Whew—I'm back

I feel like I have totally fallen off the face of the blogging world. We have been so incredibly busy the past 2-3 weeks that I have literally had no time to blog. At night, we have all been falling into bed already half asleep. We have at least two more weeks of this pace, and then hopefully it will slow down.

The biggest contributor to our increasingly chaotic schedule is a guy named Nate. Nate is our Realtor. That's right—we are looking to buy a house! We are really excited but it sure has been a long few weeks of house hunting. It started with 4-5 hours of looking at all of the house listings that met our main requirements. Then 2-3 hours comparing what we each liked. Then another 2-3 hours driving by the homes that were of interest to both of us. Then finally three different visits to three sets of homes. It has been amazing to see the vast difference between how well-kept (or not at all well-kept) some of these homes have been. It is even more amazing to me that when there is foundational damage to the property that the listing Realtor doesn't put it on the MLS page. I mean, why waste everyone's time going to the house only to walk right back out when you see the giant crack in the foundation?

This past Sunday we visited a house that looked promising. It needs major cleaning (looks like an abandoned frat house on the inside) and overall painting, but has a lot of potential to be really cute. Besides the great deck and fenced backyard, it is in a nice area just south of the city, only 10 minutes from Tyler's work, and near all of our friends from small group. The biggest drawback is that it is 250 square feet smaller than the smallest home we wanted to go. So that is what has been the largest consideration—how long will we fit in this house? The basement is already partially finished, but I am not comfortable with putting a bedroom down there unless we had a walk-out to the backyard or something. (My paranoia coming out with the basement as a fire hazard.) There is a silver lining though: the nicest thing about a small house is that there is much less area to clean!

My proud little girl
S. hit a new milestone today, much to my distress. She can now open doors. I always leave the bathroom door shut because she has started to become quite resourceful. She will grab the stool out of there and carry it all over the place to reach items she is eyeballing. So in the recent weeks, nothing has been safe on our counters, dressers, sinks ... you get the picture. Well, today the door was shut (like normal) and then I hear her in the bathroom. I thought perhaps I didn't have it latched all of the way and she pushed it open. So I brought her out of the bathroom, shut the door, and began walking away. Then I heard it: the sound of little hands twisting the doorknob back and forth. I turned around right as she got it open and she gave me this look of "ah ha!" and "ha ha!" all at once. Oh the misery! About an hour later, E. went into his room and S. went running down the hallway to follow. He shut the door before she could get there and then she whipped out her new little trick. As the door opened, E. said, "Hey!" and then S. gave the most gleeful and mischievous laugh. I had a little laugh come out when I realized that I won't be the only one she is terrorizing!