A Miracle

It is 4 in the morning and I should be sleeping but I wanted to take just a min to give a little update. It has been quite the week!! I think since last Friday we have gone non-stop from early morning to 2 or 3 am every day and I am worn thin. We found a house! It has been a whirl wind event because our plan was to not even look at houses until ours was on the market. Well here we are with a contract on a house and ours just went up for sale yesterday......are we crazy? Yes, but it was a situation we just couldn't change.

Here is the story, 2 years ago our dream home was built. We found it, looked through it and loved it but we couldn't afford it. It met all the criteria that we had set for a house that we would want to raise our family in. It had a walkout basement (a rarity in Oklahoma) with lots of kid play space, It backed up to a pond (we currently have a pond 40 ft from our back door that the girls fish, catch frogs and play in all summer) a great kitchen, and was in a great neighborhood. So we watched it.......I have no idea why but we watched it. Some nice family purchased it, began living their life in it and every few months we would drive by it and just look. Chris would often come home from work and say "I went by the house today" I knew exactly what house he meant and I would think "why do we do this?"



Well, last week "Our house" went into foreclosure (meaning the house we love). Oklahoma has not been hit in this whole housing mess so a foreclosure here is very rare. Chris called the day it went into foreclosure and started checking into how low they would go! They only opened it up for bids for 4 days. We decided to bid, so low it was laughable, but Chris said "What the heck, who knows". Well we put our bid in against 2 real estate investment firms who were offering cash and we forgot about it.....really we did. We knew that our offer was so far below acceptable that no one in their right mind would accept it so we put the offer in and the next day moved on never thinking for a minute they would accept. Well, here we are a week later with a contract on the home that has never left our minds for 2 and 1/2 years. I am still shell shocked because I feel as though we robbed the bank. We have had many prayers of thanks over what is really a miracle!!

Yesterday Ava came in to the living room and said Mom, you always pray for a long time. "I said we have so many blessings right now I have lots to say to Heavenly Father" Me too Mom, I am going to pray for a long time. She stayed in this position forever!!! (Notice her new purse that never leaves her side, even in prayer!)

So after signing contracts on Sunday we had 4 days to get our house ready to go on the market and after living here for 9 years it has been a huge job. We have painted every base board cleaned every corner, cleaned every window and basically emptied and staged the house. I can pretty much guarantee that no one has a cleaner house than us right now!! I looked like a homeless woman all week as hair and makeup and clean clothes were never an option.

We are tired and happy and full of faith and thanks!!

These pictures were taken at 2am....Chris is out washing the windows while I was planting flowers....yes I was planting flowers in the middle of the night.

As I went to go to bed last night I looked at my hands and they say it all.....paint, caulk and dirt caked in under every nail (most of them broken).