....In the Middle of the Street

Finding out that you are actually finally approved to buy a house is like Christmas morning.

But before that, you have to go through a lot of work. 

We searched for 6 months, with multiple offers, multiple fall-throughs, and a lot of disappointment. The first time we saw this house, though, we got a very good feeling about the home and the neighborhood. So we decided to offer on yet another house, hoping that this would be the one. 

We put in our paperwork...and found out our offer had been accepted! We were a excited, but since we'd had offers go through before we tried not to get too attached. 

I mean, seriously you guys, you have no idea how many random, "this never happens" situations we went through. 

But things continued to go well with this house. It was a newer house, had been redone with new carpet, new paint, and brand-spankin-new appliances, and it had a front porch. As more paperwork was pushed through, it came to the point where we were only waiting on the rural housing committee to approve our loan before everything was finalized. And that took 28 business days, to be exact.

Which is the equivalent of forrrrrrrrrever.

I believe we waited 29 business days before finally finding out.....we were approved! 

Which was a small miracle. 

Remember that one time the government shut down? Well rural housing is a government committee....which means it also shut down. And magically, miraculously, our approval was stamped and signed literally the MORNING BEFORE the shutdown. 

Skin of our teeth, right there. 

And I can tell you now, that I firmly believe this is the place we are meant to be. Because we were blatantly stopped too many other times, and this house came with too many small miracles to believe otherwise. 

First order of business? Painting the door of course.

I. LOVE. IT.

And I love our house.

Our great, big, beautiful house.

Halloween 2013

Does it make me nerdy because I like the fact that "Halloween 2013" is a rhyme?

Let me tell you, we had sooooo much fun this Halloween! It wasn't hard to beat last year though, with Chris working and me not doing anything. 

We sure turned that around this year!

 

We decided to dress up about two days before this. That's kinda how I roll though, I'm not excited, not excited, not excited, then suddenly within 2-5 days before Halloween I suddenly catch the bug and go all "LET'S DO THIS!" 

But, I think our costumes came together pretty dang well for such short notice. 

We started off the night with a minor candy crisis. You have to understand, since we've been married, we've never had trick-or-treaters. First we lived in a college town, in a basement: no trick-or-treaters. Then, we moved up north, again into a basement: no trick-or-treaters. So obviously, once we moved into our house, what reason had we to expect any different?

Except....

children overrun the ENTIRE neighborhood here. ESPECIALLY on Halloween. 

There are over 150 kids JUST in our ward.

So 5:30pm rolls around, and I can't figure out why our doorbell keeps ringing.

When it finally clicked, Chris & I shared a mutual look of horror. We had zero candy. We frantically dug through boxes, kitchen drawers, and backpacks to finally come up with a half-bag of airheads. Chris used those while I ran to the store and picked up 3 more bags. We were only going to be home for about 45 minutes, or as long as it took us to get our costumes on, and then we were going to Chris's mom's for some homemade chili. Mmmm. So of course I figured that 3 bags would be more than enough. 

{Do you like the skeleton photo-bomber?}

Well, in the short half-hour it took us to get ready, we ran through ALL. THREE. BAGS.

Holy trick-or-treaters batman.

At Susan's house we enjoyed some delicious food, and tried to avoid getting detention from Professor Snape.

Next in line for the night was a dance at the U of U. We met up with a couple friends and their friends, and danced and shouted and put our hands up like the ceiling couldn't hold us. 

{see what I did there?}

But really, it was so much fun. 

After a few hours of music madness we hopped over to visit my brother who happens to be attending school there. And then finally, at about 1am, a very tired mad hatter and her king of hearts crawled into bed and called it quits.

It was a great Halloween!