Three Greats

I gotta tell you that I was pretty darn proud of myself today. I made a pair of shoes for Ethan today. From scratch. As in, I traced his feet and made my own pattern. And they fit him beautifully. But I forgot to take pictures. And I discovered after he wore them a while that I need to put some elastic or something on the heels because they do slip off. But still! I thought it was pretty awesome.

He got kind of bored while I was working on them, so I set him up to draw. I bought this tray at DI with the intent of making it all pretty so I could use it next time I have a baby or whenever someone is sick, but I gave up on it after and ENTIRE bottle of spray paint didn't completely cover up the ugly. So now Ethan draws on it. Literally. He draws on paper too, though. It works out great.

Another great thing is that his giant owie from Sunday is healing beautifully. Hooray! It doesn't seem to bother him at all now. He says "owie" any time he sees it in the mirror or when I'm putting essential oils or salve on it. Otherwise he doesn't seem to notice it, and he even gets a little rough with his face when he's being silly sometimes.

The third great thing about today is that I think we found a realtor we feel comfortable working with. Yup, we are officially house hunting. We've been semi-hunting for quite a while now, but our search recently got kicked into high gear. I mentioned in this post that we had a disappointment. Well, it was a really big disappointment, and I struggled with it a lot. . . I guess I should back up a bit.

As I said, we've been semi-hunting for quite a while, which mostly consisted of me combing through online listings and very occasionally going to see a house. Well, I showed Terral a listing with the price recently reduced, and we decided to go take a gander. So we contacted the listing agent and set up an appointment. It was definitely not a cookie-cutter home. It was a little quirky, but we both liked it. We were surprised by how much. As we walked through, we weren't just trying to see if we could maybe make it work—we could both easily imagine us living there. It had so many things on our wish list it's not even funny. It just felt right. For the first time, we were seriously considering making an offer.

The next morning, I got on the phone with our lender. Long story short, we decided we needed to get financed with someone else. So we did. And when I called the agent to say we would have our approval letter in the morning and we'd like to make an offer then, he told me that the bank had just accepted an offer less than an hour before.

It may sound silly, folks, but this has seriously been a trial of my faith. Owning a home (and land!) has been such a huge dream of mine for so long, and we've really tried to be prayerful and prepared. It's not just that the house had so many items on our wish list (it did need a lot of work too, btw), it's that it felt so right. To both of us. I'm just not sure what to think of that. I'm still kind of hoping that the other deal will fall through and we'll get a chance at it, but whatever happens, my mantra has become "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." Proverbs 3:5

Terral was disappointed too, but not to the extent that I was. He says that whatever the outcome, he feels like it wasn't an accident that we saw the home and felt the way we did. Maybe we just needed a kick start to get new financing and really start looking. We just need to believe that whatever the Lord has in mind for us, we will love.