Abundant Blessings

It's been 3 weeks since I had a chance to write on here.  Life has been extremely busy as we've been sorting through housing issues.  I have been putting my faith in God that He had a plan and that we want to follow that plan.  But it was definitely frustrating and confusing at times.  The past few days we have seen everything come together and some amazing blessings.  We received an offer on our house nearly 3 weeks ago, and worked to come to an agreement.  The inspection followed, with the appraisal shortly after.  The appraisal took a full week to come back, which was certainly strange.  And then it came in $8k under our agreed price.  Our fantastic lawyer (Jon's uncle) worked with the buyer's lawyer and we have a new agreement.  We discovered we've been missing an exemption on our taxes the whole time we've been here.  So we received a refund for 2011, plus need to pay less to the buyers for the tax credit at closing.  We have seen many houses in the past few weeks, and got beat out by investors twice.  I repeated to Jon each time that God must have a better plan for us.  I said it out loud partially to convince myself, but I really did believe deep down.  We've done everything right along the way so I firmly believed we'd be rewarded. 

Well, I went to see another house Thursday night this week and it is awesome.  I arrived a few minutes early and stopped by Kim's to visit with her and her parents.  Then headed over for my scheduled appointment and was blown away.  I got to meet the owners, who are amazing people.  They raised 3 children and having truly lovingly cared for their home.  There is nothing that needs to be done.  We told them we would be putting in an offer, and found out they already had one offer.  We came up significantly from our originally planned price because we really liked the house.  And then we prayed.  Yesterday afternoon the agent called to say they were accepting our offer - not even a counter offer!  A house in Glenview for a price we can afford, must be God's work.  We went as a family to see the house today, and show the kids what to expect.  I expected to spend 10-15 minutes at the house so as to not interrupt their day.  We spent an hour looking and chatting, finding out great things about the house.  The wife told me that she chose us because she felt a connection.  This husband and wife are amazing people and we feel very blessed to have met them and to be chosen to live in this house.  The kids played in the yard while we all chatted and it was a beautiful day.  We walked down to the park afterwards to show the kids and were shocked again.  What I remembered as a small tot lot type park with basketball is huge - 2 large play areas with sand, 2 tennis courts, a full basketball court, and a baseball field!  We are extremely excited to have this area so close by.  We are still in shock that this is all happening.  Once our buyers' loan comes through, we know we're home free because we know we'll be approved.

Being so busy with house hunting and the new school year with work, I've been slacking on the preschool activities with Carolyn.  She's been begging this past week for new projects and to work on letters.  Instead we've just been doing some reading and she's been doing a lot of writing and coloring.  Her imagination continues to amaze me, she drew plans for her dream house the other day.  But today I got a chance to put together some more projects, G-L, so we should be good at least through this week.  I think part of the key with her is doing new things as well.  I looked at the school website for where she'll attend kindergarten and discovered they use the math program I had considered using.  So I think we'll just go with what she needs and not worry about a program.  With work slowing down a little now I'm looking forward to focusing more on Carolyn though and getting her the stimulation she needs.  So hopefully I'll be posting more often as well.

Thank you God for the abundant blessings lately.  We are very excited for what our futures hold knowing we are in Your hands.