Underwhelmed

It's been a long process (at least to me it has). We started looking into getting a home in January. My husband, being to optimist that he is, started looking at houses right away- even when I was pretty sure there was no way we would be getting a home this year.

After we finally pulled together all our paperwork, and got our taxes done...and re-done (because of some errors), I was just ready to give up and live in our duplex forever.

But, Alan is persistent. He followed through on every step. He called. He asked questions. And finally, we were told that we got approved for a home. At that point, I started looking at homes with Alan (He had been looking at homes for a while, but being the realist that I am, I wouldn't look with him until we got the ok).

We looked at every home for sale in our category in the area we wanted. Nothing (well, nothing that didn't have water damage in the basement!). So we expanded our search. We looked at homes in many, many other areas. By then, we both just got so frustrated that we thought that maybe we weren't supposed to get a home.

At this point, I mentioned to a ward member who is moving soon, our frustration. He mentioned that that was exactly what their frustrations were too, and so they looked into building a home. We thought about it and found out the information and decided that was the option for us too. By the end of that week, we were interviewing builders and had picked out our plan, our builder, and our lot.

To make a long story short, one of the agents in our meetings, started making it public to people in our ward that we were moving. In an attempt to make it so that we were the ones who told our children we were moving (as opposed to having ward members tell them), we told them we had a big surprise and to hurry and get ready for church so we could tell them what it was.

When we got to the site, we had the kids get out. Alan told them that we were building a home right here...
Their response was not anywhere near what I thought it would be. There were some blank looks for a few seconds. Then Joseph said, "You mean we're not getting a dog?" In a word, they were underwhelmed. You see the children had convinced themselves that the surprise was a dog, not a house.

Since then, they've got from being upset that we are moving out of our ward and away from their friends, to very excited about it. We hope to have the home done by July 7th, but I really think that's not going to happen. I just hope it's before the end of July, when our lease is up! Change is in the air. And we are looking forward to what it represents :)