The Wonders of Living Close to Family

We are very excited about the fact that we live within a few hours drive of alot of family. My sister and brother and their families live about 2-2.5 hours east of us, and my grandparents, and uncle live 3.5 hours south, and I have other family scattered all around Cali. And John's parents and almost his entire family only live 12 hr drive north. Now many may say, WOW that is a long way to drive, well it is if you are use to only drive 1.5 hours to anything on one island. But the mainland is great in its mere fact that you can drive for hours and hours and not see the same stuff over and over again. Well we in our short month here have seen almost all of the families that live within a days drive of here. As well as some friends. And it has been nice. We stayed with my sister in her LOVELY (well that might be an understatement, but no words to describe her wonderful new home) new home. And my brother came over for dinner, we plan to see my grandparents in the next few weeks as well. But the majority of our time on the mainland was spend either in tiny hotel rooms, or up at John's parents house. It was wonderful to see all of John's family, well almost everyone. John has not seen his parents in 18 months, I saw them this summer, but it was a wonderful time. Some of the siblings all went to the Hands-On Science museum, which was fun. And a great place to get some energy out. Papa and Gramme took the kids to the Wildlife Safari, I think that is what is was call, it was a drive thru zoo basically, while John and I had a much needed night away. We stayed at this wonderful resort that we traded our timeshare in for, and then gave the rest of the week to Jacob and Angie and their family, since they live near the resort. All-in-all it was a great week. We ended up leaving a few days early so we could get things into motion with the house, but we had a wonderful week. Here are some of my favorite pictures of our travels to visit family this past month.
**Pictures are backwards in events**

Isaac and Noah with Great Grandma Sally

Playing at GGrandma's

Hangin' Out

Noah was there too

Monkeyin' Around

The Driveway to Gramme and Papa's

Taylor at the Science Place

Thomas and Dad (Jonathon) at Science Place

The Ward's at the Science Place

The WHOLE family that went

Katie, Jonathon, Thomas and Allie spinning around

Levi, Jordan, and Taylor

Electrofing Hug

WOW!! Alley is shocking

Of course Noah was there too

Isaac loved that robot that told you all about the Science Museum

Bubbling PersonalityInside the bubble

Levi trying to be cool (HEHE just like Levi always is)

Thomas spinning

Jacob and Angie came to visit us too...

Isaac being tortured by Uncle Jacob

We still got a picture of you KatieRough Housing with Austin

Watch out he is getting ready to charge

Grammie spoiled the kids agian. (Thanks!)

Flying away...

The bird was nibbling on his ear

Listening for a heart beat in Grammie's foot, I guess Zac didn't teach him where his heart is.

YeHa

The lady that helped John so she could get help

Beautiful skies

We stopped to help an older couple that got their chains stuck.

Playing around at Karen's

Isaac's new best friend. Every kid that played with Isaac after this was Jordan.

The neverending game of Life

Kaley, Me, and Brittany

Kaley, Cris, and Brittany

Isaac playing with Caleb

Isaac loved all the cousins and uncles that he got to rough house with. It has been truly wonderful spending time with family and friends.

WE'RE HOME!!!

So after weeks of looking, and looking, along with offer after offer! And after hundreds of "We're Home" shouted from Isaac's mouth. ONE has been accepted and is now is escrow!! We should actually get to move in around Apr 3. Our new home is pretty new it was built in 2006 and is 2026 sq feet. It is three stories, 4 bedrooms and 4 baths. I did get the large master bedroom and bathroom I wanted, but I did not get as large of a kitchen as I had hoped, but it is still fairly large and it has a built in hutch in the dinning room, so atleast I have lots of cupboards. I know that I promised many of you video, but the video that we took is too large to upload anywhere that I have found. So when we get a chance we will go back and make a video again, split up into smaller portions. So soon I promise.

The Roller Coaster Ride

We have had our ups and downs and we have only been here in CA since early Monday morning. We left LATE on Sunday and tried to sleep through the flight. But both kids woke up in the middle, probably due to some WONDERFUL turbulence, which John loved as well. So John and I got very little sleep. When we got to the Oxnard Airport we found out that the lost a bag, at first we thought oh no big deal, until we realized it had all the kids extra clothes, and the bumbo, OOPS!! But we did get upgraded for FREE to some Cadillac looking thing, fits right in here. We decided to try to check into the hotel earlier and shower. Then start our day. We went and looked at about 7 houses, all which were AWFUL!! Many I wouldn't even let my worst enemy live in, not that I have many of those, but they were just ran down, cupboards falling off, and holes in walls bad. Most were alot smaller than we could even try to cram all of our stuff in. I was so discouraged. When we got home and looked at the houses that the realtor had emailed us for the next day, I was discouraged and overwhelmed even more. I didn't even know where to start, or even to look, there were 60+ houses, and many looked like they were in the same kinda shape as the ones we had looked at earlier that day. Plus on top of this, our realtor, which is filling in for our normal realtor, who had to go out of town unexpectedly, is really really busy, and only had a few hours each day to help us. Well this ended up working out for us on Tuesday (Day 2 of house hunting), we decided that we would narrow down the houses according to sq footage, knowing that our last house was 1250, and knowing that we needed more than that. So we cut those out before anything else. Then about 1pm we decided that we would drive around to all the other house on the list and cut out the ones that were in bad neighborhoods, and looked awful from the outside. This worked out great, cause the kids slept (since on Monday half the issues were kid related) and we walked around and peeked in all the windows. Then our list was narrowed down to a few with the realtor. WAY WAY easier with the kids. Also we got this got opportunity. Well it may be an opportunity. This older lady that is LDS is trying to sell her house, and it is not really even getting any offers. The house is out of our price range by $60,000. But our realtor is going to try to work some magic and see if she would let, this other LDS family that is trying to start their family have a great deal. Well its a long shot that is for sure, but we met here and she was a really nice lady, so who knows, but either way, we did see a few houses that we liked. The one that we liked the best so far, so does everyone else, it has 3 other offers, so we will see! But either way day 2 was a bit nicer and less frustrating. So we will see about day 3, today. I will keep you posted and I will one day post pictures of the houses we like.