Getting Ready

Well, I have been neglecting everything lately, including updated the blog, because I have been spending every extra minute preparing for our trip to find a house in Rochester. I can’t believe we leave in 2 days! Michael and I have spent so many hours looking at houses online, corresponding with our realtor, compiling a list of all the houses that we want to see while we are out there, using Google maps to look up the distances from the different houses to Michael’s hospital and the elementary schools, and attempting to rank the houses so that we can see the ones that look the best first, making flight, hotel, and rental car reservations, printing all of our reservation paperwork and lots of maps for the different Rochester places we will be driving, preparing a list of rental homes in case we don’t find anything suitable to buy, and asking our family members and friends all about the house buying process, (not to mention attempting to get ready for our first trip away from the kids for more than just an overnight – including cleaning our room and putting some items in the storage room so it is somewhat presentable for Michael’s mom to come stay, doing lots of laundry, planning all the meals for the week and getting all the groceries stocked up, and writing down directions about the boys’ schedule and routine), and we haven’t even started packing at all yet. I am really starting to look forward to going out and finding a house – we have a pretty good list of houses to look at, so I’m hopeful that we will be able to find something good within our price range. Actually, I talked to a Bishop from one of the wards out there the other night, and now I am really hoping to find a house in the Brighton School District (we already knew that was one of the top districts in the area) and in the Rochester 3rd Ward, which has a lot of resident families and lots of young families with kids, and it is the closest of the areas we have been looking at to the hospital where Michael will be working. I don’t know if that will work out, but I am keeping my fingers crossed. I just keep thinking that if I will just allow myself to calm down and stop stressing about everything that has to do with buying a house, this could actually be a really nice little trip. Maybe once we get out there and get things rolling I’ll be able to feel a little less stressed about it all. But at any rate, hopefully we’ll be posting pictures of our first house by the end of next week . . .