I'm going to be honest, I don't remember much that happened this week. It's a blur of tummy bug symptoms and a slow recovery for me and Alice. Unfortunately, we lost all our potty training. Our beautiful potty training. Our Alice-guided, no rewards or prompting required, easy breezy beautiful potty training. Gone, all gone. The tummy bug, without getting too graphic, required us to put Alice in pull-ups all week. By the time the sickness was gone and we tried doing away with the pull-ups, Alice had developed a healthy fear of all toilets and we had to start back at square 1. But this time rewards have been required, accidents have been frequent, and public outings are temporarily on hold once more. Just in time for spring break. I am feeling very cooped up, but at least I'm not feeling very nauseated anymore.
A highlight from our week was Jared and I attending my Dad's millennial choir concert. It was so lovely to be able to see one of his concerts in person after a decade of living out of state. The production was beautiful and the music was lovely. Can't complain about the company, either. It was nice to get out on a proper date. And now, some pictures from our week:
We had two lovely days playing outside when we started feeling better! It was delightful to feel the sunshine and watch my girl run and play. This little lady is a hoot.
^^My brother Tim and sis-in-law Abby invited us over for pizza night on Friday! They make homemade pizza every friday and invite a different family to join them each week. This is how they meet all their neighbors and keep up with everyone. They are an inspiration. Alice was thrilled about roasting marshmallows and kept telling us that she was "camping."
^^This isn't an exciting picture but I wanted to document further progress in the journey toward our (likely) forever home. The neighborhood we will be buying in is a tract-home community, meaning all the finishes are already pre-decided for each home and as a buyer we don't get any say in choosing or changing these finishes. That's just their business model. However. We have become QUITE the squeaky wheels at the sales office. It's just so easy to pop over when it's a 3-minute drive from our house, anytime we have new questions or want to walk through and see progress on the model home that has what will be our future home's floorplan.
Homes aren't selling as quickly as they'd like (it's a slow season in real estate), and we have been very vocal that we have our exact lot and floorplan picked out, and we have our financing 100% ready to go. Every time we stop into the office Jared asks if we can just put down earnest money or a downpayment to have dibs on our lot and be done with it. Again, this isn't really how the development does things. They list a home for sale after the construction has already begun, and once they are 2-3 months out from finishing the home you can put down earnest money. They won't even start on our home until the last half of the year. But because we have been so involved and invested, we've developed a good rapport with our sales agent. On the down-low she's assured us that the house is as good as ours since our financing is ready. She's walked us through all the homes as they're being constructed so we could see their 4 different packages of finishes. And even though all future homes already technically had their finishes picked out, she secretly put in a change order for us to be able to have our preferred package of finishes in our preferred house. There are some finishes in it that I don't love, but it's overall our favorite of the packages available. This definitely isn't even close to what it would be like to do a custom or even semi-custom build, but we feel pretty excited about it.
Jared has taken to calling me the Puppet Master because I've been influencing subtle changes in the home and on our future street at large. It will probably be several months until we have any more updates, but we're getting more and more excited as we become increasingly sure of our decision and can start planning for landscaping, organization, etc.
^^Dipping our toes into our first chaotic day of spring break basement playdates
