Friday, August 22, 2008

Tanner Update!

Despite all the craziness with the house shananigans, Tanner is still the center of our world. He turned 2 on August 15th. He is doing great, talking more than ever with 3-word sentences the norm these days. Today on the way home, he yells "mommy mommy, icky toes!" I look back and he's got his toes up next to his eyeball and I see that he has a little dirt on his big toe. He's sleeping great in his big boy race car bed (though still an early riser by 6) AND he went poop on the potty yesterday! He's been telling everyone he sees "poop the potty"...

We went to Beaver Lake last weekend after a day of moving stuff into storage. We grilled chicken and corn and played on the beach. Beaver Lake is just a 10 minute drive from our house now, but it will be walking distance when we move! We'll live about 1/2 mile walk from the Lake and our house includes lake rights!









We didn't have a party for Tanner's bday this year - we just had our friends Scott and Mark and Andrea and their kids over for some pizza and cake....







Playing with the Aquadoodle from Mark and Andrea...

The $2.99 slinky we bought him got the most attention that night!





A visit from Nana and PopPop a couple of weeks ago...


One of his latest capers..."Captain Tanner" - He puts on a dishcloth cape, his sunglasses and ballhat and he shouts "Captaaaaaain Tanneeeeeeer" He climbs onto the ottoman, puts his hands out over his head and jumps...where did he get this from?

At the playground with his friend Kameron...so cute together.





89 Babcock Tavern

Allegedly we are closing on our new house 2 weeks from today. So far so good. Everything is in line. We're waiting on one small issue with the title that hopefully won't hold anything up. We are super excited and have been working on getting our existing house on the market for the last 4 weeks. So after 6 years, its finally entirely painted (fresh paint on 3 sides this summer alone), we've been spiffing it up from every angle painting this and fixing that...the yard has never looked better and we've cleared out 1/2 the contents for showing. Luckily, there is a storage unit just 1/2 mile away at the end of our road which has made that much easier. As of today, the "For Sale" sign is in our yard. Cross your fingers for us!!!!
The new home was built in 2002, is 2500 square feet (instead of our current 1600) and sits on 1.4 acre. There is a beautiful stone walkway leading up to the front yard/farmers porch. The back deck is enormous and is right off the kitchen. It has 3 bedrooms and 3 full baths. Second floor laundry, a huge kitchen with a long breakfast bar and vaulted ceilings in the master bedroom are a few of my favorite features. Rob is excited about the whole house stereo system, large walk out basement, and 2-car garage. We've been shopping sales for the missing components and have quite a collection already (it was a foreclosure property and the owners stripped it down pretty good before they left). So far we've found great deals on our appliances, cabinet knobs, a couple of light fixtures, etc. We even had to buy a mailbox - that was gone too. The rest will come in time...including the AC units that they took off the outside of the house (yup, they even took the central air and central vac units).

We weren't planning on spending our summer packing, moving, buying and selling a house...but when we saw 89 Babcock Tavern come on the market for 1/3 less than its value, we got interested...We drove by it on the way home from work that night and as we walked around the outside, we became VERY interested. Low and behold a door was left open and we went on in and looked around! Rob and I became VERY excited...Rob's exact words "I'd buy this house tomorrow." I made a phone call and a realtor was there within 30 minutes...by the next day (Saturday) we had an offer in on it...We had to raise our price a couple of days later b/c there were multiple offers. We agonized over how high to go, what we could afford, etc...One week after we first saw the property, we got the news that our offer was accepted. 10 days after that, on Rob's birthday, we were signing the Purchase and Sale Agreement (a good omen?). Just this week, we signed the papers to list this house on our 4-year anniversary (another good omen?)...We are finding everything very synchronistic with this whole transaction and hope that the sale of 85 Highland goes as smoothly...Its a great house that will always hold a place in our hearts as our first home that we put so much sweat and toil into...It will suit someone really well.