Graduation

We celebrated Josh's graduation from his PhD program a little different than we thought we would.  When we bought our house, the seller was not going to budge on an April 30th closing date.  If we wanted the house, we had to close then.   We ended up closing on April 21st instead.  Because of insurance reasons, we had to be living in the house one week after our official closing date.  We packed up our apartment in Missouri and loaded our cars to leave St. Louis earlier than we originally anticipated.  We debated back and forth whether or not Josh and I would fly back to St. Louis for his graduation ceremony.  In the end, we decided just to have a party at my parents' house to celebrate this big accomplishment.  The actual ceremony wasn't a big deal to him.  I cried my eyes out.  However, I finally came to grips with it and realized that what was important to me was that we make a BIG deal out of completing this whole process.  As long as we did that, I was good to go.

A couple of days after we moved to Florida, we drove up to my Columbus to have our party.  We invited a few friends and it was super fun to have everyone together.

I prepared a little speech and it was fun to think back and remember all of the fun things we did while we lived in St. Louis.

Anna also missed her preschool graduation so we let her dress up in a cap and gown and gave a little speech about her as well.

She LOVED all of the attention!!  She walked around the room and gave everyone high fives.  She was so proud of her accomplishment and so were we.  She has done amazingly in preschool.  We can't wait to see what Kindergarten holds in store for this little princess.

Then, it was Josh's turn.  This cap and gown are from my high school graduation.  Josh felt a little silly doing this but he HAD to!  If we were missing his hooding for his PhD, then he had to fake this for the sake of my emotions.

We made sure he got high fives from everyone too.  ;-)

So proud of this man!

Our friend, Tina, let us borrow all of her FSU decorations.  She is the BIGGEST FSU fan in the world.  She had the cutest stuff.  We were really grateful to her for letting us borrow everything.  It looks like Josh graduated from FSU but really we wanted to celebrate what we're looking forward to.

Bryan and Ashley were able to come down from Atlanta.  We love living so close to everyone.  Special occasions don't have to be missed anymore because of distance.  It's awesome!

The kids were going nuts that night!  At least they are cute!

Josh got a few graduation gifts from my parents' and me, this shirt being one of them.  Garnet and Gold!!!

Here is Josh on his way to work for the first time.  He loves being able to have his own office.  Everything has been really good so far for him at work.  That makes for a happy wife.

We went up to visit him in his office a few weeks ago.  He is using this office on loan for the time being.  He should be getting his own office relatively soon.  We still loved being able to see him at school.

Here is to our new adventure!!

Our New Home!!!

 Back in March, Josh and I decided to go ahead and head down to Florida to go house shopping.  Our realtor told us to expect about a 45-60 day closing which would be just perfect timing for us.  We packed up our little family and headed down to my parents' house first.  We wanted to break up the drive and spend a couple of days with them.  Grandpa has become notorious for making cookies with his grandkids.  I made cookies with Anna not too long ago and she said, "I sure I was making cookies with Grandpa!".  I loved hearing her say that.  They really love each other.

 We headed down to Tallahassee on a Monday morning and checked in our hotel.  We made sure to get a suite so that the kids could have a separate room from us.  We love doing it that way.  Vacations are just easier when kids are in a separate room from parents.  The pool had an indoor pool and was right in the heart of where we needed to be.  We were really pleased.  After spending just a few minutes at our hotel after we checked in, we went and met our realtor who had set up some appointments for us that day.

 The first day, we saw five houses.  Most of them were really nice and we kept a list of pros and cons as we drove from house to house.  The kids did really well.  I was nervous about how they would do going to so many different houses, but they were champs.  Basically, we went down for one specific house that we just KNEW we would buy.  We had others on our list too but we knew that this one house was THE ONE.  When we went and saw it, we immediately both hated it!  It was just NOT for us....at all!  We were shocked that we both didn't like it.  You can just tell when a house is well built and when it is not.  This house was not. I couldn't buy it.

 The fourth house we had seen that day really stood out to us.  It had an awesome back yard and everything inside that we were looking for.  We really wanted our kids to have a playroom and for Josh to have an office.  This house had both of those things plus a great fenced in back yard, a pool, and a playset.  We were really excited about it.  We went to see a few more houses the next day and then we just told our realtor that we were done looking and wanted to put an offer in the house that we loved.

 Here we are at one of the houses we looked at.  This is where we decided to go ahead and make an offer on the house from the day before.  I took the kids outside while Josh and our realtor, Jennifer, took care of some paperwork.

 Signing our offer.  It felt exciting but we were also nervous.  Did we offer enough, did we offer too much?  How long will we have to wait?  Etc.  It didn't take long to find out that there were three offers put on that house the same day.  We started panicking and were so worried that we wouldn't get this house.  No other house stood out to us like this one.  We prayed a lot that night.

 To make a very LONG story short, there was A LOT of running around trying to get things in order.  We had a 3:00 deadline and it felt like we were chickens running around with our head cut off. I think it wore out Daniel.

 Josh's director took us out to dinner with another professor and his family that night.  I loved getting to visit with all of these wonderful people.  They were all so nice.  This pizza restaurant was fantastic too!  My mouth is watering just thinking about it.  That night, we found out that we GOT THE HOUSE!!  We were all screaming and hugging.  It was such a fun time for our family.  Between then and closing, Josh worked tirelessly making sure everything was taken care of and at the right price.  I don't know what I would do without him!

 Here we are a little over a month later signing our mortgage.  We closed on our house while we were still in St. Louis so we had to go to the bank to get everything notarized there.

 Signing our life away.  It was so fun!

 It all felt like we were in a dream, just waiting for someone to pinch us and wake up.  We could not WAIT to get into our own home.

 I know I say this a lot but we really do have the sweetest friends ever.  We had SO many people come to help us load our truck.  It was a REALLY stressful hour though.  We got some pizza for dinner and then headed over to get our truck set up.  We decided to go to the church, which was right next door, and leave our trailer hitch there with our Camry.  Josh and I drove the kids over.  Andrew was super afraid to ride in the truck because it was SO far off the ground.  As we were detaching the hitch, it BROKE!!!!!!....fifteen minutes before everyone was supposed to get there to pack our truck.  The trailer was still attached to the truck so we didn't know what to do because we had to get it off.  Otherwise, we couldn't take out the ramp to load everything inside the truck.
I took the kids and ran through "the forest" to our apartment.  I was going to get help from our next door neighbor.  It takes about one minute to walk from the church to our apartment.  Well, Andrew and I were shoe-less.  So, as we were walking through the forest, I was looking down at my feet with Daniel on my hip, to make sure I didn't trip or step on anything that would hurt.  When I looked up, Andrew was gone!  I mean....gone.  He was no where to be found.  I freaked out and sent Anna up to go get help.  She knew her way and I set out to find Andrew.  I called his name for SEVERAL minutes and never got an answer.  I finally went back to my apartment and knocked on our neighbors' door.  My sweet friend, Cynthia, took Daniel from me and I took off to find Andrew.  Still, after several minutes, nothing.  After a good ten minutes, I heard someone saying, "I've got Andrew.  He's up here with me."  My heart suddenly felt lighter.  As soon as I saw him, we both collapsed together in a hug and just sat and cried together.  Andrew tends to get lost every now and then but this time it felt especially scary.  I thought he wasn't responding because he slipped and was unconscious somewhere.
As we sat there hugging, all of the guys started showing up to help load the truck.  It then hit me that the trailer was still broken and we had a bunch of guys to help and no truck.  After a minute or two, I got word that Josh and our neighbor, Tim were able to get the hitch off and the truck was on it's way.  With the stress of our hitch breaking, losing Andrew, and being completely emotionally and physically exhausted, I broke out into an ugly cry.  I couldn't hold it in any more.  I just cried and cried.  Sweet Cynthia was so good to me and took all of my kids into her basement and then consoled me just as I needed her to.  Cynthia is a heaven sent friend.  Those guys who were helping probably thought I was nuts.  They didn't know what was going on, just that I was sobbing like a little baby.  I got my composure again and the rest of the move was great.

 Oh man, sweetest people ever born!!

 We had a TON of help.  What a blessing!

 Josh left super early in the morning with the truck by himself.  My mom was flying in that night and was going to help me drive our van with the kids.  I was glad that we didn't leave as early as Josh because I needed to spend a little more time with my girls before telling them goodbye for one last time.  We went to see Josh off...and to get my shoes.  I forgot to leave any shoes out for myself and of course they were packed in the very front of the truck.  Awesome!

 There he goes!  He was so excited to make a trip across the country without having to stop every hour for potty breaks, not to mention the lack of crying that he would be listening to.  Yea...and he totally rubbed it in!  ;-)

My mom's flight got in about 6:15 that night.  I went to the office to drop off my keys and then waved goodbye to our apartment for one last time.  I wasn't expecting to feel so emotional about it all, but I totally did.  It really felt like this was IT.  This life that we've known for five years, where we've had and grown our kids, learned a billion life lessons, loved some of the most wonderful people in the world....it all was over.  There was no going back.  We would never be students again.  We would never live here again.  Sadly, we would never see some of these people again.  It was emotional.  I cried on the way to the airport.  The whole past week was so exhausting and it all came out on my way out of town.

We picked up my mom and started our 12 hour trek to Florida.  The kids were SO excited to see her.  They sure do love their Granny.  Our goal was to make it five hours to Nashville, spend the night, and leave early the next morning.  My mom and I hadn't had a lot of opportunity to talk the past several weeks and so we just started talking and talking and talking and talking.  We ended up driving all through the night and talked probably 11.5 hours out of the 12 hour drive.  It was really fun and AWESOME because the kids slept almost the whole time.  I still can't believe that we did it because neither of us are night owls.  We get tired really early and the car definitely makes BOTH of us sleepy.  I was SO happy that we did it this way though because Daniel hates the car with all his heart.  He just screams.

We couldn't wait to knock on the front door of our house and see Josh's expression.  He did not disappoint.  He just stood there with his jaw dropped and couldn't say a word for several minutes.  He was stunned that we had driven through the night.  He knows both of us well and that's what made it even more unbelievable.  I loved being there early and seeing our house.  The kids were all so excited.  My mom was the perfect driving buddy.  She was so fun to talk to and ridiculously helpful.  Driving up to our house for the first time was really exciting.  This was OUR home.  It was ours!  We owned it!  We just beamed all day.

 People from our ward came to help us move in.  They were all SO nice and super helpful.  They got the whole truck unloaded in 30 minutes!!  We couldn't believe it!  I was especially grateful because I can't lift anything since I'm pregnant.  We also met a lot of our neighbors.  Everyone here is SO nice.  We are just in heaven living here.

 Here we are with our first family picture in front of our house.  Love it!