A Visit From the Stork ;-)

Yesterday I came home and found the most amazing thing sitting on my bed. Ten trees from the Arbor Day Foundation packaged in a white bag with a picture of a stork on the front. We got their Autumn collection and look forward to watching the trees grow and the leaves change from season to season. We'll be planting them in pots for now, until we get our home and they will be transplanted into the perfect spots.

Buds

Finally spring has sprung around here...albeit with the threat of snow by the end of the week...but I shall just be happy watching the buds break out on the trees and the daffodils and crocus blooming in front of our apartment. This is our pear tree...it is good to know that all of our potted trees seem to have made it through the terrible winter that we've had.

Most weekends we are planning routes to visit a handful of houses - we make notes about what we like and what we don't like here are some of the ones in the lead right now...

...a beautiful limestone house, on a hill. across the street there is a hilly wooded area - great for hiking!

...the gym house. this house is great, a full wrap around porch goes completely from front to back. there are great big boulders out back and a wood swing hanging from the tree. this would give us options for putting the girls in their own space.

...it's hard to see this one. but it isn't too far from our current apartment. it is on a few acres and has a great porch.

Can't wait until we can walk inside some of these homes and decide where we want to make memories...

Feels like when we were trying to get pregnant...

Many moons ago, I was diagnosed with PCOS while I was trying to get pregnant with our first son, Gage. Each month we were on rounds of fertility drugs and artificial inseminations. We were waking up each morning to track my temperatures and all the ups and downs that go along with infertility. Each month we'd hope that we'd see the two blues lines or two pink lines on the test saying that I was growing another human...and....NOTHING. It took us over a year of trying to get pregnant with Gage, six months with Drake and three months with Cora. So now, I feel like we are going through the same ups and downs with home buying and frankly...Well...this month was a bust. There is nothing we can do to make things better. We had our lender look into our credit report and see if we paid certain bills how that would affect our actual credit score. Ya' know...to give us the 9 points that we need...but apparently the only thing that will help us is time. She said that she will pull our credit again in another month (middle-end of April) and maybe we will have the nine points...but then again we might only have five...or as luck would have it, maybe our credit scores will be less. Who knows?! For now - we just keep chugging along and paying bills (ON TIME) and continuing to save money.

Disappointed...

Ok...so I contacted the lender a few days early. I got excited...a little too excited. "You want me to put you on hold while I check your numbers?!" Um YEAH! Finger crossed, toes crossed, hell - the kids even had their eyes crossed..."Are you there still...wellllll....you aren't quite where you need to be". UGH that SUCKS. She mentioned that we've done a GREAT job and our credit is SO SO much better than it was. However, we are still 9 points away from where we need to be. Nine Freakin' Points. At first I couldn't cry...and then I cried a bit...and now, I don't want to cry. I'm just upset and numb. I don't know what more we could be doing. We've been working SO hard to get where we need to be. We've even gone over and above her suggestions. I feel terrible right now.

Nine Days

In just nine days we are going to reach out to our lender and see if we've been able to raise our credit scores enough to qualify for a loan. I am hoping that we've been able to rectify our past credit mistakes. We've paid off all credit cards, with the exception of one - which has an extremely small balance and we've got a good amount of money in savings for either a down payment, closing costs or repairs. Fingers crossed people!