Quick Update

**Update, 12/5/08, 8 p.m.**
We just found out that the appraisal for the Bentonville house came back slightly above the sale price, so there is no issue with the mortgage! We are now waiting on the roofer's report on any potential repairs (hopefully minor) and are moving towards closing on that house.


**Update, 12/10/08, 2 p.m.
The roofing report on the Bentonville house showed no significant damage and no repairing needed. Everything on both houses is going smoothly; we are ready to close on the Cabot house with the title company already finished with their end.

Just a quick update --

Everything is pretty much done to close on the Cabot house on time. We've finished the appraisal, inspection, termite clearance letter, survey, title work, etc. Since the buyer's are paying cash, their funds have been verified, and there is no lender to deal with. It's been a bit of a headache this week, as our appraisal on the Cabot house came in under the sale price we'd agreed to. That was quite a shock, as we thought we had priced low. However, only two homes in our neighborhood have sold in the past year to use as comps since we live in a small neighborhood with relatively low turnover. Those two sales were priced low and did not have the upgrades my home has, but they were all the appraiser had to compare for sales prices. We came to a compromise with the buyers since they didn't have to satisfy a lender, and we met in the middle for a new sales price (they came up from the appraisal, and we came down from the original sale price). The inspection went well, and the buyers are not making us fix anything. We are on schedule to close on December 22 and vacate by December 29.

The Bentonville house was inspected this week, with some damaged shingles as the only issue. The sellers got a roofer out there yesterday, and we are awaiting his report today. It appears to be minor damage, and all the other inspection items were small. The main things we are waiting for is the appraisal! Since our Cabot house appraisal was low, we are concerned about the Bentonville appraisal. That house is in a similar situation to our Cabot home, in that there aren't any good comps from 2008 sales in that neighborhood for the appraiser to use. Only five homes in that neighborhood sold in 2008, and all of them were significantly smaller than the one we are buying which can skew the comp figures in an appraisal. We expect to get the report today or Monday, and we are praying it appraises close to the sale price, so we don't have to walk away from the property, as our mortgage is tied to the appraisal value. If the appraisal is low, we are going to ask the seller to lower the selling price to the appraisal value and see what happens! If this house falls through, we will live in temporary housing in Bentonville for 2-4 weeks while we try to close on another property (which we would have to locate!).

Keep praying! It's a crazy, wild ride with real estate in this market!

A "Must Read" Christmas Favorite

If you haven't read the short book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson, then you need to do so this holiday season!

This short, seven chapter book is written at about a 3rd grade reading level and is readily available in the children's section of all bookstores and libraries. It is best read out loud, so everyone can enjoy the humor and dialogue!

We traditionally read this book to the boys sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas over a one week period, with one chapter per night at bedtime. We just finished it last night.

Here's a short synopsis:

"The Herdman kids lie, and steal, and smoke cigars (even the girls). They also talk dirty, cuss their teachers, and take the name of the Lord in vain. The last place anyone expects to see them is in church.

So no one is prepared when the Herdmans storm Sunday school and take over the annual Christmas pageant. Before anyone can stop them, they're plotting revenge on Herod, frightening the angels, and burping the baby Jesus. They've got the whole town up in arms.

How the Herdmans turn a series of disasters into what everyone agrees is the best Christmas pageant ever is a hilarious, touching, and unforgettable tale from a beloved storyteller."

It is family-appropriate, and it gives lots of opportunities for good discussions on sharing the gospel, forgiveness, redemption, and acceptance of others who are different.

If you choose to take on the challenge to read this book with your kids over this holiday season, post and share how it went!

School Days

I think the only thing that concerns me about our impending move to Bentonville, AR, is transitioning Owen to a new school during the middle of the year. I remember moving around his age, and then again after fourth grade. It wasn't fun to be the "new kid" for the first few months. Stuart bought the boys a Wii to soften the blow of the move, and we will give it to them once we get into the new house. I am also praying that God will provide Owen with some great friends during the first few days of school.

I remember taking him to kindergarten two years ago, and he was so brave. His smile was the nervous kind, and I could see his chin quiver a few times, but he didn't cry. Luckily, when we picked him up, he had had "the best day ever" and didn't even want me to walk him to his classroom after the second day. Now, I have to take him to a new school during second grade, and I think it's going to be harder than leaving him at kindergarten. At least when he started kindergarten, I knew all about the teacher he had from my other friends whose children also attended the same school. Also, all the kindergarteners were having their "first day" together, so it didn't seem strange to be nervous or shed some tears when your mother left.

Now, I am navigating the line between wanting to shelter him and provide security, yet not hover or embarrass him. He has already said he doesn't want me to walk him to his classroom . . . at all. "Mom, it's second grade!" he told me emphatically. I know he'll be brave, yet I hope the kids can include him. I will worry about him sitting at lunch and recess all alone with no one talking to him.

I'm nervous because I don't know anyone at his school either. When he started kindergarten, I had already toured the facilities, taken him to the playground, and met the principal and office staff before the first day of school (yes, I'm one of "those" parents!). Now, I'm sort of nervous too! I don't know the directions for picking up and dropping off in the car lanes. What if I hold up all the traffic? What if it takes me a lot longer to go through the carpool lane, and Owen thinks I've forgotten him? What if I get lost trying to find my way back to the school from our new house (if you know me, then you know that is a real possibility, as I'm "directionally impaired").

The other issue that I'm praying about is which school Owen will actually get to attend. Bentonville (and Rogers, too) have a problem with their schools being full. Even for kindergarten, there is a "lottery" to decide who gets to go to the nearby school and who has to go to alternate schools! We began to hear from our realtor that Owen might not get to attend the public school he is zoned for because it is full. I've never heard of this before! I always assumed that if you live in the neighborhood for a particular school, then you get to go there. However, when I talked to the people at the Bentonville public schools administration office, they informed me that because of the extreme growth in their county, only TWO out of eight elementary schools have any openings right now in second grade. Neither school with openings is near us! So, we are expecting Owen to have to go to an "overflow" school and be put on the waiting list (yes, a waiting list for public school!) at his zoned school. When he gets a spot, he will transfer over. I'm not thrilled with this option because of the extra driving to transport him to a school on the other side of town, plus the fact that he will have to be the "new kid" all over again and make new friends for third grade.

Please pray for the school situation! I know the Bentonville schools are top ranked, and I've checked all the test scores, and Bentonville's schools are always listed in the top ten districts for Arkansas on all the lists I've found. Bentonville High School was a national Blue Ribbon School for 2007 which is an honor only given to the top 33 schools in the nation. I am amazed at their curriculum and feel Owen will love it. I just want him to get into our neighborhood school quickly and be accepted easily by his classmates. Hopefully, he'll come home and say that it was the "best day ever" again!

Real Estate Rollercoaster Ride

After about 50 plus home tours and 4 written contracts, we finally have a house in Bentonville! When we went back to Bentonville this past weekend, we narrowed down our search to our top three houses. Unfortunately, two of those three houses went under contract during the weekend while we were there! Our realtor was shocked that two houses sold within hours of each other when the market had been so slow there recently.

We made an offer on the only house left that we really liked (there weren't many houses in our price range with the size we were desiring), but we encountered some "hard ball" negotiating from their forceful agent. We wrote multiple offers and counter offers back and forth over price for four, long days! We finally walked away from the house on Tuesday after they returned the same counter offer back to us twice without any drop in price. However, after we walked way, the seller suddenly became much more willing to negotiate! They called our agent with a lower price the next day to see if we would reconsider. Thankfully (no pun intended!), we signed a contract this morning, right in time for the Thanksgiving holiday! The best part is that we got the house for the exact price that we had been praying for! God continues to lead so clearly!

We close on our house in Cabot on December 22, and we close on the Bentonville house on December 23. We plan to get the Cabot house completely packed the weekend after Christmas and have the movers load the truck on Monday, December 29. We will unload in Bentonville on Wednesday, December 31, after we take possession on December 30.

Please pray for us throughout the rest of the move. There are still inspections and appraisals that must be done, and we pray that everything goes smoothly through the two closings. We're very excited about the new house and think it will be a good fit for our family. Stuart moves to Bentonville this weekend to start his new job on Monday, December 1, and he'll be living in temporary housing for the month of December. Please pray for him as he is there for a few weeks by himself, and pray for me as I deal with the kids alone!

God is Our Realtor

Seventeen days ago we listed our Cabot house for sale. The "FSBO" signs went up in the yard with the handy-dandy info tube. I typed up neat flyers that described the property. We placed two more signs on nearby streets, paid for a flat fee MLS listing, set up a website at owners.com, and placed an ad in the local paper.

Suddenly, the house that we had lovingly built and designed was on the market. It was no longer "home" but a showcase for potential buyers. Most traces of our personal effects were erased. Down went all the tabletop picture frames, the fridge was cleared of all the school papers, and the kitchen counters were vacant.

Not too many years ago, we stood on the foundation of this house and looked at the bright, blue sky above our heads through the open beams. Owen was just two years old and thought that a construction site was the greatest play area! Now, five years later, we have added two more children to our family. We brought Hudson and Arden home from the hospital to this house where we had hand-picked every wall switchplate, carpet swatch, paint color, and faucet.

There is some reflection as we prepare to leave these walls; however, God has given us an amazing peace about our upcoming move, and He has worked His hand in utterly miraculous ways to show us that this is the way we should go. Who can doubt the hand of God when you can almost see it?

As we packed away our personal effects on October 31, we embarked on a whirlwind 17 days of fanatical house cleaning and 7 house showings. Within these 17 days, we ended up with a total of 3 offers from buyers to purchase our house. The first one fell through due to financing, and just yesterday, we received two more offers that were both very good. We signed with the offer that also allowed us the longest time to remain in the home, in order to give us time to locate a new home in Bentonville. We plan to close on the Cabot house on December 22 and vacate by December 29.

The amount of the offer we accepted was the exact number we had been praying for. The couple adore the house and "just love" my decorating style and color choices! I feel that we are passing down this home to a wonderful couple who will appreciate the house and love it as much as we do. This couple is also planning to pay cash for the house, so we anticipate few, if any, glitches to get to closing.

When we listed our house for sale, we were aware that the housing market was in a slump. There were over 60 houses on the local market in our price bracket, and only 2-3 per month were selling. We were listing the house in November, a typically slow time of year to sell. We were listing by owner which had never worked in our neighborhood before. Yet, we sold our house in 17 days.

If you'd like to use our realtor, feel free to contact Him. He's available day or night, from any location. His name is God, and He can work miracles.

Driving to My New Home

We loaded up Hudson and Owen and traveled to Bentonville on Saturday through Monday. We left Arden with grandparents since we didn't think we could get as much accomplished with her bottles, naps, and diaper changes!

I had never been to Bentonville/Rogers before, so it was very exciting to know that we were driving to my new home! I honestly have no fears or nervousness about the move; God has so thoroughly prepared our hearts for a move that we knew it was inevitable. He has changed many of our circumstances here in Cabot in order to make it easier to leave. We view this an adventure and look forward to all the benefits it will offer our family.

My first impression of Bentonville was . . . . wow! They have amenities and shopping . . . lots and lots of it! Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, Gymboree, Children's Place, Harold's, Dillards, Gap, Old Navy, Target, J. Jill, Starbucks, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and the list goes on and on. All of this within ten to fifteen minutes from my new neighborhood!

We drove by the new elementary campus that is most likely the school the boys will attend. It has an amazing facility, and the boys seemed excited to play on their playground. They offer weekly Spanish classes as well as some neat electives like lacrosse, golf, drama, and pottery (in grades K-4!!).

I checked out the Bentonville Public Library website, and they have (get this!) . . . a library cafe where you can order sandwich "wraps," coffee, etc, and real, working fireplaces in the library sitting areas! That sounds pretty amazing! They offer a lot of neat programs for kids and have a fantastic, two year old facility. This weekend, for example, they are having an extravaganza in conjunction with the Children's Museum of Northwest Arkansas and putting on a dinosaur-themed party (don't tell Hudson, or he'll be so upset he missed it!).

Also, I am excited that they have a lot of great family amenities like neighborhood pools/parks, an ice skating rink, The Little Gym, Gymboree Play and Music, Pump It Up, paint your own pottery studio, and lots of other fun things to do with preschoolers. I enjoyed all of those things in West Little Rock when Owen was a toddler, and I am looking forward to participating again with Arden. The area is in the beautiful Ozark mountains with lots of hills; it is urban yet not too crowded. There are still cows and fields interspersed between businesses.

We met a great realtor who spent most of Saturday and Sunday afternoon with us. We got a feel for the neighborhoods that are the best fit for us, and we looked inside almost 20 houses. We have a short list of ones that we really like. We attended Grace Point Church on Sunday morning, and it was really great. We enjoyed the contemporary music, and the kids like the children's programs.

I could picture myself moving right into one of the empty houses we toured, and it already felt familiar. The boys enjoyed the hotel, and we had fun swimming in the indoor pool and sitting in the jacuzzi each night. They served a delicious hot breakfast every morning (much better than what they get at our house!), and that was a treat. We splurged and had a great steak dinner at Texas Land and Cattle restaurant which brought back a lot of memories since the last time I ate there was after my dad's memorial service in San Antonio, TX.

It was a great trip, and we came back tired but excited. Stuart got to go into his new office and meet the staff, and the local newspaper for Northwest Arkansas ran a press release on Saturday to announce Stuart being hired for the chief deputy prosecutor position (our realtor even gave us the clipping!). You can read the article at http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2008/11/07/news/110808bznumbers.txt

Now, we just have to sell the Cabot house in order to make the move permanent. Please continue to pray for a quick sale!

A Week of My Life

Saturday, October 25 . . . .

Oh, this is so exciting. Stuart got a new job. But, there's so much to do! I have a Sunday school party tonight, and then on Sunday, I have to take Owen to see the new Junie B. Jones play in Little Rock at the Arkansas Children's Theater.

Here we are driving back from the play, and I'm not feeling very well. Why am I feeling dizzy and sick? Oh, this is bad. Stuart, I think I am going to throw up. Okay, I was right. I think I need to lay down . . . by the toilet. A few hours later, I think I need some meds. Oh, I don't feel well.

"Can you help me?" says Stuart. Why? I'm throwing up right now, I reply (in a not-so-nice voice). "Hudson just threw up all over his bed!" I stumble to clean up his mess, while I'm still a mess, and I stagger around in a drug-induced state brought on by phenergan.

The next day, Hudson feels better, but Stuart comes home from work with the stomach flu. I'm not nice enough to help him very much, but I do all the childcare by myself, so he can sleep. Quiet kids. Your father is sick! Yes, I think he got the throw up. I don't know where it comes from. No, it doesn't crawl in your mouth when you sleep.

Finally, maybe a good day to work on the 57 essays that I haven't gotten to yet. I think I've done 18 loads of laundry! Oh, I still have to fill out the 14 page form for the MLS listing for the house, and I have to take digital pictures of every room and make them look like my home is out of Pottery Barn catalog while disguising the toys, exersaucer, and vomit-protection towels all over the floor. I think I'll type a flyer to put in the info-tube. Oh no, Owen are you okay. Are you getting sick too? Yep.

After two days with Owen home from school, I'm only 1/3 into the stack of essays that are supposed to be returned in the next 24 hours. I jot off a sad-but-true email to my class, stating that I will be delayed in returning their magnificent essays. I'm back to emptying out the vomit bucket (for the tenth time).

Ah, finally it's Friday. Owen returns to school, and his broken capillaries from projectile vomiting don't look too bad. I think I can finally get some more grading done today. Oh, I forgot. It's Halloween, and I promised Hudson I would go to his "Fantasy Ball" at his pre-K, then I have to get all the kids ready and dressed as a ladybug, pirate, and army man to attend the church festival. So much for grading again!

It's Saturday, and we get to visit with Lewie Clark as he made a visit while he was in town from Chicago (was I coherent, Lewie?). After our nice break with Lewie, I found my handy-dandy "to do" list, and I worked Stuart to death as we tried to get the house ready to show. Mulch, mow, edge; we need more mulch. The "for sale" sign went out, and we tried to stuff all the "clutter" and extra belongings into our attic to achieve a "spacious and magazine-ish" feel. I don't know if it worked, and our attic flooring might collapse from the weight of it all.

Ah, another Sunday. Oh no, I've got a baby shower, and I don't know where I put the gift, and I forgot to iron the tablecloths for it. Stuart, watch the kids. Gotta run.

Finally, I sit down to eat a relaxing dinner (of 4 day old spaghetti and Halloween candy). The phone rings. What? Twenty minutes? They want to see the house? Kids, start cleaning! Pick up your toys! Stuart, I knew we needed to clean your closet . . . .