Gehrig has a new habit when saying family prayers now. When we write in our family gratitude journal at night, he remembers what everyone said they were thankful for, he he includes that in his prayer. It’s quite impressive really that he thought of it. I remember one night I said I was thankful for peanut butter because at the time I couldn’t think of anything else. I think Gehrig mentioned he was grateful for peanut butter in each...

Tonight for family home evening we talked about faith. We had just eaten home made pizza where we put pinapple on it. The kids wanted more pinapple. They wanted more pinapple afterwards, so I got this idea in my head. I went downstairs and got another can of pinapple and tore the label off. They had no idea nor even attempted a guess at what it was. I wispered to Rachel what it was then allowed her to tell them. After that we talked about faith...

This morning while Rachel was getting ready, I watched some church videos with Gracie. One of them was about the Book of Mormon. It showed a clip of President Ezra Taft Benson in which he said the following:  “If we would avoid adopting the evils of the world, we must pursue a course which will daily feed our minds with and call them back to the things of the Spirit. I know of no better way to do this than by reading the Book of...

We spent the day looking at houses. We left the kids with Rachel’s mom. After looking at all the houses I think we determined that we prefer newer houses over older ones. That sounds like a given, but the trade-off is that you get bigger yards, more mature trees and neighborhoods with older houses. The new homes were built on smaller lots so you don’t have much yard and houses are so close together. We did decide to put an offer on...

Rachel and I just gone done going through the budget together. I always enjoy doing it together because generally it is just me and then I give her a printout of where we are at and she says “OK”. It’s been helpful to get on the same page and set some goals as well be purchasing a new home and our mortgage payment could go up as much as $500/month. I didn’t know how we could do it, but we’ve found a number of ways...

As we have been looking for houses we started tracking them in an Excel spreadsheet. It became problematic though. Here are the reasons why: Rachel just couldn’t figure out URLs and hyperlinks Sometimes we looked at houses on the computer, sometimes on the laptop. Transferring the spreadsheet back and forth became problematic. Sometimes I looked on the computer and Rachel looked on the laptop. Keeping the spreadsheet in sync was again,...

We got an offer on our house this morning. The offer was $2000 less than our asking price and they wanted us to pay closing costs and they wanted all our appliances. We counter offered and raised the price and lowered what they wanted us to pay in closing. Essentially our counter offer gave us $10,000 more at closing. They accepted the counter offer and we are now officially under contract!