We have a closing date!

HOORAY! We are scheduled to close on December 19th. I am so thrilled that we will be in the house for Christmas. Now we do have a lot of work ahead of us as we prepare to move out of our apartment. I keep wondering why we are on the third floor. What caused us to make this decision? Oh well, it will be over before we know it. We will have our walk through and pre-sign our paperwork on Friday the 14th. Keith has a lot of travel planed the next few weeks so we will be busy preparing for our move.
Also, the girls and I have just started the Christmas portion of our curriculum this week and that will continue for 4 weeks and then we will take a week or 2 off. Our Christmas shopping is almost complete so I need to get my act in gear, finish it up and start to ship off our gifts. We will keep updating pictures on the photo site so be sure to check it.

Getting Caught up

OK, we are home from sunny California. This week is about getting caught up on mail, school, laundry, etc. I have finished about half of my grocery shopping for Thanksgiving. I try to do little trips so I do not have to carry 30 bags up to the third floor. This experience of apartment living with a family has been a lesson to me of how much I take for granted in life. Pulling into a garage, running the dishwasher, washer or dryer at any time of day or night (we have thin floors and walls!). Having more than one spot to eat, do school, craft, color, sew. Sending the girls out back to play... and having Internet access! I thought that hopping down to the library would be easy when I needed to go online, it wasn't! So I caved and ordered Internet for the last 2 months (hopefully). As our move in date inches closer I find myself looking forward to these things. However, I feel grateful for how much we have and I know this is temporary. Also, because this is temporary we have not settled in so it does not feel like home to us.

As far as the house goes I am going a bit nuts because we are waiting on a call to tell us when our closing date is. It looks like we will close before Christmas but I have no OFFICIAL word yet. I really would like to start planning our move and can not do it yet and this is really bothering me. Apparently I need a lesson in patience.

We are going low key and staying home for Thanksgiving. Just food, football and movies for us. We are expecting snow tonight and tomorrow but not on Thursday. We went and bought snow boots yesterday. I believe I have completely updated our photo site to check it out if you are interested. We hope you all have a HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Back in Sunny California ( for a visit)

We are in Orange County, CA for a visit. Keith has business meetings this week in LA so he decided to drive so we could tag along. A friend of mine recommended someone in our apartment complex to feed Gipple (our cat) and off we went. The drive is about 17 hours straight so we break it up into two days. The girls do well in the car and we are good with providing lots of things to watch, color and eat! The weather in great. I think it was 80 degrees today. We are staying with Keith's parents and visiting my mom and friends as well. On Friday we plan to go to Disneyland and then leave for home Saturday morning. We are squeezing in school here and there and should end up with a full week of school while we are on a trip. Pretty cool! We finally broke down and ordered Internet for our apartment so I should be able to update more frequently. Our home is scheduled to be finished around the 3rd week of December. I have updated our photos through October on our photo site and hope to be up to speed by the end of the week. The girls are doing well, however, Victoria is struggling with understanding where she lives. We are having many ups and downs with her behavior but we are trying to stay as consistent as we can with a schedule and parenting and praying that this will mellow out with her. I will update soon. Jane