April 20: Iphone pics of the day (with a house update too)

The girls spent some time painting and drawing this morning.  Isla is starting  to be more purposeful in her scribbles.  They still mostly just look like scribbles, but she will tell us what she is trying to draw.  Then she concentrates really hard and takes her time trying to draw it.  Often she will try to write letters (O's and A's, as she calls them) because Audrey is always writing letters.  She is also now trying to draw people (even though they don't look like people at all).  I took this picture while she was drawing Daddy.  Such concentration!

Someone commented on Facebook about how well she grips her pen.  She does!  She has always naturally held writing utensils in the correct way.  Unlike Audrey, who still doesn't quite have the right grip yet.  I'm thinking maybe Isla will be artistic...who knows?

Audrey likes to put on shows.  Which means she wants to listen to princess movie soundtracks on Spotify, dress up, and sing all the songs.  She will often create an audience using her dolls and stuffed animals and us.  When the show is over, then she wants people to come meet the princess.  Today, after finishing her Belle show, she invited Isla to come and meet Belle and get her picture taken with Belle.

This afternoon, Daniel took the girls to the park that is right next to our new house (we haven't been to that park before, so they wanted to scope it out!).  They all had a great time.  Daniel said the park was nice, and it is right next to the pool, so he got a good view of the pool too.  While they were playing at the park, they met two other girls who live in the neighborhood.  Audrey and a  girl named Lucy played together.  Daniel talked to their mom, and she had lots of good things to say about living in the neighborhood.  She also said she is excited to see more girls move in!  We are excited to move to a neighborhood with more families and kids...and a neighborhood where the families and kids are out playing and interacting with each other. 

This is Audrey saying goodbye to her new friend.

Now, we just want to move to that neighborhood, so everything needs to continue to go well with our house selling process.  We had the inspection last week, and it went fairly well.  The buyers asked us to fix a few minor electrical problems and to repair part of our chimney, which is starting to fall apart on the roof.  It doesn't sound like any of those issues will be too difficult or expensive to correct, so that is very good!  We also passed the radon inspection with flying colors! 

All that is left now is the appraisal.  The appraisal was supposed to be on Friday with an appraiser who has a bad reputation, but it was cancelled for an unknown reason.  We were glad that it was cancelled, and we were hoping that it would get rescheduled with a different appraiser.  Well, it did get rescheduled (for this Wednesday) but with the same appraiser.  Boo!  Daniel and I are getting pretty nervous about it, because this appraiser is known to appraise houses lower than most other appraisers.  That could be bad, as we are counting on all the money from the sale of this house to go towards the purchase of the new house.  We can't really afford to come down from our selling price.

This whole system is frustrating and so subjective.  If we have someone who is willing to buy our house, why can't they just buy our house?  They think it is a fair price, and we think it is a fair price.  We did our research, and I really do feel like we priced it fairly.  So why does the entire sale of our house have to hinge on the opinion of this appraiser?  Oh, it's such a stressful process!  I CANNOT WAIT to be done with all of it!