March 31: Easter

 Happy Easter!!!

March 30: Dyeing Easter Eggs

This was the girls first time to dye Easter eggs.

 I assumed Audrey would like it, as she always likes crafty types of things, and she did think it was a lot of fun.  In fact, she said it was her favorite thing to do and that she wanted to dye eggs every day. 

I was surprised by how much Isla liked it.  I assumed that she wouldn't be interested, but I was very wrong.  She loved dropping the eggs into the cup.  She loved watching us pull the eggs out of the cup and seeing the different color.  She just had a huge smile on her face the whole time!

March 29: Painting

The girls wanted to paint this morning.  I don't always let them paint when they want to paint, because it is just a hassle and makes a mess and I am lazy.  But, today seemed like a good painting day.  Isla has painted a few times with my help, but I haven't let her do it totally on her own yet.  Until today.  Wow, she loved it so much!  She painted for the longest time and probably would have gone for longer if I would have let her.  She made a little mess, but it wasn't bad at all.  (Note to self:  let the girls paint more often!)

They started painting pictures out of coloring books.

 Notice that Isla favors her left hand.  She pretty consistently uses her left hand for everything.  We think she is going to be a lefty!

 I love pictures of the two of them playing nicely together.  Look at them sharing the paints!  It doesn't always happen, but when it does...I love it!

 

After they started painting, a thought came to mind that we should be painting some sort of Easter craft, since it is Easter weekend and all.  So I drew some Easter eggs on cardstock for the girls to paint. 

Here are their finished eggs.  Isla's on the left and Audrey's on the right.  Maybe we will be festive and cut them out and hang them up in our window.

March 25: Sold!!

We accepted an offer on our house tonight!  Over the past five days, we bought a house and sold our house.  That is pretty exciting.  Of course, it is not a done deal yet.  There are inspections and appraisals to be done on both houses still.  We won't close until May/June, so we still have a lot of time before all of this is finalized.  But we are off to a very, very good start.

In less exciting news, we ended up with 18.5 inches of snow with this snow storm.  That is the most snow that has ever been recorded here in all time.  Crazy!  Fortunately, the weather is supposed to warm up considerably over the next couple of days, so the snow shouldn't stick around for too long. 

March 24: Pinkalicious!

Audrey and I went on a date this afternoon.  We braved the blizzard like conditions to go see Pinkalicious the musical at a local theater.  It really was nasty outside this afternoon, it was snowing and blowing like crazy.  I do not like being out in the snow or driving in snow, but I was willing to put up with it for the sake of spending an afternoon with my daughter (and also for the sake of the expensive tickets that I didn't want to waste!).  I think we have about 12 inches of snow on the ground right now.  It is ridiculous considering that it is supposed to be SPRING now!

Anyway, back to our day, I let Audrey pick where we went to lunch after church.  Of course, she picked McDonalds, which is her favorite but most definitely not my favorite.

 Before the show started, they had a pink party with pink crafts (basically just coloring) for the kids to complete.  After making the crafts, Audrey and I got some pink lemonade and Skittles to enjoy while we waited for the show to start.  Audrey really wanted to take a picture of me with my pink lemonade, so here it is.

The show was cute; Audrey (who is a big fan of the books) thought it was great.  After the show, she got to get autographs from the cast and get a picture with Pinkalicious.

Audrey was so much fun today.  She just had a great attitude and a good time.  She couldn't stop smiling or laughing.  We had to walk about a block through all the cold, wet, blowing snow...but she didn't complain or cry at all.  (I wanted to do both!)  Great memories!!

March 23: Easter Egg Hunt

We survived the Easter Egg hunt today!  It was chaotic, but I would call it organized chaos.  We had a huge turnout, with over 300 kids and over 600 total in attendance. 

It was a busy morning.  We started with a free pancake breakfast for everyone.  Our pancake breakfast crew was awesome, and they got everyone served and seated and then cleaned up with no problems at all. 

After breakfast, it was time for the fun and games!  We had bounce houses, games, crafts, snacks and egg hunts for all the kids.  I don't have any pictures of these activities, because I was in charge of the egg hunts.  And they kept me busy all morning long!  Trying to get hundreds of kids to hunt for eggs in a fun, fair and organized manner is no easy task.  But it really went well.  Daniel kept the girls with him all morning, and I think they had fun hunting eggs and doing all the other activities.

March 22: We Bought a House!

I apologize for yet another blogging break...we were busy buying a house this week.  Well, we verbally agreed to buy a house.  It won't be official until we sign the contract on Monday.  And then it won't really be official until we sell our house, as our contract is contingent on us selling our house.  And it won't officially be official until we close sometime in June.  But the process has begun!

On Tuesday, we walked through the house that I was really hoping we would like.  And we liked it!  We love the location, neighborhood (it is a half block from a neighborhood pool!) and the schools.   The layout will work well for us (with three bedrooms plus an additional room to serve as a piano room).  It has just about everything on our list except:  the garage is not attached (but it is a nice, 2 1/2 car garage), the laundry room is not in a finished part of the house (but I have hopes we can make a finished laundry room someday), and the price was just a little over our budget (but it was close!). 

We have a potential buyer for our house also.  He walked through on Monday, then he brought his wife and parents through today.  They liked it, and our realtor said things were looking good.  But then later tonight she told us they were walking through SEVEN more houses tomorrow.  So who knows what could happen??  Let's hope that they pick our house!  How amazing would it be if we could buy a house (not yet listed) and sell our house (not yet listed) all within a matter of a couple of days?!  It would be amazing, and it is probably too good to be true!

So besides all this craziness with the house (I am NOT moving again for a very, very long time!), Audrey had her Easter Egg hunt/Family night at her school last night.  It was crazy with her whole school plus all their parents and siblings.  But the girls had a good time. 

Isla was eager to jump in and do all the crafts just like the big kids were doing.  That girl is growing up!  I just loved watching her and Audrey working on their projects together.

 The highlight of the night was the Easter Egg hunt.  Though it wasn't much of a hunt, because the eggs were just scattered around the gym floor and each kid got to pick up six to put in their bags.  But my girls thought it was great!  Isla was so proud of her bag, and Audrey was so excited to see what was inside each egg.

Speaking of egg hunts, our church is hosting a big egg hunt and pancake breakfast tomorrow morning, which I have been helping to plan.  With all the house stuff going on, it has turned out to be the worst timing to also be helping with the egg hunt.  But I think everything is ready to go for the morning, and hopefully it will be a great community outreach event!

March 18: Our House

We had a potential buyer walk through our house today...and he liked it!  He is coming again on Friday to walk through with his wife and parents.  We haven't listed our house for sale yet; this buyer is someone our realtor is working with and she thought he might be interested in our house when we are ready to sell it.

So that is great...as long as we find a house we want to buy.  But we can't sell this house without finding a house we like, as I really don't want to be forced to buy a house we don't like.  We are walking through a house tomorrow night that has huge potential.  I love the location and the schools are good (our top two reasons for moving).  It looks like it fits with almost everything on my list, plus I have seen some pictures, and it is super cute.  It is not listed for sale yet, but we have talked to the owners and it sounds like they are willing to sell it to us before they list it.  All of these things are good!  I just hope that when we see this house in person it lives up to all the expectations we have for it.
Daniel worked hard for the past few days to get our house in top selling condition.  It looks really nice!  The biggest project was our kitchen.  He took down the wallpaper, repainted the walls and the ceiling and put up new baseboards.  It really does look much better.  Here is a before picture of the kitchen: 

And after!  The cabinets and countertop really do need to be replaced, but at least it looks brighter and cleaner in there now.  It was amazing how much more light appeared to be in the room once we had the horribly dark wallpaper down.

 

The buyer wanted pictures of the house to show to his wife and family, so I took some today while everything was looking so nice!  

Here is another view of the kitchen.  The appliances are by far the best thing we have going on in the kitchen.

 I posted pictures of the dining room recently; there is nothing really new in here.

And here's the living room.  I don't think I have posted pictures of the living room, since we removed the closet door that used to be in the back left.

This is the downstairs bathroom, which we gave a facelift last year.

This is the office/piano room, which could be considered a third bedroom to a new buyer.

 

Going upstairs, this is the master bedroom.

And this is the built in closet in our bedroom.  (This was a huge selling feature for me in buying this house!  For an old house, it has great storage.)

And the girls room is also upstairs.  I cleaned a lot of stuff out of here, so it is pretty empty right now!

We remodeled the upstairs bathroom shortly after moving into this house.  I had to go way back to my old xanga blog to find the before pictures.  (ugh, it was awful!)  Here is what that bathroom looks like now:

 

And finally, the basement.

 

It was too cold to go outside and take pictures today, but if we end up listing the house for sale, I will have to add those pictures then.  

It's a good house.  I hope that someone will want to buy it and love it as much as we have loved it!