CHANGE

Ok, so I have noticed that it has been a VERY long time since I have been on here and updated ya'll... a good 5 months. A LOT has changed since then!

To start off with, I have been rocking school, straight A's and one (very sadly) C+ in pharmacology. (though I was literally 1% away from a B. Not one person in that class got an A and about half the class failed) regardless of that class, I have been doing awesome! I get to start my externship July 16th and will graduate September 12th! SO CLOSE!!!!

Kayden and Emma both had a birthday... Kayden turned 3 and Emma turned 1. I can't believe how big our babies are getting!!!! We did a Pirates and Princess them for their party, and my dad even had Captain Jack Sparrow come and surprise Kayden, and boy, was he surprised!!!! It was by far the coolest little kids party ever! (Not to be boastful or anything. ;) )

Back in March, we started looking for houses because our lease was up in June and we no longer wanted to rent an apartment, especially at the price we wanted, we knew that we could be paying a mortgage that was much less than what we renting our apartment for. So, we decided to start looking. Shortly after we started looking, we made a few phone calls and got prequalified for a home loan, so then we really started looking around. The very first house we looked at, we fell in love with. It had a nice size backyard, two car garage, and  a basement. It was not too big but not too small. We put an offer on the home, and luckily enough, we were the first ones to put an offer in, but, the house was a shortsale, so there was no guaranteeing it to be ours. We found out about a week later that someone else came in and offered more, as well as a $30k down payment on the house. So.... we continued to look for more homes. We found a few that we liked, but were just a bit out of our price range. About two weeks after we got the first phone call, we got another one saying we were back in lead, but we needed to offer just a bit more on the home and we were basically guaranteed it was ours. We were ECSTATIC!

So, after about a 2 1/2 - 3 week process of making counteroffers on the home, we finally got it! (which by the way, all of this happened in about a two month period, which I have to believe is record timing for a short sale!) We got the keys to the home about 3 1/2 - 4 weeks ago and for the first few days, all we did was clean and paint. I think I was at the house at least 6 hours a day after school working on it, but of course we had help from our awesome family! We have since moved in and are working on getting settled. We need to start getting a move on it though because in a week, we will be hosting fathers day at our house. I am super excited we finally get to host a family party!

The ONLY drawback to our home, is we are trying to find a way to keep the neighbor dogs behind us out of the yard. I know I have talked to my family about it, and maybe it's not as big of a deal as I think it is, but it still bothers me. The people behind us have no care in the world about their 3 dogs. the smallest one is a pretty small, shaggy, curly haired dog, and is borderline dreadlocks. There are two literally huge piles of feces about two feet from our fence and they were constantly getting in our yard. Well, I think it was the third day we were here working on the house and I guess the cousin to the dog owners lives right next to them, (so kiddy......however you spell it...... corner from us) came over and asked us to keep our side gate closed so that if the dogs got in our yard, they wouldn't get out of our gate and in to the neighborhood. Politely, I told her I would try my best to make sure it stayed closed if we weren't using it. Unfortunately, the dogs kept getting in to our yard, preventing kayden from playing on his playset and the owners were doing nothing about it, so, I called animal control on them. I know, I know, a lot of people say that I am already making enemies with the neighbors, bu really, I believe it to be that they are making enemies with us by not taking care of their animals.

Other than the dog situation, we are LOVING our new house!!!! Kayden loves that he has his own "park" behind his house (our backyard with the playset) and both the kids love the fact that we don't keep them corralled so as not to bother the neighbors below us!

Brian has been working a lot lately which is good and bad. Very thankful he has work to keep him busy and to keep him getting paid, but sad that he isn't home as often as he is on the winter months.

I think, this post has been long enough, I will try and get on here more often so I can do more updates so I don't forget to update ya'll on something and so my posts aren't as long as this novel I just wrote. ;)