Mother's Day

The boys' school had a mothers day breakfast that happened to be on my birthday. The boys made the sweetest gifts for me, handprints,flowers, potholders and cute pictures of them.

Watching Ri get up and sing the songs he had learned in his class was such a treat! As recently as the Christmas program he didn't really sing with the other kids on stage, but for the breakfast and at church today he sang all the words. He has been so excited about his songs that he has been singing them for weeks and he sang them for me again before going to bed tonight. If I think of it tomorrow I will have to film him!

This morning Ry and the boys brought me cinnamon rolls and scrambled eggs with flowers. Ri chose blue and T white and yellow daffodils (so I have a BYU colored bouquet!). They came home from church with more sweet crafts for me - including the crown that Ry took a pictue of! Ry made us dinner and let me take a nap. It just really was another lovely day.

Birthdays!

We have been trying to be super frugal in the time between now and when our house closes and so Teddy had a very homemade kind of family birthday party. He's young enough that he was still very happy with it! Fortunately he didn't seem to mind the christmas wrapping paper :)

It's hard for me to believe it has been three years since he joined our family! He is such a sweetheart and we love him so much!

He LOVES chocolate and he loves to pretend he is a baby bird (he loves seeing the nest in our back yard) and so I made him a "wormy" (gummy worms) chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. The three random chocolate candies are there because he asked for them and that's where he wanted them.

We brought cupcakes to preschool and his teacher made him a crown that he kept calling his "princess crown." I tried to turn it into a "prince" crown, but he wouldn't go for it.

He got a construction set, a "word whammer" a toy that builds words - believe it or not he really likes it! - underwear (so he can be like a big kid) nice khaki shorts (for church) and a car from Riley. He will get to spend his gift card to Toys R Us from the Allreds and his money from the Mize's after we move. He blew out his candles before we sang happy birthday and so we had to light them again! He loves birthday cake!

On my birthday (two days after Teddy) we used a gift certificate to the Cheesecake factory that we got for Christmas to go out to dinner. Ryan made me a cake and I will get a present after the house closes in June - or I guess the house is my present! On the morning of my birthday Riley asked, "If it is your birthday, why isn't the house decorated like it is for our birthdays?" I explained that it is because I decorate the house and I didn't decorate for myself!" He very seriously said that when he got home from school we would decorate the house for me. Sweet boy! Ryan surprised me by getting off work early and I really had a lovely day.

Catch-up post: Easter and other Fun

We really enjoyed the back yard until just two weeks ago when the mosquitoes came out in full force. The boys spent hours out every day for almost the whole month of April. In the above picture Riley is pushing Teddy to the "letter factory" so they can go "build" words (thank you leapfrog videos!)

Here are some pictures of the boys doing an Easter egg hunt in our back yard. We drove out to the Carolinas largest Easter egg hunt (it happened to be about 10 minutes from our house) and boy was that a mistake! We waited for an hour to get on a shuttle to where the hunt was - the cash I brought to buy lunch (no one took cards) fell out of my pocket (luckily and amazingly it was still on the grass in our front yard when we got home) and the bigger kids got all the eggs before any younger kids could get any. We then had to wait for the shuttle to take us back to our car again. So we came home basically tired and hungry with nothing to show for it - it really wasn't very fun. The boys loved the backyard hunt though, that is what we should of done all along!

There are also a couple pics of Teddy finding his basket in the morning.

We had fun dipping strawberries in chocolate one afternoon

The boys at bathtime. Ryan captured this "priceless" moment.

Homemade hot cocoa (Answer to the question - where does chocolate come from - we got out the cocoa - doesn't taste good without sugar etc.)

Riley reading to Teddy (his favorite book about rescue machines)

Hike and picnic at Reedy Creek park - it was great until the lightening storm hit. We spent the second half taking turns carrying Teddy and Riley as we sprinted back to the car! (there are news stories out here after most major storms about someone being hit by the lightening)

Catch-up post: House Hunting

In the middle of April I flew to the northwest to find us a house to buy. I took notes and video for Ryan, but even still - what a sweet husband to trust me to go out and pick out a house by myself! He doesn't have any time off before he finishes his residency and besides that it would been expensive to fly out the whole family (since we have to buy tickets for both boys) so I traded some baby-sitting on Thursday and Friday and Ryan watched the boys all weekend (brave man).

Most the homes in the area we are looking are short sales which can take months to hear if your offer has been accepted. A short sale is when the seller owes more than the house is now worth in this falling market. I came back from the trip with two homes we wanted to make offers on. (with short sales you can put more than one offer in at a time).

Then, the day after I got home a house came back on the market that had gone "sale pending" the day before I left on my trip. Luckily my realtor had walked me briefly through this house as a comparable - we knew what it was pending at and it was the same floor plan and in the same neighborhood as another house I liked. I didn't, however, pay much attention as I had been looking at houses all day and this one was no longer available. I do remember feeling disappointed that it was taken.

Ryan and I decided to go for it - it is bank owned (a foreclosure) and so we are buying as is, but we got a response to our offer in 48 hours. My mom drove up to take pictures of the backyard - I hadn't even looked at it when I was there. My mother-in-law who is a realtor in Oregon (we are moving to Washington) represented us at the home inspection. It doesn't look like anyone has ever actually lived in it - it was most likely bought by speculators, but when the market crashed went into foreclosure. We beat out a couple other bids and we plan to close on June 5th.

We are pretty excited - it was built in 2006 - has 5 bedrooms and is 2700 square feet. The backyard is not the yard we have always dreamed of, it is in a development and it (the yard) is fairly small - but there is a park around the corner and we think it will be fine for us at this point in our lives. Plenty of rooms for the next couple kids (which since Riley has taken to praying that we will soon have twin girls - I don't know where he got that idea - we may need sooner that we were planning!) It will be our first house and it is a little crazy of us, we know, because neither of us has ever really examined it - but we have people we trust to check it out for us and I was in it briefly, once - and it is the same floor plan as another house I looked at very closely. We are buying it for 100,000 less than it sold for 2 years ago.

We were pre-approved, but financing is a little tenuous because it is based off a future job contract and Ryan ends his residency June 30th and so doesn't start his new job until July 2nd so we are still a little nervous standards might change and we might not get the loan, or we might have to figure something out with the close date... Anyway, we are cautiously super excited if that makes sense.

Catch-up post: replacement car

We knew April would be extremely busy before the car accident and with this new wrench thrown in our plans there were days that were downright frantic. After a week without a car (the police officer recorded the name of the street wrong so it took awhile to get the report and work with the insurance...) we got a rental, which we fell in love with. It was a 2008 Nissan Xterra. After a lot of research on things like "the car you are least likely to die in in an accident" and other fun topics we decided on getting an Xterra. The gas mileage isn't great, but it sure is a sturdy car! There are a couple cars that are better (newer 4Runners and Odyssey minivans - which will probably be our next purchase - but because we are in the process of buying a house we couldn't buy a car in a higher price range than what we got from the insurance company for the CR-V so we ended up with a 2002 Black Nissan Xterra.

Buying the car was complete craziness as I was going out of town to find us a house to buy and Ryan was working a lot (he always works 8-5, but he also has quite a few 24 hour shifts of on-call where he has to stay at the hospital - not conducive to car shopping). One night we drove 2 1/2 hours to Sanford, NC to look at a car we ended up not buying. It took the boys days to recover from being up until midnight. Then the clutch in Ryan's civic went out and we had to turn the rental car back in and we literally came within 24 hours of not having even one car!