I know, I know it's Mother's Day so I should probably have a more... festive ? post but I don't. I feel like I have been so busy these last couple weeks and I should have probably written about 5 separate blog posts but it just didn't happen. So I will play catch up in one big post I guess.
The first thing was we got some bummer news on our house prospects. In a nut shell we got some bad info from our mortgage lender so what we thought wasn't going to be a problem getting a mortgage is kind of turning out to be one. He told us we only had to be out of bankruptcy for two years but what he didn't tell us was that because we surrendered our house we have to now wait 3 years from the time it was settled. At the time I took it pretty hard. Even more so than I really expected.
When we started up house hunting again I couldn't really understand why I was uninterested in the whole thing. All I've wanted since we gave up our house was to get another one again and now it seemed like it was a sure thing. Looking back though I wonder if I was just scared something like this might happen so I was trying to play it safe and not get too excited. Which I finally ended up doing anyway. I had reached a point where I started to dream of having a home again... a garden in the back... decorating the kid's rooms... where we would take family bike rides... hang the tire swing... the whole nine yards and then bam! it was all taken away. I cried when Dave told me... and for days after I cried. But I picked myself back up and I am really feeling okay with it. What's another couple of years or so right? It's just a house and honestly until the building option presented itself we were not finding much of anything we liked for the money. Certainly not what we have come to expect from what you hear about the current housing market. So we wait... again. But it really is okay. I am far too happy with so much in my life right now to let this one thing keep me down. I gave it too much of my attention when it happened the first time around.
Luckily we are in the midst of planning a family vacation so I was able to turn my focus right around to that. We figured since we don't have any kids in school we should take advantage of the awesome midweek, off season deals you can find and go before mid June. We wanted to take the kids to Mount Rushmore and then started planning a biking trip through all the beautiful national parks in SD. BUT our spring has been less than desirable and even worse not overly predictable either and we came to the conclusion it might be the same straight west of us. So suddenly the prospect of going south was sounding better and better. The kids were already pretty excited about a biking vacation and we liked how much cheaper it would be than just about anything else we started searching for good biking country south of us and came up with the Ozarks... which somehow just sounds better than saying "we are going to Missouri for vacation." Hopefully things will work out as we hope. It seems like we have a habit of picking random places to vacation with little to no planning and things seem crazy when we are there but we always leave with fond memories. That might just be a "Martens' vacation" though.
Just recently my cousin Amber came back to visit for a day. She is off moving around the country exploring and living life to the fullest! I love listening of her adventures and remembering the feeling I had when I did that 13-14 years ago... the good feelings when I wasn't thinking I was just nuts and wanted to be home raising babies. She seems to have a bit more of a spark for the wild side of life though which I hope my own kids inherit. She so often feels like one of my own kids or at the very least my baby sister since I spent most of my summers raising her... and her mom spent most of my summers raising me.
Amber meeting EilaRain...
Aunt Jan with Eila...
Ozzye snuggling Amber
I thought this picture was funny since just to the left of Aubriel is a goose standing on one foot.
Then right after Amber's visit we got a visit from Dave's step-brother and his wife who just recently moved to CA. We didn't even get a chance to see them around Christmas before they moved so it was a nice surprise when they called to say they were stopping by. They were back for our nephew's baptism who was born just a week and half after Eila.
Ryan and Laura meeting EilaRain.
Uncle Ryan with Eila
And of course we had to try to get a group picture which always seems to be a much larger production than it should be. I know one would expect it to be challenging with 6 kids but it is usually just one of them that won't cooperate and his name would be Ozzye. I have no idea why Brody looks so angry... it might just be because Eila was screaming... poor uncle Ryan.
The girls with the "men" of the house.
I just LOVE this picture of my oldest and youngest. I have another picture of Aubriel looking at him like this right after she was born... I might have to look it up...
