We love our neighborhood and more importantly our street.  On Saturday of last week the doorbell rang and there were 5 little girls and a mom on the doorstep.  One little girl handed me a handmade invitation to a street party the next evening.  Who does that anymore??  It was SO cute.

Sunday we loaded Reed into the wagon and took our cooler and my black bean and corn dip 3 houses down to the end of the cul de sac.  All the families in our cul de sac were there with their kids and their dogs and lots of food.  It was such a fun evening.  (Of course we capped it off by bringing out some puppies for everyone to play with.)  This street party is an annual event, but the timing made it feel like a welcoming party for us.  We finally live on the kind of street where all the neighbors like each other and the kids trade off playing at each other’s houses every day.  I can only imagine how the summer will be 🙂 

Every night last week about 10 minutes after I got home with Reed I would hear the doorbell ring.  Standing outside was a whole group of children that wanted to come in the backyard and play with the puppies.  Sometimes they stay for 30 minutes and sometimes their parents have to come looking for them because it’s been an hour or two.  Needless to say I am in heaven.  I just love our street, our neighbors, and the multitude of children on our street.  One family has 10 children (yes, 10), one family has 8, and one family has 4.  The rest of us are the normal 1-3 kids. 

All these children equal lots of little hands to cuddle and play with the puppies so each one is well socialized, but it also means lots of future babysitters!!  Most of the children are older than Reed, but there is one little boy named Jonathon who is only 1 year and 3 weeks older than him.  Jonathon was adopted from Russia (by the family with 10 kids).  He and Reed have the same coloring and for now look very similar to each other.  It’s SO cute!  Last night we had the puppies in the front yard to run the sprinkler in the back and we took Reed and Jonathon for a ride around the cul de sac in the wagon.  They are at the ‘parralel play’ stage so they just stared at each other.  So stinking cute!!!  I only wish we had pictures to share…but we had our hands full!!

Shiloh has great-grandbabies again!  (Too bad she isn’t here to meet them!)  My parents’ golden retriever, Bluebonnet, had puppies on Sunday.  She had 11, but we lost one the first night.  We have 10 healthy beautiful puppies (6 male, 4 female).  Those of you who know my family know how much we love our golden retrievers, and how much we love puppies.  However, my mom is a little sick of taking care of puppies. 

This time around Randy and I agreed to let the puppies and Bluebonnet come live at our new house once they are about 2 weeks old.  Sweet Logan has never really recovered from losing his mom and best friend 15 months ago (neither have I).  We are hoping all the activity will get him in a happier mood…plus we are going to keep a little girl pup!  We have wanted to get another puppy, but we were really hoping to find a non-related female to breed Logan with.  He is almost 9 now and we still haven’t found our female so we are going to get one out of this litter. 

In other puppy news, Logan is a dad again!  Our good friends have a female chocolate lab and we bred Scout with Logan.  Those pups were born on March 29th and are also adorable (we are planning to go visit those pups soon and I will post some pictures). 

Here are a few pictures of the pups and of course Reed.

Life has been even more hectic than usual the last 2 months.  We decided to put our house on the market in January because we had outgrown the square footage.   I know that selling and buying a home is one of the single most stressful events in every person’s life and now I can understand why.

Randy and I have literally spent thousands of man hours fixing up our sweet house.  When we bought it it needed some TLC and we gave it.  We also spent LOTS of money fixing it up inside and out.  It took us a few weeks to get it on the market because we had so much stuff everywhere that we needed to rent a storage unit so potential buyers wouldn’t realize just how little storage was in our house.

We got the house listed at the end of January and from day 1 through the end of March we had 76 showings.  Yes, that’s right.  76!!!!!!!  Let me translate that for you, that means we were not able to spend one weekend day or night at our house for over 2 months.  It also means that every single time we left the house for any period of time it had to be in tip top shape with no clutter left out, no dishes in the sink and no Reed messes.  Let me tell you, it was just too much.  Almost every Sunday while we were in church Randy would get at least one call that someone wanted to come look at the house.  SUCH a pain!!

Long story short, almost all the feedback we received was that the buyers  LOVED the house, loved the location, loved how we had decorated it and the upgrades we had put in, but they didn’t like the commercial building behind us.  Obviously we can’t change that.  Our realtor Kyle says that in his opinion if that building wasn’t behind our house we probably would have sold it the first week it was on the market.  The most perplexing thing to us is that the building NEVER bothered us.  In fact it was kind of a bonus.  No neighbors behind us, (there were no windows in the building facing our house), rear gate entry in case you forgot something at the houe and needed to run back in, and regular maintenance and upkeep.

Luckily, two days before we closed on the new house someone made us a real offer that we accepted.  We had received 4 ridiculous low ball offers prior to this one and refused all of them.  These people wanted to pay us the price we paid for the house 4 years ago!  Are they kidding?  We have easily dumped $10-12,000 into the house and they want us to take a loss???  People watch too much HGTV and think they can do whatever they want in the current housing market.  They are wrong.  I tried not to take it personally, but how could I not?  That house has literally got our heart and sole in it and these people just wanted a good deal.  I think not.  Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to get my thoughts and feelings down on paper 🙂

In the end, we are under contract and should close on April 26!!  Praise the Lord all of this is almost over 🙂

J