This Week

Let's just say this week has had its fun times and its more stressful moments as well. I will do my best to explain without getting too long winded. But I can't promise anything - here I sit at 8:15 with the two little ones in bed and the two older ones watching some of Narnia Prince Caspian! Mark is out working and will be most of the night probably. I am getting tired of these slushy/icy messes that keep occurring. Makes his work much harder. He doesn't seem to mind too much. He genuinely enjoys snow removal and the weird hours that go along with it.

The fun things from this week: having our life group party on Friday night and hanging with our friends. We had a great time and relationships seem to be meshing more and more the longer we know one another. Kind of the natural progression I guess. I really appreciate our friends and enjoy anytime we get to spend with them. Tuesday of course was also fun finding out we are being blessed with another little girl! I am still a little in shock about the whole thing. Normally there is extra anatomy floating around - not this time! I am happy that Eden will have a little sister and already am praying for a deep, quick and lasting bond between the two of them. I am a little nervous too which someday I will go into all that. Last night Mark's sister Christine and her husband Eric offered to babysit the kiddos so we could get a night out!!! Yippee!!!! We were hoping to finish up last minutes shopping but weren't very successful. We did laugh a lot though - especially when he made me sit down and relax for a minute and stop being so task oriented. He is very good for me! Today I baked some more Christmas cookies with the boys and they are wonderfully delicious. Oh......I do love the holidays! Here is the picture I am using for our card this year. I am so behind with everything! We packed everyone on the couch before bed in their pj's and took some pictures. They are so dear!

Eden was quite fascinated with the tree! It has very sparse decorations since she broke 2 in the span of about 2 minutes. I didn't want any little fingers or toes getting hurt so the tree doesn't look overly embellished! Maybe next year! Oh, and excuse the stains on her shirt. The problem with her love of food is that she is kind of messy when she eats and a lot of her clothes show the results.

Another one of the kids in front of the tree! They are counting down the days at this point to seeing their cousins and Christmas morning.

My little man! In his favorite moose shirt! He normally resists getting dressed unless I offer his moose shirt. Then he is more compliant.

Now....the other fun thing this week and also the thing that caused us the most stress. We closed on our new house today!!! Yeah and a huge sigh of relief! The reason there was so much stress is that we didn't get our final approval for our loan from the bank until 2 hours before closing this morning!!!! Ridiculous! On Tuesday, they suddenly needed a crazy amount of extra documentation from us and from our CPA. Apparently there were a few glitches. The one being this: we have two rental properties and only one showed up on our initial credit check for some reason. So...we had to provide signed leases for all the rental units, bank statements, letters from our CPA, investment account statements, yada, yada, yada! Then...the last and final problem was they thought for some reason that we could not access the business account for any personal use. Well..how exactly did they think we got paid? Our broker told us today that our numbers were perfect and he didn't know what all the run around had been about. But our realtor did tell us that this is becoming more and more common. All in all we are thrilled!! I am a little nervous simply because we have to finish getting our house ready to put on the market and then have to wait for it to sell. Hopefully it doesn't take too, too long. Although I would like to be able to come back early spring and dig up my strawberry patch.

One final funny tid-bit. Our hens have been laying eggs now for almost two months. Yet, we were only getting 1-2 eggs a day from 5 hens. I kept saying to Mark that something wasn't right. We have two rogue hens that somehow escape the pen almost daily. So...Judah would go out, round them up and pen them back up. The one is very tame and follows you around and will even jump in the van if it gets the chance. One day this week Mark was outside and knocked on the window. Turns out those two hens must not think the nesting boxes we provided were not okay for them. They were getting out and laying their eggs under an azalea bush - 2 dozen eggs to be exact! Judah and Mark put them in a bucket, went back in the woods and threw them at trees since we didn't know how long they had been laying there. So now the hens are completely confined and we are getting more eggs in our nesting boxes. Quite the exciting times at the Eveleth house.