The kids scored big on 90% off Halloween costumes for their dress up bin.
They still wear them at the least weekly.
We blessed little Avery one Sunday morning
Avery was blessed in the same dress as Ella.
We blessed her in our ward and then had family at our house for sandwiches/hoagies, chips, and drinks.
We through the kids a combined birthday part in between their birthdays, and it was so much fun!
They were obsessed with the movie The Greatest Showman at the time, so we went with a circus theme. Which also happened to be very fitting since we felt like we were running our own circus.
We reserved the gym at the church, so we had plenty of room for fun.
We had some simple carnival games as entertainment - ring toss, knock the cans down, corn hole, and bowling
There was a little photo booth and props for pictures.
And I think everyone's favorite part was the bounce house we rented for the day.
It was so much fun for both the kids and the adults.
Blurry but the look or joy in her eyes
I have no idea why I took this picture at the time, but man grocery shopping with 3 kids (1 in a car seat) is dang hard.
And then things got real crazy.
We saw a house online that we really liked online and the next thing we knew we were making an appointment with the realtor to go see it. We had no plans of selling our house then or anytime soon, but we just wanted to look at the house. Well, we looked and we really liked it, but it was a lot of square footage that all needed at least a little bit or updating and the location wasn't 100% where we wanted to be. Taylor found another house not too far away that happened to be vacant, so we quickly went and looked at it. And the rest is basically history as they say. We LOVED the location, the neighborhood, and overall the house. We put an offer on the house the next day and had ours ready to photograph in less than 24 hours.
It was listed Monday morning and by 2 PM that day we had multiple showings scheduled.
It was a chaotic week filled with showings, 1 too low offer, and eventually a small bidding war with an all cash offer as the winner.
We ended up having to fix a few small things after the inspection (a light fixture, securing the bathroom vanity, smoke alarms, the fireplace, and some others small things), but overall the sale of our first house went smoothly.
Moving was a little complicated, but somehow we made it through.
We had to have everything out of our stokes house when we signed the papers, BUT we couldn't move anything into our new house until we signed the papers on it which had to be after the sale of our old house. They also tried telling us that we couldn't sleep in our old house the night before because the final walkthrough would already be done, but thankfully we were able to say heck no that doesn't work to that and stay in the house until the day we signed.
We got really lucky and were able to move our things into the garage of the new house before signing, so that saved us from most of the stress of having no place to put alllllll of our belongings.
Taylor and I moved 3 or so trailer loads of things into the garage ourselves in the days before we signed and then, thankfully, had help from his family moving everything into the house. Actually, Taylor and I pretty much moved out of our old house all by ourselves while always dealing with and taking care of our 3 kids under 4 besides getting help with just a few heavy things, so it was extra nice to not have to move it in on our own.
The week we listed our house also happened to be the week of Thanksgiving, and we were hosting.
It definitely added a smidge of extra chaos into our week, but overall it was a great time and fun to host our first and last Thanksgiving in that house.
