Well, here we are in our new home, new town, new life pretty much. Thanks to the help of lots of friends, we did it!
I don't know how I survived that week before the move. We somehow pulled off Halloween a week before, then Bennett's birthday two days before moving.
Bennett's friends came over after school that day. They opened presents, had cake and ice cream, (my awesome friend Shanel offered to make the cake because she knew I would be packing all day. Wasn't that sweet?) then Jeremy drove them all to a trampoline place for the rest of the time.
People are all asking..."So, what made you choose _________?" (Insert name of town. Gotta be careful with how much info I give online.) "Is this due to a job change? Family?" And I imagine they wonder what would make us want to stir things up when everything is going so well. We don't know why, really. We just kinda felt like it might be a good time to change things up. We started looking. We found a house in Cedar Hills that we loved, but the sellers were asking more than it was worth and we decided it wouldn't be a good investment, so we kept looking. We went through lots of houses in Alpine, Pleasant Grove, Highland, AF and Lindon. We wanted to stay in the Northern Utah County area so that we could keep the kids at their awesome school. But nothing made us excited enough to move forward. After about a month of searching, I was curious to see what was out there a little further south. So I opened up the search, and this house popped up on my screen.
I knew the minute I saw the pictures that this was the one.
It was just like when I found Anya on the Internet. "OK, that's my daughter, but wait, she has Down syndrome." :) This was like, "OK, that's is our house, but wait, it's clear the heck down in ______. Well, I guess we're moving to _______."
We went and looked at it with our friend/Realtor a couple of days later, and everyone in the family fell in love along with me.
Love at first sight, I tell ya. The reason we started looking was because we hated our tiny, boring back yard. This house is 18 years old, so the trees are huge, and there are lots of them. In the summertime, it's all secluded by shrubs around the perimeter. After 10 years of living in newer homes with small trees, this was a beautiful sight to us. You have to understand...Jeremy is a Landscape Architect. It's all about the yard. :)
We placed an offer the next day because Jeremy and I were headed to Lake Powell for 4 days. We found out that another family was in the process of purchasing this home a month ago and the sale of their house fell through, so they had to back out. Well, talk about timing. It just so happened that their house sold and they had placed a new offer on it the day after we placed ours. The thing that was so amazing was that we didn't have cell coverage at Lake Powell, once we left the marina area. We tried walking out on the hill next to the houseboat and we tried when we were out on the ski boat...no luck. I was a nervous wreck.
That night, all of a sudden, my phone rang! I jumped up to get it. It was our realtor telling us that our offer had been accepted. No counter-offer or anything! She said we had to sign online quickly because there was someone else in line for the house. For a brief few minutes that night, we had enough cell phone coverage to sign our documents electronically and send them back to our realtor.
Meant to be? You hafta wonder!
This all happened so fast. I wake up almost every morning and think, "Did we just do that? Did we just relocate our lives for no particular reason?" Yup, we sure did. It really happened.
So, we are official small town people. :) I never thought of this town as small. But it feels very different from American Fork, which has more of a suburban feel to it, IMO. When I told my sister that we were moving here, she said, "that's hick-ville, isn't it?" Ha, I laughed. It's not that far away!
Our new ward feels very different than our last one, as far as people go. Before, we were in an area that had mostly newer homes, so most of the families in the neighborhood were around our same age, give or take 10 years. I walked into Sunday School here and the room of about 100 people was almost completely full of grey hair. Haha.
It's turns out, though, that there are still lots of younger families like ours. Our younger kids all have friends to play with already. Eli even has a preschool to go to, just 3 houses away! I was so happy that it had a spot open for him. He started right up and loves it.
Everyone keeps saying how awesome it is here and that they never want to leave, so we're just taking their word for it and hoping for the best. We've felt very welcome, that's for sure.
This has been really hard for Sadie, though, who left her close friends at Lincoln Academy that she had grown up with since 2nd grade. She was really excited to move, and probably the one who pushed us the most about it. But now that she has started up at the Jr.High here, she's wondering what she was so excited about. It's not fun being a new kid in 9th grade. Every single face is unfamiliar and everyone has their friend groups already established. She will learn so much from this experience, though and I'm confident that she'll learn to love it. She's so cute and friendly, she doesn't have a hard time making friends at all. It will just take time.
For the record, the rest of the kids are doing great at their new elementary school, and Landon is finishing his senior year out at AF High. (He has to drive all that way every day, but it's worth it.)
Anya's placement is perfect. I moved her back to first grade because that's the level she's at right now. She's in a regular ed classroom all day. People come in and help with reading, math, etc in the mornings, so she doesn't need to be pulled out for anything except speech. She has her behavior issues still, but I'm amazed at how well she's adapting to the change. The fact that she can stay in one room and not have all those transitions to deal with is huge. This is her teacher's first time teaching a student with Ds, and she seems very willing to take the time to modify her lessons for Anya and make sure she's learning. She's perfect.
Hazel has already started up at the district preschool. The bus picks her up and drops her off. I don't know if it's much better than the one she was at before, but the class size is only 11 instead of 18 or so. So that's good.
We are having such a fun time making this house ours. Everything about it says "this is home." The pine floors, the bead-board walls, the huge windows that let the light in all day...it's just fun.
I've never been one who likes the country style of decorating, but I'm finding myself searching Pinterest for Swedish Country, Swiss Chalet and Rustic Modern pictures. We don't have any furniture that fits that theme, except for this antique dresser that I found at Deseret Industries and refinished before we moved.
oh, and this old church pew fits the look as well. The previous owners so graciously included in our purchase along with a few other things. I'm trying to decide whether or not I should paint it. What do you think?
I'll post more pictures as I finish the rooms. There's still lots to do. I wish I had taken some before pictures of the rooms before we painted. All I have is what was on the Internet when it was listed, but it has the previous owner's furniture in it.
We definitely have our work cut out for us here in the fall! Jeremy has been raking leaves all week and they just keep coming down, blanketing the ground.
OK, it's after midnight and it's a school night, so I'm off to bed. I still have so much catching up to do on this blog. I feel like this year has been a big blur. I hope we can just settle down and be done with all this change that's been going on these past few years. I feel like I'm ready to settle in. We are home.
I don't know how I survived that week before the move. We somehow pulled off Halloween a week before, then Bennett's birthday two days before moving.
Bennett's friends came over after school that day. They opened presents, had cake and ice cream, (my awesome friend Shanel offered to make the cake because she knew I would be packing all day. Wasn't that sweet?) then Jeremy drove them all to a trampoline place for the rest of the time.
The new house became ours 5 days before we moved in. We spent those 5 days taking loads of stuff down to the house and painting. We were lucky to have beautiful weather that whole week.
(This was so cute. The girls sat on the trailer door for probably a half hour, brushing Rocky's fur. Rocky just sat there and let them do it while the older kids were carrying boxes into the trailer. I had to get a picture.)
We updated the paint in the main family room, dining room, master bedroom and the three bedrooms upstairs all that week, while we also packed boxes and took a couple of loads down with a friend's trailer. . It was quite an ordeal trying to get all that done right before moving, but I'm sure glad we did it.
I tell you what, it was HARD to leave that ward. I was a mess, and I still have to fight back tears when I think about leaving my friends there. Sadie and I both have been grieving. It seems so silly because we are only a half-hour away! But it's just not going to be the same. This has all reminded me just how important friends are in our lives. I had friends in that neighborhood who served our family so much during our two adoptions, and helped me through some really rough times as we waited, and as we adjusted. It's amazing how much you grow to love people who give of their time and their hearts on your behalf.
People are all asking..."So, what made you choose _________?" (Insert name of town. Gotta be careful with how much info I give online.) "Is this due to a job change? Family?" And I imagine they wonder what would make us want to stir things up when everything is going so well. We don't know why, really. We just kinda felt like it might be a good time to change things up. We started looking. We found a house in Cedar Hills that we loved, but the sellers were asking more than it was worth and we decided it wouldn't be a good investment, so we kept looking. We went through lots of houses in Alpine, Pleasant Grove, Highland, AF and Lindon. We wanted to stay in the Northern Utah County area so that we could keep the kids at their awesome school. But nothing made us excited enough to move forward. After about a month of searching, I was curious to see what was out there a little further south. So I opened up the search, and this house popped up on my screen.
I knew the minute I saw the pictures that this was the one.
It was just like when I found Anya on the Internet. "OK, that's my daughter, but wait, she has Down syndrome." :) This was like, "OK, that's is our house, but wait, it's clear the heck down in ______. Well, I guess we're moving to _______."
We went and looked at it with our friend/Realtor a couple of days later, and everyone in the family fell in love along with me.
It had them at the yard. Before we even stepped into the house.
Love at first sight, I tell ya. The reason we started looking was because we hated our tiny, boring back yard. This house is 18 years old, so the trees are huge, and there are lots of them. In the summertime, it's all secluded by shrubs around the perimeter. After 10 years of living in newer homes with small trees, this was a beautiful sight to us. You have to understand...Jeremy is a Landscape Architect. It's all about the yard. :)
We placed an offer the next day because Jeremy and I were headed to Lake Powell for 4 days. We found out that another family was in the process of purchasing this home a month ago and the sale of their house fell through, so they had to back out. Well, talk about timing. It just so happened that their house sold and they had placed a new offer on it the day after we placed ours. The thing that was so amazing was that we didn't have cell coverage at Lake Powell, once we left the marina area. We tried walking out on the hill next to the houseboat and we tried when we were out on the ski boat...no luck. I was a nervous wreck.
That night, all of a sudden, my phone rang! I jumped up to get it. It was our realtor telling us that our offer had been accepted. No counter-offer or anything! She said we had to sign online quickly because there was someone else in line for the house. For a brief few minutes that night, we had enough cell phone coverage to sign our documents electronically and send them back to our realtor.
Meant to be? You hafta wonder!
This all happened so fast. I wake up almost every morning and think, "Did we just do that? Did we just relocate our lives for no particular reason?" Yup, we sure did. It really happened.
So, we are official small town people. :) I never thought of this town as small. But it feels very different from American Fork, which has more of a suburban feel to it, IMO. When I told my sister that we were moving here, she said, "that's hick-ville, isn't it?" Ha, I laughed. It's not that far away!
Our new ward feels very different than our last one, as far as people go. Before, we were in an area that had mostly newer homes, so most of the families in the neighborhood were around our same age, give or take 10 years. I walked into Sunday School here and the room of about 100 people was almost completely full of grey hair. Haha.
It's turns out, though, that there are still lots of younger families like ours. Our younger kids all have friends to play with already. Eli even has a preschool to go to, just 3 houses away! I was so happy that it had a spot open for him. He started right up and loves it.
Everyone keeps saying how awesome it is here and that they never want to leave, so we're just taking their word for it and hoping for the best. We've felt very welcome, that's for sure.
This has been really hard for Sadie, though, who left her close friends at Lincoln Academy that she had grown up with since 2nd grade. She was really excited to move, and probably the one who pushed us the most about it. But now that she has started up at the Jr.High here, she's wondering what she was so excited about. It's not fun being a new kid in 9th grade. Every single face is unfamiliar and everyone has their friend groups already established. She will learn so much from this experience, though and I'm confident that she'll learn to love it. She's so cute and friendly, she doesn't have a hard time making friends at all. It will just take time.
For the record, the rest of the kids are doing great at their new elementary school, and Landon is finishing his senior year out at AF High. (He has to drive all that way every day, but it's worth it.)
Anya's placement is perfect. I moved her back to first grade because that's the level she's at right now. She's in a regular ed classroom all day. People come in and help with reading, math, etc in the mornings, so she doesn't need to be pulled out for anything except speech. She has her behavior issues still, but I'm amazed at how well she's adapting to the change. The fact that she can stay in one room and not have all those transitions to deal with is huge. This is her teacher's first time teaching a student with Ds, and she seems very willing to take the time to modify her lessons for Anya and make sure she's learning. She's perfect.
Hazel has already started up at the district preschool. The bus picks her up and drops her off. I don't know if it's much better than the one she was at before, but the class size is only 11 instead of 18 or so. So that's good.
We are having such a fun time making this house ours. Everything about it says "this is home." The pine floors, the bead-board walls, the huge windows that let the light in all day...it's just fun.
I've never been one who likes the country style of decorating, but I'm finding myself searching Pinterest for Swedish Country, Swiss Chalet and Rustic Modern pictures. We don't have any furniture that fits that theme, except for this antique dresser that I found at Deseret Industries and refinished before we moved.
This is what it looked like when I brought it home.
And here's the finished product. This was my first big refinishing job. I purchased an
electric sander and paint sprayer because I want to do more of this. :)
I'll post more pictures as I finish the rooms. There's still lots to do. I wish I had taken some before pictures of the rooms before we painted. All I have is what was on the Internet when it was listed, but it has the previous owner's furniture in it.
We definitely have our work cut out for us here in the fall! Jeremy has been raking leaves all week and they just keep coming down, blanketing the ground.
OK, it's after midnight and it's a school night, so I'm off to bed. I still have so much catching up to do on this blog. I feel like this year has been a big blur. I hope we can just settle down and be done with all this change that's been going on these past few years. I feel like I'm ready to settle in. We are home.
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