Comparing locations

Since we are in the midst of Garrett's job interviews, I have been thinking a lot about things I value in the places we live.  We have always loved where we have lived, and it's always been for different reasons.  Mostly, though, it's been all about our friends and the relationships we have formed there.

We loved Provo because we were students, and we lived in the same house (tri-plex, essentially) as my sister and her husband, and as my brother and his wife (for a while).  So, we loved being students at BYU because of all that had to offer, and we loved living with/near family.  Endless fun.

We loved Georgia because we made some really great friends there, whom we are still very close to.  We got together with them often and I had a really strong support network during that time when Garrett studied non-stop.  Augusta itself isn't that special, but the friends we made there made it wonderful.  We also loved our ward.

We loved Virginia because some of our best friends from med school moved there with us.  Also, Garrett had an incredible schedule so we had lots of family time.  It was fun to live in a new place for a year and discover what the area has to offer. Garrett also caught a lot of delicious fish! Newport News as a place isn't great, though. In my opinion.

We loved Florida for many reasons too -- mostly our friends!!  I had 3 girlfriends there who I became very close to and we still have a group text going all the time (two of us moved away in June).  It was a great support network for me, especially when Garrett was working all the time and things were really stressful.  We also loved our house, our ward, our neighborhood.  We loved Disney, and the beach.  And besides those 3 close friends I had, we had tons of friends who we hung out with almost daily at the park, or neighbors who we went walking with almost every night after dinner.  It was awesome, and I'm sure that I will always look back at that time as being one of the highlights of our lives.

Wisconsin has been interesting.  Some good friends from Florida also moved here for a fellowship, but they don't live very close by so we don't see them as often as we would like. They aren't LDS so we don't see them at church regularly, either. So, it has been interesting trying to settle in.  No other kids live on our street, and we are the only ones in our ward (that I know of) whose kids go to the Madison school district, so our schedule is a bit "off" from everyone else's.  Also, we are some of the few who actually live in Madison, so we don't really live near anyone else in our ward.  However, I've been surprised with how fine I have been with all of that.  In Florida, we spent HOURS at the park with friends, nearly every day after school.  I thought I would really miss that.  Sometimes I do, but other times I'm just grateful for the time we have this year to be together, alone.  Frankly, I'm having a great time playing with the kids and checking out new playgrounds and trails - by ourselves.  We did get invited to someone's house in our ward for dinner once, and that was nice.  We will reciprocate soon, they are really nice and have a couple girls whose ages match up with ours.   But for the most part, I'm just really enjoying our time together as a family.  As for Madison itself (and Wisconsin in general)... I will have to write a post about my impressions soon, and how it compares to other places we have lived throughout our marriage.

Beach Day

Garrett had a few vacation days in April, so we took the kids out of school one day and went to Clearwater Beach

Olivia was not impressed at first.  She walked down to the water and stood there at the surf, staring at the ocean,

Then she turned around and stared at the sand.  And said, "I want to go to the pool."

She didn't like the sand, or the salty water. Haha.

She was pretty happy a few minutes later, though, eating pizza under the shade of the umbrella.

Garrett can't go to the beach without bringing his casting net.

He caught some fun little bait fish, which the girls loved playing with:

I love our day trips as a family.  I love doing things with friends, but I've noticed that when we go places with friends, our kids go off and play with their buddies while Garrett and I chat with our friends.  That's great, but we don't really spend time with our kids!  I really like our family days when we do things with just us.  We made some great memories that day.

But, it was also nice at the end of the day to let the kids put on their headphones and watch a movie on the way home, giving Garrett and me some time to talk and listen to our 90's jams up front. Ha.

Rainbow Springs

Ever since our Disney passes expired in February, we've been spending some time exploring other fun parts of Florida before we move.  A few weeks ago, we took a short drive down to Rainbow Springs.

The girls loved swimming in the cool, refreshing water.  It was so beautiful and clear!  And water is always 72 degrees, year round.  On the day we went, the weather wasn't super hot, so the water felt quite cool.  I would imagine that it would feel very refreshing in the middle of a Florida summer!

We rented a canoe and did some exploring around the Springs.  Saw lots of really cool fish:

 They also have a large dock and swimming area, which we enjoyed before we headed home.  I hadn't planned to go in, but I ended up swimming around for about 10 minutes and it was so fun!  After getting over the initial cold, it was really refreshing.  The water was gorgeous from underneath, with goggles.

On the way home, we stopped to have dinner at a roadside BBQ place (and by "BBQ place", I mean - a pickup truck had pulled over on the side of the road, pulling a huge smoker, and there was a cardboard sign that said "ribs").  It was delicious, and none of us got food poisoning, which was a bonus. I wish I had gotten a picture.

 It's always fun to spend a day with friends, checking out new places!

For sale by owner

In February, we officially started trying to sell our house.  We decided to try selling by owner at first, since our area of town has lots of turnover with all the UF residents and grad students.

We had several showings in Feb-March (maybe 10?), which was always great, although a little nerve-wracking.  Since we are selling by owner, I'm the one who shows people through the house myself.  It's always interesting to look at our house through someone else's eyes.  You notice all the imperfections that you don't normally see on a day-to-day basis.  You know, just little things that you don't notice and that don't really matter, but with a picky home buyer you just never know.  Don't get me wrong - our house is very nice, and we love it.  But it's not perfect!

Anyway, we had a hope that we could perhaps sell it to an investor, who would rent it out some incoming residents or something like that.  We figured that an investor wouldn't care about all those small issues - they are just looking for a nice house for someone ELSE to live in!  They would care about our new roof (only 3 weeks old), 4-year-old HVAC unit, and low-maintenance yard. 

We got an offer from an investor in mid-March, but it wasn't quite what we were looking for so we passed on it.  To be honest, I was really kicking myself for a few weeks.  I dreaded every showing after that, and I couldn't help thinking "I could be done right now!  This could be over with!"  It was hard.  Garrett works a lot, so everything naturally falls to me and it wears down after a while.  One day, I spent six hours doing yard work by myself, including raking up 9 bags of leaves and then spreading out 11 bags worth of mulch around the house, just to have the new mulch covered in leaves a few days later, when we got a new roof and they blew out our gutters full of leaves (I had planned to clean out the gutters one morning later that week, after laying a tarp down under the ladder to protect the fresh mulch!).  Anyway, it was tiring.  I was ready to be done.

It was always our plan to list with an agency if April came along and we didn't have any offers yet.  So, last Monday, we finally signed with a Realtor - a great guy who was our buyers agent 4 years ago when we bought this house, and who we had been keeping in touch with.  In fact, he had kinda been giving us some guidance as we attempted to sell by owner, and he had brought over many potential buyers to see the house (we were willing to pay 3%  commission to a buyers' agent).  When we met with him to sign all the papers to list the house, he said, "Now, I have to be straight with you - I will be shocked if I don't have an offer for you in the next couple of hours."  It turns out, one of the first investors he had brought over was in the process of drawing up an offer for our house! So, he (our Realtor) had already included a clause in our listing paperwork that if this person bought our house, we would still only owe the original 3% buyers' agent commission (rather than 4-6% if anyone else bought it).

Two hours later, we got an offer.  We looked it over that night, and the next day I texted back and forth for a few hours with the Realtor, countering back and forth.  Finally we agreed upon the price and signed the contract!  It's actually a pretty good deal - since we are saving around $5k by not paying that second 3% commission, we essentially settled on an offer that was only $2k under our asking price.  And my favorite part - it's an AS IS deal, meaning the buyer cannot ask us to make any repairs after the inspection (we expect that they will not find much wrong anyway, but it's still nice that we won't spend the next several weeks making small repairs and fixes).

SO!  We are under contract.  A big weight lifted off our shoulders, for sure.  Now we can focus on enjoying our last few months in Florida, packing up our house, and figuring out how the heck to move all our stuff to Wisconsin (UHaul?  Budget truck?  ABF U-pack?  Zippy Shell?  Garrett and I can't agree, haha).

And side note, let me just toot my own horn and say I'm getting pretty good at negotiating.  Don't get me wrong - I HATE doing it.  It makes me SO nervous and SO uncomfortable.  But Garrett will NOT do it (nor does he have time to), so that leaves it all up to me.  I negotiated the price for our rental house in Wisconsin, I negotiated the price on our minivan that we bought (more on that later!), I negotiated a price for our new roof, and I negotiated for selling our house -- with a knot in my stomach every time, haha.  Just thinking about all that stresses me out, I'm so glad it's all behind me.  But I should probably call some moving truck companies before I chicken out too much...

Random Summer Pictures

Since I didn't blog at all over the summer, here's a bunch of random things that happened this summer! :)

Garrett brought home a fish for dinner and the girls watched intently as he filleted it:

Abbie & Ellie did swim team this summer, which was awesome.  It was 4 days a week, for an hour each day, and it was a lot of fun!  There were probably around 15 kids in their session time and about 12 of them were friends from church.

Abbie had her dance recital on a Saturday in June.  Garrett was originally scheduled to work, and I was so happy that he was able to switch with someone else.  It worked out perfectly because he ended up making up the work day when the girls & I were out of town in July.  Abbie did a wonderful job in her recital.  I was so proud of her!  I love to see her dance; she is very talented.

Olivia playing in the splash pad at a neighborhood pool:

Helping me make Garrett's birthday cake:

Most evenings, we go walking in our neighborhood with some friends who live two doors down.  We do a 1.5-ish mile loop, it's fun.  One night, our friends' baby wouldn't sit in her stroller so Ellie was more than happy to fill the seat.

Is there anything cuter than a toddler in scrubs??

Another swim team shot.  Olivia had her own swim cap so she felt included, also:

Early in the summer, Abbie wanted to have a "baby doll tea party".  She wrote out all the invitations and everything.  Everyone brought their favorite doll and stuffed animal.  We had homemade bread and lemonade, painted fingernails and toes, and played in the sprinklers.

One evening when we were on our walk, we looked behind us and saw a wall of rain moving rapidly towards us down the street!  We ran home as fast as we could, but the rain won!  That's life in Florida, though.  It can be bright and sunny outside, but still pouring!  I also frequently see rain out one window, but it's not raining on the other side of the house... or I can see it raining over my neighbor's house, but not ours.  It's crazy!  I love rain but I really hate driving in it.  Also, being a homeowner makes me a little anxious about roof leaks and other damage it can do. Other than that, it's great!

In mid-July, Garrett presented a poster at a conference in Orlando.  It was at the Ritz-Carlton, so that's where we stayed for two nights.  It was very fancy, of course.  Olivia was hoping this would be her bed!

The girls struck a pose while we were walking around the grounds:

Playing in the kids' splash pad area.  They were just as excited about the shower.  We also spent some time in the fun lazy river and several swimming pools around the resort.

And we definitely took advantage of the free ice cream in the lobby:

I have mixed feelings about staying in nice hotels.  I really do like them, but I hate that they don't ever include anything like free parking and free internet like cheaper hotels do.  Also, we had to leave the resort to eat our meals because we never would have been able to feed our family of 5 for under $100 for dinner.  It actually turned out really well though, because both nights we met up for dinner with some good friends who just moved back to Orlando for a job (he was a resident here with Garrett for a few years, and just finished his fellowship across the country).  It was so fun to catch up with them.

The girls did a little "Chinese brush art" class one day at the library.

Spent an afternoon at the Natural History Museum - they have a butterfly exhibit also.

Keeping busy while the girls are at swim team:

It rained on our walk again one night, but stayed sunny and bright so we got a great rainbow!

The Kona Slushie truck came through our neighborhood so we took advantage of it:

The girls did "makeovers" one day:

We put together our own little end-of-season swim meet/party at a neighborhood pool.  Abbie really is a great swimmer!  I would love to put her in year-round swim team but it's very time intensive (and expensive).  A lot of Olympic swimmers got their start here in our town, though!

Ellie got a hold of my phone one evening during our walk.... these were the good pictures I kept.  She also had some pictures of random strangers from the neighborhood, standing in their driveway!!  I guess I wasn't paying much attention on our walk, haha (she was riding in the stroller for a few minutes and that's when she was clicking away, I guess).

Afternoon at the farm

A couple of Saturdays ago, the girls and I met up with some friends at a little local farm and learned about what life was like in the 1800s.  The farm itself is an authentic working farm, and the homestead consists of 18 buildings like the farmhouse (with original furnishings), a kitchen outbuilding, general store, post office, etc.  The people who work there perform daily chores like raising crops and tending the livestock. It was really neat to visit and see how things were.

They most likely didn't have pink sequinned hats back then, but I decided to be a good mom and let Abbie wear it out in public.... first time (and last) time for everything, right?

This man was telling us about how they would wrangle up wild cows in this area, which were then shipped to Cuba.  Interesting.. he was also showing us how they branded cows.

Another cow wrangler:

This guy was teaching us how they made whiskey.  Learning life skills, here!

The chickens were so pretty:

We also spent some time listening to fun music from this little back porch band:

The kids danced and learned some new songs, including "Here we go 'round the Mulberry bush".

It was a fun afternoon, but really hot, of course!  I love living in a place where we can drive such a short distance (15 minutes or so) and be at a farm with such neat history.  We will have to go back sometime when Garrett can join us!