from the archives

I (dan) am having trouble sleeping tonight. It could be because Elise and I are planning to have our first kid-free-getaway-night in 3 years tomorrow (thanks Nana and Poppy!). yo. Meanwhile, I've posted some old pix from the archives while waiting for last week's episode of "Undercover Boss" to buffer.

Contract

Thank you everyone for praying. We have felt it and you were heard. We have a signed contract on our house!!!! Just typing that has made me start crying. Tuesday the sign went in the yard and I balled in the car all the way over to inspections on my new house. This house was my first baby and it is going to be so hard to leave it.

It has been a crazy, fast ride these last few days. But we are really excited and the buyer has given us our wild request to rent back for up to 6 weeks or more. And to top it off she is giving us the first month of staying here for free. We can't tell you what an answer to prayer that is. Now we can get a bunch of major remodeling and construction things done on the new house before moving in. And even more importantly, we will have a long transition window to introduce the girls and in particular Mia to the new house.

And finally it meant that the Deeble girls got to come home. The girls, dogs and I went to my parents on Tuesday and were planning to stay until Sunday evening. Dan and I were shaking our heads trying to figure out how we were going to live in the house while showing it this next week. We had a crazy number of showings each day. So thankfully we instead got to come home Saturday night before all the snow hit and were able to cancel the open house scheduled for Sunday.

So thank you for all your prayers!!!!

Elise

House For Sale

We have a signed contract on a new house. We are super excited but at the same time we are incredibly sad to leave our home. We are also too exhausted to celebrate. Our house will go on the market on Tuesday, February 2nd. We have been scrambling trying to get it ready.

We need everyone's prayers that ours sells really fast. I am still not sure how I am going to keep the house clean and get three kids and two dogs out of the house every time someone wants to see it. Afterall it takes me 20-30 minutes just to get the girls into socks, shoes, coats and their car seats. Now add getting the dogs and scrambling around and cleaning up. I am exhausted just thinking about it. And wouldn't you figure that we never have fixed the darn DVD player in the car.

Pray! Please, please pray!

if you must know...

This whole house shopping thing can really break a man.

-dan

Great Quote

So I (daddy) was eating some soup and crackers for lunch today.
Brianna came up and - because she's a natural born leader - demanded one. Here's the exchange:

"Give me a cracker."
"Brianna, ask nicely. What's the magic word?"
"Please... { pause}...NOW...{pause}...DO IT!!!"

Quotes of the Week

So Dan and I have started looking for a bigger house. However we have only actually looked at a couple of houses. My two favorite quotes from the girls this week relate to that.

Mia: "Daddy this house is so dirty" and

Brianna: "Mommy after my nap we go look at more houses with Ms. Sharon?"

The apples are not falling fall from the tree. :)

Elise

The Little Dan

I sent Dan downstairs to clean up the basement and next thing I know he is putting his old little league jersey on Hadley. Brianna was very disturbed by how big it was on Hadley. But as you can tell Hadley didn't mind.