upside down in the yard to help your house sell sounds a little,...well, superstitious?  Ummm.....rich with Catholic craziness??  But on May 25th, after a friend lent me her statue of Jesus' foster dad, I decided that I would bury the statue and MORE IMPORTANTLY, start a novena....that is 9 days of prayer asking for St. Joseph to intercede (that is to pray to our heavenly Father) that we might in fact sell this house! 

We had a showing that morning.  I buried the statue around 3pm, and by 5pm our real estate agent called to say that the people who had come to look at the house were going to make an offer....and they did. 

I about fell out of my chair. 

I think God was smiling at me that day.  It wasn't so much that I needed to bury a statue in my yard to sell our house.  I think it has more to do with God wanting me to devote some serious prayer time to this petition (more so than my bedtime "oh and please send a buyer for our house"), and that he wanted me to ask other people to pray too (particularly St. Joseph)!  Well, it gets better than that.  We had decided awhile ago that we were going to be changing parishes, and had fallen in love with the atmosphere of respect and reverence that we found at a parish by the name of (none other than) St. Joseph's!  The 9th and last day of our St. Joseph's novena, we attended our first Sunday Mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church as parishoners!  I didn't even plan that one out!  But what a cool way to end the novena, starting out at a new church! 

So our house is under contract and fingers crossed that all goes well and we get to close it in mid July.  In the meantime we are packing and figuring out living arrangements, and all kinds of other fun stuff.  God is definitely working out all the details!  And if you want to pray that it all goes according to His plan, I would be grateful!! :)