Blessed is an understatement

First off, I'll start off by saying I am SOOOOooo sorry blogger world.   I have failed you.

I keep planning some awesome blogs, but then realizing I don't have the time I want to spend on them and postpone it for when I have time.   As we all know that time just never seems to come does it?? I finally just decided to write this post to fill you guys in a little bit.  And hopefully I can catch you up more later with some better quality posts :)

I can't believe July was my last post!  GOSH and I can't believe today is the first day of October!!! Welcome Fall!

So what's been going on in the past few months that has kept me so busy??    I'm glad you asked.  
We bought our first home! And moved in.

If you asked me on my last post if I was even thinking about buying a house and moving in the next month, I would have laughed in your face.  Not even kidding ha...

SO how did it come about?

Back in July we had just announced we planned to start he adoption process.  By the way, thank you guys sooooo much for all your tremendous encouragement and support through that! It means a ton!! I know we will definitely be needing it these next few years throughout the process.

Just after we announced, about within a week.  We knew one of the first things we will face in the process is a home study.   During that process they like you to be in a steady place, and will come out for at least one visit in the home you plan to bring your child into for obvious reasons.   This place isn't supposed to change, or you have to redo that part of the home study, which also costs more money from what I hear.    Well, we have been renting in the past from some family friends and it was an amazing opportunity for us which we enjoyed tremendously.   However, once we started thinking about the fact we would need to be in the same place possibly 3-5 years, and finding that someone might be wanting to buy or do something with the house we were renting in that long stretch of time, we begin to think of other options.  It was a little discouraging at first, right at the start of when we wanted to be starting the adoption and focusing all our finances towards that and that plan.  God continued to give us peace about it, and the timing, and that things would work in his perfect plan (Definitely not ours).   Trust! that is God's theme for my lessons these days.  We checked into rentals, but actually found it might be best financially to go ahead and buy.  

We looked previously a year or so ago shortly after we first moved to Olive Branch, but at that time decided it was a much better decision to rent with the good situation we had, and focus on paying off student loans.   So we did have a little experience in looking, not that it's not always still daunting and  an excessively scary process.  There was one house that kept coming to both Will and mine's mind.   There was a house in a neighborhood not far from our house then that we liked, which was also directly beside some of our close friends our pastor and his wife.    Our church meets in what they call community groups for Sunday nights, and ours happens to be at their house. There are actually several couples from our church that live in the neighborhood.   We passed this house probably hundreds of times and knew it was always for sale.  The house had been vacant for about 2 years, when we first moved to Olive Branch.   It recently was bought and fixed up to sale again.    We definitely had an interest in this house, and it kept coming to our minds.  We however did not have high expectations.   If this house was at all nice, why had it been on the market so long??  Houses sell so fast right now, even some terrible ones.

Well... apparently it had been on the market because God was saving it for us... that's all I can say.   It was the first house we decided to go look at, and it was pretty perfect.  We loved almost every single thing about it, including the floor plan.   If we designed a house it would be pretty similar.   It also had some things we hadn't even thought of that we loved.  

I was actually over the next day helping our friends that live next to the house with some projects. We started the process of thinking really hard about the house, and if it was a possibility for us, when we got a call from our realtor.   The house went to pending, meaning it was going off the market.   She had called to find out why, and apparently the guy had someone he was going to lease the house to, but said we could make an offer that day.   Oh and that was around 2pm.   It was an insane day to say the least!  

Well... we got the house that night.   I'm pretty sure my careful, logistic, planning husband had several heart attacks.

We moved into our new home a month later with a lot of help from some amazing friends and family, and have been there a month now! So hard to believe!  We have been travelling a lot of this month... so there are still tons of boxes and almost nothing on the walls... but we'll get there!

It was fast, a lot of crazy, but also amazing.  So thankful for God and his provisions.  He provided a house before we even knew we would be needing one.   And not just a house, but one we love, and will look forward to raising a family in for years to come.

So that's our house story!  Most of it anyways ha.... I might have left out some craziness about our seller, but you can ask me about those.  

I'll be posting some more pictures later on when we have a little more done and decorated how we wish... hopefully that will take place before the house is decorated for Christmas ha!  Life gets crazy!

Adoption Update:

Also some of you guys have been asking about where we are with our adoption.   Some days it really breaks my heart, but I am reminded to Trust, like I said above.   We actually haven't been able to start yet, but we plan to one day very soon.  I know everything is on God's timeline anyways, so I remind myself it isn't a big deal.  We paused it a little while, throughout the move.  
We wanted to get this out of way and get settled before we get into the thick of it.   Practically before we have 5 billion papers with potential to lose in the move, and also practically so we can reassess our finances.  The house while thankfully affordable is a little more of a strain on our budget which will definitely mean more fundraising, though we will still definitely try to make as many cuts in our budget possible.  The cost to get started in the adoption up front is quite a lot.   So please join us in praying about this and which steps we need to take.   I know God called us to adoption and of course knew all of this was coming and will most definitely continue to provide.  I have some evidence of that already in that this week I was provided a new job opportunity!  It will hopefully allow me to work some while I continue my treatment because of the flexibility.   I will go into more detail about later!  I'm very excited about the new venture though and Soo sooo thankful for God's provisions and answers to many many prayers... I mean... we feel sooo amazingly blessed!

Here is a sneak peak at the outside of the house before we bought it!  Much cuter now of course ha! More to come!