the kids' first trip to Columbia.

A little over a week ago, we drove down to Columbia to see our new house in person.  This time, we took all the kids, so this is how we started the day, because we're nothing if not realists:

Once we got to town, we dropped (most of) the kids off with a friend so we could go and see the house on our own.

Rocco wasn't so sure about what he saw, but he has impossible standards, so it was no surprise.

After checking it out, we went and picked up the kids, and by that point it was dinner time.  So we headed to Chipotle, then stopped at a local grocery store to grab some food for the next day's breakfast, then we went 'home'.  

When we've gone to Columbia, we've gotten the privilege of staying in this humongous house that is owned by some kind of Baptist missions organization, for the purpose of giving missionaries a place to live when they're in the States on furlough.  No one is living in it now, so they've graciously allowed Anthem to use it when we go down there.  It was so late when we arrived, and we'd had such a long day, that Laurelai conked out before we even got there.  And when I say 'conked,' I mean passed-clean-out.  

The kids got to sleep in pairs on queen-sized mattresses - Penelope and Atticus in one big bed, and Laurelai and Finneas on a big mattress on the floor right next to the big bed.  They had a BLAST.  I forgot to bring toys of any kind with us (what am I, new?!?), but they didn't really seem to mind.  They just kept parkouring all evening until Todd and I got fed up and made them go to sleep.

The next morning, the kids got up and had breakfast (yogurt, precooked bacon, and bananas - no cooking involved, and everything served on Chick-Fil-A dishware) then we dinked around for a while.  Laurelai had fun wearing Penelope's glasses, and the kids got a rare opportunity to play games on the Kindle.

We headed out late in the morning, and stopped on our way out of town to visit with an Anthem family who had just moved into their Columbia house that week.  Then we stopped at Wal-Mart to stock up on lunch and dinner items for the road, and headed home.

It was a really, really long two days, but it was fun to see the house for the first time in real life, and it was great getting to show the kids their new town.  They're all getting really excited (for the most part) to get down there and settle in, and I think this trip made it a little more real for them.

rocco's modern life: five months.

My tiny boy is growing!  He turned five months old last week, and is killing it.  He pulls himself to a sitting position when I'm cradling him in my arms.  He loves being held while he stands up.  He grabs at things and tries to put them in his mouth.  He can roll from his back to his tummy, and vice versa.  And he got his first tooth the other day!

When he's tired, he sucks his pointer finger on one hand, and rubs his ear with the other.  He's still not in an entirely predictable sleep pattern, but for the most part he wakes up once in the middle of the night to eat, then sleeps until sometime between 6:30 and 7:30 (though sometimes as late as 9:00!).  If it's on the earlier end of the morning, I nurse him in my bed in an attempt to get him to fall back to sleep, though this has happened less and less often lately.  This is a huge bummer for two reasons: 1) I have to get up earlier.  Waaa waaaa. and 2) I don't get sleepy snuggle time with him.  He's the first baby I've ever done any form of co-sleeping with, and even though it's only for an hour or two a few days a week, I just love it.  (Also, though, I love that he also has his own bed for most of the night.  Best of both worlds.)

Penelope sat him on a 'throne' and 'crowned' him the King of Cute Town.  He looks like the rightful heir to that throne, don't you think?

He's getting stronger and stronger, and I'm starting to be able to carry him on my hip.  He loves to get the chance to look around from up high like that, but it also makes him puke on an apocalyptic scale, so he doesn't get to do it as often as he'd like.  He is still so incredibly barfy.  I've been strictly dairy-free for a little over a week now in an effort to see if that will help his belly settle down... no good news yet, but I'm going to give it six weeks or so before making a final call on whether or not it seems to be helping.

He got all dolled up for Easter.

He laughed his first social laugh this month - I was leaning down to kiss his cheek as I laid him down for nap, and I whispered in his ear and kind of laughed, and he laughed in response.  It was so, so wonderful.

Rocco's response to seeing our Columbia house in-person for the first time.  From the look on his face, I'm not sure what he thought of it.

He spent LOTS of time in the car, riding back and forth from Columbia with us.  He was a super champ about it.

I love this kid, and I love these days.  I'm by no means a 'baby' person in general, but I just adore my babies, and who can blame me?!  He's so cute and squishy and cuddly and happy.  I genuinely love my life and who I get to share it with.

house tour: living room and dining room.

Now that we're getting ready to box stuff up to move it to our new house, I thought I'd show you around one last time.  I'm trying not to cry even as I type this post.  I have loved this house.  I still love this house.  I wish I could just pick it up and stick it on a truck and move it to Missouri with us.  I wish I could adopt it as my child.

When we were trying to arrange everything in the move to Cedar Falls, we had been house hunting, to no avail.  We had looked at nearly 30 houses, and everything was just the worst.  I cried over more than one house.  And then This House came.  I really think God brought us this house.  It was adorable.  It was clean.  It was well-maintained.

I loved it as soon as I walked in the door, so these aren't really "Before" and "Afters," in the sense that I thought "the 'befores' were totally the worst, and thank God for the 'afters.'" This House has always been This House - cute and awesome and perfect.  We just got the privilege of putting our stamp on it for a while.

With that, here is what our living room looked like:

And here is what it looks like now:

I love everything about our living room - it's so sunny and open and snuggly and pretty.  I'm going to miss you, Living Room.  You've been good to me.

From the couch, you can see the dining room.  This is what it looked like before:

And here's what it looks like now:

The kids spend so much time in this sunny room, eating, doing schoolwork, and coloring.  It's a room we all love to be in.  I'm going to miss you, Dining Room.  You've been good to us.

I'll do a couple more House Tour posts - this week I'll show you the entryway and our bedroom.  And in the meantime, I'll just live in denial about the fact that we're not going to live here until we die.

missing these girls already.

We have been blessed with THE. BEST. babysitters here in Cedar Falls.  We have a small group of really great college girls who hang out with the kids so that we can go to Connection Group each week, and we even get to go on an occasional date night.  While we don't have photos with all the girls who occasionally babysit for us, I thought I'd introduce you to Ellie and Bethany, who watch the kids pretty much every week while we're at CG.

I think you can see the kids adore these ladies.

Not only do the kids love them, but Todd and I love them too.  We love getting to chat with them over dinner before we leave, and once we get home from group.  We're all going to miss you ladies SO MUCH when we move!  (You're welcome to come with us to Columbia and solve this problem... just sayin'.)

'what's up' weekly.

This week has been weird.  It was the first week in the last month that I didn't have something scheduled every day, which was really, really nice.  However, the inspection on our Cedar Falls house is happening tomorrow, so I've been spending the week busting my butt, trying to get everything ready for that.  Plus, I turned thirty and we bought a house.  So there's that.

But let's back up:  I turned thirty.  I'm not one who has always dreaded the big 3-0.  I didn't have a list of stuff I was trying to accomplish by now, and my life is better than I could have ever imagined or hoped for at this point, so I'm not living with any kind of regrets or wishful thinking.  Thirty never scared me.  But... it was a bit of a somber day, nonetheless.  I've just felt old for a while... having a bunch of kids ages you.  But at least before, people would hear I was still in my twenties and say something about how young I was (at least for having that many kids).  Now I'm thirty, and I feel old, and everyone agrees with me.  Plus, I spent my birthday grocery shopping like a chump, which didn't help anything.

BUT.  It's all good.  Todd likes to remind me that there are only two options in life: I'm either getting older, or I'm dead; there are no alternatives.  So I'm actually in a pretty good boat considering my other option.  And I spent a lot of time thinking about and praying for so many of the amazing people God has given me so far in my life.  This was by far the best part of my birthday.  So, here's to thirty years of being loved and cared for by some awesome people.

Okay, moving on.  We put in the offer on the house on Saturday as well.  (We offered on our Story City house on Valentine's Day of 2011; Todd likes to buy me houses as special holiday gifts, apparently.)  Everything was locked down the following day.

Speaking of the following day, Sunday was Easter, and we all got dolled up to head to church...

... then we came home to act like weirdos.

Also, I would like to show you this photo to document how nicely my hair-teasing efforts turned out that morning.  Because I was sporting a noteworthy poof.

Monday, we fired up the grill for the first time this season.  It was awesome.  We also had a neighborhood family over for dinner for the first time since we've lived here.  We're nothing if not procrastinators.

And then the rest of the week was spent cleaning and freaking out about our impending inspection.  Please be praying it goes well!

So, that was our week.  How was yours?

we have a house!

So, here's some news: there are still a few balls in the air with it all, but we are under contract for a house down in Columbia.  And...we've never set foot in it.  Yeah, it's yet another crazy story.

The house hunt had been somewhat discouraging.  Most houses that stayed on the market long enough for us to see them were kind of... trash.  After that one long, discouraging weekend of looking at a bunch of sad little houses, our realtor sent us photos of a house he was getting ready to list.  It wasn't on the market yet, so the photos were from the last time it had sold.  And, I'll tell you the truth, I cried when I saw them.  Not happy tears.  Sad, blubbering, desperate tears of, "THIS IS ALL OUR MONEY CAN GET DOWN THERE?!  We are doooooomed to live in a miserable state of quasi-existence in a literal hovel."  (I get kind of dramatic about houses.)

So, on the phone with a friend who lives in Australia, I spent our limited international minutes describing this meltdown and the stupid causative house.  Because I'm a jerk like that.  She later went online to look for a pizza place she remembered in Columbia, and an ad for this house came up on her screen.  The new listing for this same house had gone live that day, and she sent the link to me.

Well, apparently, I had a change of heart.  Like, a massive change of heart.  Because now I was really excited about this house and thought we should make an offer, sight-unseen.  (Um, I'm a nutjob.)  The market down there moves really quickly, so when it came on the market on Friday, we knew it would likely be gone by Monday.  But with it being Easter weekend, we weren't able to plan a trip down there to see it right away.  There were seven showings already scheduled for Saturday, the second day it was on the market!  So we put in an offer Saturday morning, though our realtor didn't want to make it official until he could walk through the house while facetiming us so we could 'see' it.  (He's been in real estate since 2007 and has never had someone place an offer on a house sight-unseen.)

We 'saw' that it was pretty much what we expected from the pictures, and made our offer official.  Right after that, another offer rolled in.  The sellers chose to negotiate with us, and we got everything finalized.  There is a contingency on their end that should be resolved this week, so I'm hesitant to say we're 100% locked down with this house, but we're as confident as the situation warrants.

We'll be heading down soon to actually see it in person.  I'm really excited about it - it has four bedrooms and two bathrooms, and is about twice the square footage of our current house!  So much space!  It has a finished basement with a family room, hardwood floors, and a fenced yard, and is in a great neighborhood.  It has a brand-new roof, a new-ish kitchen, and new vinyl windows (one of the things I've been praying for is windows that are easy to clean).  Do I love it yet?  I don't know.  But I do know that I really like it, and I'm excited to make it 'our own.'

So please be praying that all goes well with finalizing the contract and having it inspected.  Please also be praying for the inspection on our current house, which will be happening Saturday.  Annnnnd, if you're not prayed out, also be praying Todd finds a job soon.  Holy cow, so much to juggle, but it's all good stuff.  

i think it's time to tell you how our house sold.

Remember when I asked you to pray that our house would sell without having to list it, and that it would go for full asking price?  Remember how I conceded that it would be a crazy, outrageous prayer, but suggested you pray for it anyway?  I've been alluding to the fact that our house sold in kind of a crazy way, but I haven't detailed it on the blog because I was waiting for all the paperwork to be official.  Not counting my chickens and all that.

But now the paperwork is all in, we are officially under contract, and the appraisal has been completed.  (We haven't heard back from that officially, but I'm feeling good about how it went.)  Our inspection is Saturday, which stresses me out only mildly, because we didn't really have time to have our house 'market ready' by the time it ended up being for sale, so there's still some half-finished projects and quirks hanging around.

Because, here's how it all went down:

On Wednesday, February 17, we decided we would move to Columbia with Candeo's first church plant, Anthem Church.  We started telling people on Thursday, and Friday I posted it on the blog.  On Saturday, we replaced the kitchen counters and I started sealing them, so our house was a PIT - everything was covered in sawdust, and it smelled like sealant, and all the items from our kitchen were piled on the floor in the entryway.  There was a huge pile of construction garbage behind our house.  It was a disaster.

My friend Sarah was out of town that weekend, and didn't hear until Sunday that we had decided to move.  She knew of a couple that was house hunting, and asked if she could let them know our house would be for sale soon.  I said yes, and Sunday night, I received a text from the couple, asking if they could come see the house sometime that week.  They had already found a house they were planning to offer on, but they'd hold off on that until they made sure ours wasn't a contender.

We set up a time for them to walk through Wednesday evening while Todd was at work.  I spent Sunday night and the next few days cleaning like crazy, although it didn't really end up doing much for presentability - basically all I was able to accomplish was some basement organization and getting the sawdust off of everything.  I was incredibly overwhelmed at the amount of work that needed to be done in just a few short days, even after hearing God tell me to cool it - "You are not going to sell this house; I am."  Meaning, any amount of effort I could put in would make no difference in his ability to move this house if he wanted to.  I still stressed about it, but only because I'm a turd who doesn't listen to reason.  Or, apparently, God Himself Speaking To Me In Audible Form.

And God was faithful.  He really did sell our house.  The couple walked through and loved it.  They were really excited, I was really excited, it was all very exciting.  They were able to see past the grime and chaos and sawdust and smell, to the bones of our house - the cute, solid, well-built, reliable, airy bones.

We ended up getting full asking price for our house.  Neither side used a realtor.  It sold in a week (though it took longer than that to finalize all the paperwork, obviously).  And we've made new friends - the couple who is buying the house is so sweet and fun, and I love that they see what I do in this house.  I'm so glad it's not going to end up being a rental, or selling to someone who doesn't appreciate what a gem they've found.

God clearly orchestrated this.  His hand is all over it.  I think he is taking a lot of joy in his flamboyant displays of grace and mercy to us in all of this.  I know I'm taking a lot of joy and comfort in watching him work.  He is our good Father, and he has done this for us.  Thank you for those of you who prayed (and are praying) for us - God's hand is moving in response to your prayers!

the bi-weekly 'what's up.'

I didn't post one of these last week, and there has been a TON going on over the last few weeks, so this might be long.  In fact, there has been a lot going on for the last month.  Exhibit A:

UGGGGGGH.  Most of these scheduled things were/are things I love, but man alive, I'm too routine to appreciate the incredible variation the days offered me this month, and I'm tuckered out.  Here's to hoping April has just as many visits from friends, but fewer appointments and trips down to Columbia and deadlines for stuff to happen with the sale of the house.  April is for sitting back and relaxing... and oh, yeah, packing and cleaning and gearing up for May.  Oh well, someday I'll be in Heaven, where there are no home inspections and Well Child visits.  That'll be the life.

Anyway, we started last week with a visit from my friend Karlee and her husband, and their six kids.  That's right - there were eleven kids in this house, all aged seven and under, for seven hours.  And I'm not kidding you, it was the BEST time.  The kids got along great, the husbands got along great, and Karlee and I got to head to a local dealership to test drive a 12-passenger van.  You all know I had a blast.  This photo is missing two kids, if you can believe it.

Then mid-week, I drove down with all the kids to stay with my mom for a few days.  While we were down there, I got to see my grandparents (my dad's parents), which was so wonderful.  Then on Saturday, Todd and I left in the morning with Rocco to house hunt in Columbia.  If you've been reading along this week, you know how that turned out.

This week has been spent prepping for Easter.  Todd has spent time during each of the last forty-odd days reading aloud to us from The Passion of Jesus Christ by John Piper.  The kids are really enjoying it, but maybe it's mostly for the snuggle time with their Daddy.

I've also spent much of my time this week preparing for our appraisal, which will happen this morning.  (Please be praying it goes well.)

Tomorrow is my (thirtieth...eep) birthday, followed by Easter, followed by a few days of madly trying to get ready for our home inspection, followed by the possibility of another stint of house hunting.  Followed by a long, long nap and a stretch of trying to persuade my husband to take me to Puerto Rico to lay on the beach for a million years until my skin turns to leather and my troubles turn to mist.  Here's to hoping that being thirty gives me magical powers of verbal persuasion and free airfare.

how we do... [purse prep for going out in public with a million kids].

I have always hated carrying a diaper bag.  I had one with Atticus and I just despised it - it was so bulky, and I had a nagging suspicion that many of the 'must-haves' in there could be left at home without much worry.

I will preface this by saying - I stay at home.  I don't have to leave a bag at daycare, and we're rarely out more than a couple hours at a time.  So this might not work for everyone.  I also toss the pacifier and burp cloth right into the car seat, so we have that on hand, just not in the purse.  And last, it has bitten me in the butt more than once that I don't carry an extra baby outfit (and, let's face it, mommy outfit) with me at all times, so do as I say and not as I do - take an extra outfit.

That being said, here's what I keep in my purse to make sure that I'm prepared for most situations that might arise when we're out in public.

First, here's the purse.  I like them moderately large, but still somewhat structured, so stuff isn't getting lost in the bottom.  This one has three large compartments, as well as a small zippered pocket.  As you can see, I need a new purse, as this one is starting to fall apart, but I've used it everyday for the last three years, so it's earned its retirement.

Here is the entire contents of said purse:

On the left you see my wallet (which also has done its time and is ready to be retired), and a pad of paper for taking notes or letting the kids scribble while they sit in waiting rooms.  Down the center is my first aid bag (I'll detail that below); mints and gum to be used for bribing the kids, if necessary; the ever-loving WIPES, which are used for all kinds of things - hand washing, face washing, table washing, nose blowing, etc.; pens (self-explanatory).  Down the right side are kleenex, hand sanitizer, glasses cleaner, and an extra diaper.  (Not pictured is my planner.)

In the first aid kit reside the following:

Dramamine (Atticus gets car sick). Mela-gel (essentially, Neosporin). Tweezers for the occasional splinter (theirs) and rogue chin hair (mine).  Motion sickness oil blend (again with the car sickness).  Tea tree, lavender, and peppermint EOs for common owies and ickies.  And a Tide pen, because - five kids.

And that's it.  Really.  Sometimes I'll throw a book in there, in case I have some down time to read in a doctor's office or something.  (Hahaha, I'm so naive.)  But other than that, we're pretty well set with these items!

finneas' fourth birthday party.

A little over a week ago, we had family over to celebrate Finneas' birthday.  My sister helped doll up the place with the decorations Todd picked out.  Finneas wanted the theme to be "Gray Soldiers" (read: knights).

It was so sweet - this year, both the biggest kids wanted to buy Finneas a present with their own money (and Penelope even gave Laurelai fifty cents to get him a gift, too).  Atticus bought him a nerf gun, and Penelope got him a bag of skittles.  They each made cards for him as well.

The cake was grain-free, and wasn't as bad as you might think.  It had espresso ganache, which can divert your attention from pretty much anything you want it to.

And, because it's Finneas, this is how the day ended.  This photo is Finneas in a nutshell.