Upstairs Before Tour!

This picture belongs in the downstairs post, I just forgot it:)
I am so excited to have a laundry room and not a laundry hallway!

And if you turn around you will head down another part of the hallway that leads to the bathroom, linen closet, upstairs office, and Katelyn's room. We didn't get a picture of Katelyn's room because one of my kids locked the door and we couldn't get it unlocked. (The real estate agent had to call a locksmith!)

Love this office. It has tons of book shelves. The entire wall on the right is bookshelves. The window seat is a storage bench. And the doors are french doors like the piano room's doors.

I love this linen closet because right now I have a tiny linen cupboard that doesn't hold half of my blankets. I'm sure this will do much better!

Sooo in love with this bathtub. Baths are one of my favorite things. Although I think the water bill is probably going to go up:)

Huge master closet. How long before it gets filled?

This is the boy room, it is 2 bedrooms turned into one. The paint color is very interesting...

Downstairs Before Tour

The carpet is so nasty. We are replacing all of it.

We're not totally sure what to do with this space. We are thinking we might make it into a huge kitchen. More cupboards along the walls. We'll see.

Can't stand the kitchen counter, I've got issues with that kind of tile. The last two houses we have lived in have it and it was just so nasty looking. This counter is actually in better condition than the one we have in our rental now. So it will stay for probably another year or so. We also want to put an island in.

Really nice sized room. We're thinking tv room!

10k

These pictures are all out of order, I always forget to upload them in backwards order. This is me at the end, they handed me a bottle of water. I felt really good at the end, like maybe I could have kept running, gasp. I wasn't out of breath at all.

Running down the last hill to the finish line. And this hill is not even close to as steep as some of the other hills! I was expecting to finish somewhere around 1 hour 20 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes. But as I ran down the hill, I saw the clock and it said 1 hour 58 minutes! Aaack. Way slower than I'd hoped for. I crossed the finish line at 2 hours.

I fell twice. One time I caught myself and just had muddy hands, the second time I fell flat on my booty as the 1st place half marathon runner lapped me and ran past me! Kind of sad to be lapped. But hey, I didn't come in last place, so there you go. Good enough for me! There were times it was so muddy I kind of surfed down some of the hills.

I was pretty happy to be done.

My white shoes, not so white. My white socks, definitely not even close to being white. Pretty sure they'll never look white again. I had mud all up the side of my legs where I fell, but you can't really see it in this picture.

I arrived at Lynch canyon around 7:30 a.m. yesterday, it was pouring rain, and muddy, and I told Joel, I got my number and my t-shirt, maybe we can just go home and forget this race! But I got up the courage and went for it. I had on a shirt, a sweatshirt, and a windbreaker. I thought the windbreaker would be a little better keeping me somewhat dry underneath, fat chance. We walked down a hill to the starting line. I started off with my dad, but was very quickly shoveled backward and away from him. I thought about running fast to catch up, but then decided that I wanted to take it slow. So glad I did. I had no idea exactly how many hills we would be running up, honestly I didn't even think we'd be running up hills, just kind of assumed we'd be running around them! Wow, was I wrong, we ran straight up at least 4-5 hills. And I'm talking hills, not mounds. It was muddy and slippery, so a lot of the time I was running off the trail in tall grass so I could get some traction. But that made my shoes even worse because I had sloshy water in my shoes.

I ran alone pretty much the entire time. I passed some people, and others (a lot of others) passed me. There were times when I looked behind me and there was nobody in sight, and I looked in front of me and there was no one in sight. Sometimes I wondered if I was even on the right trail! It rained the ENTIRE time, not even a 5 minute break. The rain hurt my face a lot of the time too. And sometimes the wind got so intense it took everything I had to not fall over. My windbreaker didn't seem to help much because the wind made it look like I was a balloon about to fly away!

But despite all of the challenges of this race, I am so glad I did it. I trained for a couple of months, and followed through. Something that I have an extremely hard time doing when it comes to exercising. And I had so much fun that I thought I might even keep running and do another race, maybe even a half marathon. But my ankle is so stinking sore, and probably will be for 2 weeks, that I realized running is just too hard on my already not great joints. So now I'm in the market for a new exercise program, once again.

Updates

We got our house! Now start all the inspections and appraisal! Hoping we don't get caught up on more stuff and we can be in before July!!
Also, I'm off to run my very first running race of any kind. I'm running a 10k trail run. I've been training all year, and I really hate running. I mean really. And to top if off I have a sore throat, and it's raining! I think that's what I'm most upset about, my nice shoes are going to go from white to brown:( But I'm doing this. And then I can stop running! :) I'll be taking it slow, and I have some new fun songs on my iPod. And off we go!

New House

We are trying to buy a new house. Trying, being the operative word. We've put offers on several houses, with no luck. We finally found a house we love, it's the perfect size, perfect layout, and perfect price, and not just a house we'll eventually grow out of and have to upgrade, but a house that we can stay in until our children are grown, and even longer depending where life takes us. Our offer was accepted by the seller March 8th, but it's a short sale, so it has to go through the banks that the sellers owe a bunch of money to. We got approval from the bank on the 1st mortgage, and we finally got approval from the same bank that holds their 2nd mortgage. But there was a hiccup because the 2nd mortgage didn't release the seller from liability, and so we wait some more while they negotiate a deal. Things are still looking up and we will more than likely get the house, but it's really annoying to sit here waiting, hoping that every phone call is our real estate agent telling us yes, we got the house, or no, we didn't. Either way, I'd like to know! Here is a link to our maybe future house. There is work to do to it, but it's all cosmetic.

Okay, so the link doesn't work anymore because it was taken off of the listing page because it's all ours! I will put up pictures of before and after. We've got some work to do before we can move in, but we are so dang excited! Can't wait for closing, which if all goes well with the appraisal should be the 20th of June!

Sleeping

My children are starting to get older, and this is becoming more and more evident in many ways, but I am especially starting to notice it because of how much they sleep! Especially little miss Katelyn. It used to be that my children would sneak downstairs to watch cartoons while I was asleep, or they would come into my room to wake me up (at 7 am). But now it's 8:47 am and they are ALL still sleeping and I have been up for almost 2 hours with all this time to myself. It's very interesting... I've checked my email, facebook, and blogs, read 3 articles from the recent General Conference talks, and have time to sit and do a little blogging myself. And to make things even better my sweet husband has been getting up before he goes to work every day and cleans the kitchen for me! It's so sweet that that little act of kindness has improved my days exponentially. I cook more, I play with the kids more, I teach the kids more, I relax more! I would have to say that life is really great!

Train bridge

Aunt Kristin came to town and our mom took us out to a really yummy lunch at Putah Creek Cafe (it was on the Food Network!) and right down the street from our delicious lunch was on old railroad bridge that had been turned into a fun walkway. Benjamin is obsessed with trains and we could not pass up playing on the bridge.