Stay at home mom with kids in school!

This year is a new phase for me as a stay at home mom with all my kids in school.  It is so fun!!   I love my littles and miss those days of having them at home, but I'm having a great time in this stage of life too!

When the kids went back to school in August and Jojo started Kindergarten, for the first two weeks of school I was too sad to even go home!  I knew if I did I would just lay in bed and cry so instead I caught up on errands, tried out some new gyms to see what kind of exercise I wanted to add to my dog walking!

I'm also teaching a high school biology class for some freshman and sophmore home schoolers! It is so fun! They are great kids. I get a kick out of watching them interact, flirt, talk, etc. It is just great. I also love being back to teaching bio.  It is on of my loves.  I have had to change my teaching style a bit to match up with the learning styles of these very self motivated home school kids, and that has been fun too!    On Mondays I teach class from 10:45-12:15 so after I drop off the kids I spend and hour or so getting things ready and then head over to class. After class I usually go right to kickboxing and get a quick workout in before heading home. It's a great routine!

Every other Tues I work in Jojo's class in the morning.

Wed/Th/Fri I walk with Gabby and/or Holli Ewell or occasionally someone else!

Once a month I check out Clare and Lexey on a different day and take them out to lunch for a little one on one time. I started this last year and it really means a lot to them. They talk so much during this time, they are always in a great mood, and we have some really great conversations.

For Jojo I check her out of school one day a week around lunch time and just bring her home to rest, relax, chill and hang out. She has been struggling with separation anxiety when I leave her at school and she is also pretty burned out and grumpy after school. A little bit of extra home time seems to help her quite a bit.  I do have to say that I am seeing improvements in her ability to handle the full day now so I think she might be getting used to it.

We bought our first house!

Mid-Sept we went to see a house on Shadowline and we both really liked it.  In fact, I was so excited about the house I could hardly sleep that night after we saw it.  However, we were still toying with the idea of buying the Lime Grove since we could get it at such a good price.   I took Holli Ewell over to see the house, and Kari and they both thought it was nice.  I think I saw the house a total of 4 times.  I really liked it but hesitated to pass up the great deal on buying in green valley, had a desire to stay in the neighborhood with the Hussmans and McEwans and other great families that we know, and keep our great deck and view.  However, there were so many great reasons that we have been wanting to move - better freeway access, sidewalks and streetlights for the kids to walk around and play, proximity to the park, neighborhood with kids around, smaller and more manageable house and yard.  After discussion for a few days we decided to buy the Shadowline house. It is what we want in this stage of life!

The house had originally been listed at $789-849 but a few days before we decided to buy the range dropped to $769-819.   We decided to offer $775. 

After we made our offer, Dave wanted to see the house one more time in the daylight since he had only been there one time in the evening after dark.  We noticed that day that there was no A/C unit in the house.  I was glad to see that because then we knew that we would be spending 6-10K on an A/C and possibly ducting and a new heater if that was needed as well.  So, we decided we would not go up too much in price knowing we would spend that right off the bat.

They countered at $795.  We decided that we would go up to $780 and that is all.

The realtor's talked back and forth a bunch and their realtor said the lowest they could go is $790.  We decided to hold at $780 and see what they would say.  Their realtor offered to give them a portion of his commission (4K) and our realtor offered to pitch in 1,000, raising their take home value to 785. I'm sure they were hoping that we would just be willing to budge on the last 5 but we decided not to, figuring that 3 weeks on the market and knowing they already had another house that we were in the position of power and they would be crazy not to take it and keep it on the market even longer waiting for another offer.   

And we were right. After a couple of days of waiting they came back and accepted our offer of $780.

That was Oct 6th. It has been a whirlwind of paperwork, emails, phone calls and little decisions.  We've had tons of paperwork to do with the bank, paperwork with the realtor, paperwork with the escrow company!  I went to the home inspection which was fun to spend a few hours in the house.  Nothing major came up on the inspection and all the other reports - termite, title, etc were all nothing too surprising so things have been moving forward pretty smoothly. We are scheduled to close escrow Nov 7th.  I planned for a moving truck to come load all of our boxes and furniture on Nov 15th, giving me a week to take a few things over myself and a few days to look around and see how I want to set everything up! We are all pretty excited!  I hope we have made a good choice -- I think we have!

The kids will stay at painted rock, at least for this year while Clare finishes 5th grade.  Next year it would be much easier to switch over to Tierra Bonita so that we are going to school with the neighborhood kids, and it's right next door to the middle school where Clare will be! So, we'll see how the girls feel about that. I have almost a year to talk them into it!

Yesterday was our first day at the Del Norte ward! Pete and Jessica sat in our row with us. That was super fun. My kids loved playing with Jackson who is just over a year and darling as can be!  It seems like it'll be a good ward for us.  Clare has a class of all girls and she liked it! Lexey of course loves everything. Jo has a great teacher  (Jenny Baker) and 4 out of the 5 kids in her class are sweet little girls.  Yesterday I sat with Jo both hours of church and I am hoping that doesn't last too long. Jo is having lots of separation anxiety ever since starting Kindergarten and the ward change a few months ago when we were split out of green valley ward.