A Storybook of Grace

  We had our house closing today!  The movers come tomorrow so this is the last night in our rental house.  We had a quiet last walk through our neighborhood this evening.  We made some good memories here over the last almost two years.  I am very thankful for this place.  God definitely placed us here and He was so good to us.   But tomorrow we go to our first forever home.  And our last forever home.  :). And what a testimony.  The market is still crazy.  Maybe even crazier.  But we got this house and we even got it under what it currently appraises for.  That in a market where houses are staying on the market for just a few hours and buyers are paying way over listing price.   And we had a tight timeline.  A timeline of a little under a month.  Our lawyer and agent said it was near impossible.  VA loans take a minimum of 45 days and they are backed up, but we got ours done in 23 days.  God is go...

 Since my birthday post, we had a 3 day neighborhood wide garage sale, which we did Ok with.  The kids became quite the little salespeople.   Addison has learned how to ride her bike without training wheels!  And we removed Lucas’ feeding tube.  He still will just eat puréed foods that we spoon feed him, but he will drink enough from a sippie cup that we felt like we didn’t need the tube any more.   I finished my stats class early and with an A and was even able to skip an assignment!  I actually really enjoyed stats, which is crazy because the other two times I took it, I did not enjoy it at all.  I am happy to be on a school break now.  We have had some drama with getting into our new home, mostly with the contract and what not, but we are supposed to close on the 28th and move the 29th.  We will see!  I think everyone is excited and ready to move in.   Personally, an ongoing close to 13 year on again off again trial has real...

  Today is my 41st birthday, but I’ll back up to last Saturday.  That was my birthday outing day.  So I chose to go to Lake Geneva, WI with the family.  Sean had taken me for our anniversary, but that was in February and it was super cold and the lake was frozen and it was snowing a bunch.  So I had said then that we’d have to go back when it was warm and so we did.  We went to lunch and walked by the lake and went in the shops.  And got coffee.  :). And by the way I loved our anniversary in case it sounded like I didn’t! Today Sean and the kiddos threw me a party and we ate dinner and had Nothing Bundt Cake Bundlets.  They decorated it all pirate-y for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (my favorite football team) and Ryan actually gave me $70 of his own money to get something special for the new house.  I could’ve believe it!  I felt bad taking it, but I didn’t want to offend the giver so I did.   It was a good day after all, because a...

 I have moved 22 times in my life! Most of it was back and forth from Florida and Georgia for a total of 17 years in Florida, 13 in Georgia, 2 in California, 7 in Tennessee, and coming up on 2 in Illinois.  I was born in Louisiana, but we moved to Florida when I was just a few months old.   We were so surprised to see God moving us to Illinois.  We thought we would probably stay in Tennessee forever!  It didn’t have the traffic like Atlanta or the weather like Florida.  And we made some really good friends there.  We loved the area.  But we started to put in job applications through the USA gov jobs website.  This was because of Lucas.  After he was denied heart surgery at Vanderbilt there wasn’t a hospital in all of Tennessee for him.  He had two heart surgeries in Boston in 2019 - one in April and then we came home.  But he was flighted back there in June after being on a vent for a month at our hospital in East Tennessee and...

  Happy 4th of July! Hope it was great for you.  We went to church yesterday and then up to Kenosha to Becker Center on Lake Michigan for some food truck grub and a walk.  Last night, we cooked out steaks and did “fireworks” and S’mores.  The boys camped out in the backyard overnight.  It was a good 4th.  Praise God for our independence.   Andrew cut himself on our rusty fire pit this past week and had to go get a tdap.  He’s fine.  :) That’s it in our world…….except (see house post!)