Surprise!

 Gideon says:

We had a fun time with grandma and grandpa. We had watermelon and we went to silver lake. We climbed up the wall-rocks. I liked the rolls and I liked reading with grandpa. I liked going there.

Here are some pictures of our trip to silver lake:

As aside note we saw a mating pair of moose while up there.

Timmy says:

This week we first learned that we were going to move and we went to a shiny park.

Sara didn't want to add anything to the blog post except that she wants mint chocolate moose tracks.

Rea says:

It was cool that when grandma and grandpa game over they went start gazing and saw the big dipper and the north star. Then Dad came out and they had to go to Aunt Becky's house.

Mike says:

Since baby Elizabeth always has a hard time sleeping through the night, and we have never figured out why, we have decided to try different things to see if we could get her to sleep through the night. This week we started trying to give her milk mixed with chocolate flavored protein powder before going to bed, and she slept two nights all the way through the entire night in a row. This is pretty good for her, so we are tentatively hopeful that this is the dawn of a new era of baby Elizabeth sleeping all night. 

Mike's schooling is continuing to go well. He is doing well in his classes, and not having too much difficulty. He only has one more week until he begins to teach again, so hopefully he will be able to continue keeping up with everything while he is teaching and going to school. If not, he will have to do a little bit of his work after his day job is done. 

When we are moving into this house we are really banking on the possibility that Grandpa Mike and Grandma Sheila will move into the neighborhood. If they do, then we also are hopeful that Grandma Julie and Grandpa Craig will want to move into the neighborhood as well. Then if we can just get Becky and Chauncey to move into the neighborhood we'll have everyone who is in Utah in one neighborhood.  

Alison has had many people asking for her story about buying a new house (as opposed to Mike's one sentence in the last blog post :) ). Here it is:

About three months ago, we were driving to one of our favorite parks, Dimple Dell, and since we had had trouble getting out the door because of the constant challenge of having seven people and one bathroom, we were talking about buying a new house vs adding on to our current house. Mike said, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could buy a house near Dimple Dell?"

So while we were there, everyone was off playing and the baby wanted to nurse. I got bored and pulled out my phone, and I decided to search for homes for sale near Dimple Dell. And I found my dream house! It had huge windows, a natural-light basement that could be a playroom/schoolroom, a xeriscaped front yard, mature fruit trees and grape vines in the backyard, walking distance to Dimple Dell and the library... It was amazing. It was far more money than we'd ever thought of spending on a home ($420,000), but I loved it! We drove by it on the way home and it was gorgeous.

We immediately contacted the agent, only to find that it was already under contract. So we decided to reach out to a contractor and try to alter our current house to match our dream house. We drew up some sketches that we were pretty excited about. 

Then we got the estimate back: $210,000. Since our house is worth roughly $300,000, we decided to see if we could buy a dream house for less than half a million dollars instead of the work of adding on. So we started casually looking at houses.

Mike's sister Amy heard that we were looking and immediately started lobbying for us to move into her neighborhood. She set us up with visits to every home that went for sale in her area.

(In the process, Amy found her own dream home in her neighborhood, bought it, and sold her own house in the last two weeks. It's been crazy!)

So last Friday, she urged us to go to the open house for her bishop's old home, and we did. It had all the bare necessities: 3 bathrooms, a natural-light basement playroom, a fourth bedroom for the school supplies so the kids could be split into two bedrooms, mature trees in the yard. It was much smaller and older than the $350-400,000 possible dream homes I'd been choosing for us to look at, but it was only $300,000 - so we could sell our house, get a house with all of the things we most needed, and not lose any of our retirement money.

That seemed too good to resist, especially when Grandma Sheila and Grandpa Mike came to help Amy move and mentioned that if we moved within walking distance of Amy, OF COURSE they would move into the same neighborhood. That would be pretty cool! So we decided to put in a very strong offer.

Funny story: Mom happened to text Amy right after that conversation, and Amy mentioned that we'd decided to put in the offer. That was the first Mom heard of it (it all happened so fast!), and she called me on Monday to get the whole story (the blog post not having enough). We turned in the offer Monday. Tuesday Mom texted me with, "Amy says you got the house! Congratulations!" I stared at the phone in bewilderment; no one had told us our offer was accepted. It took almost 24 hours before the official word came from the realtor. (Amy got a text from her bishop as soon as they decided to accept, so she was the first to know.)

So now we are the proud purchasers of a new home. We're planning to wait till we close (Sept 30) and take some time to move out before putting our house on the market. We're meeting with a realtor to discuss how much updating of the house is worthwhile and how much we can get away without doing.

The new house is not really close to my dream house, so I'm having some trouble with the change. The kids are all very excited right now, but Timmy's starting to feel a little sad and scared. Mike seems perfectly fine about it. We are planning to come back here for all of our activities, since it's only 10-15 minutes away. I was sad about not getting all the storage space that was in the $400,000 houses I had us look at, but we decided to buy a shed for our food storage, which will make the amount of space in the home much more reasonable. We're now discussing which appliances to take and which to replace, and what new furniture we'll need, and such. Moving is a big job!