Things Are Settling

We are home from Pittsburgh. Whew. It always feels good to sleep in your own bed. Travel was good except that the airline mislocated our bags. We got them back late yesterday evening with everything intact. I think I have bad luggage karma--United Airlines totally lost my suitcase and never recovered it back in 2000. I was very thankful that they found both our bags--especially since I borrowed a friend's winter maternity clothes.

Assuming all goes well, we will be living in the house below.












It is a very cute house that actually is a 4th generation seminarian home. The priest at our church who is in charge of peeps going through the ordination process is the first seminarian who owned the house. It is very complicated but basically we are buying the house. I will post some more pics that we took later.

House features:

1. Basement -for storage and laundry (not exactly looking forward to hauling laundry and cloth diapers up and down 2 flights of stairs but maybe it will help me lose that baby weight quicker) House comes with washer and dryer. Maybe we can figure out a way to hook up ours too since our laundry with be increasing. We don't want to get rid of our appliances because we know we will need them when we move back to TX. Most people include the appliances with the homes here.

2. First floor-1/2 bath (Very rare in this area. Most bathrooms are on the 2nd floor), living room , dining room, kitchen (comes with fridge, microwave, dishwasher--hallelujah!), large kitchen storage area with some ikea storage funriture (see below), mudroom.

3. 2nd floor-3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom. One bedroom used to be 2 bedrooms and someone knocked down the wall in between. We are deciding how we will use that portion of the room. TV room, play room, sitting area? No idea!


4. Attic/3th floor-The attic is finished and has 2 rooms in it. One room has a window unit and base heater and will be used as the guest room. (If you ever want to visit Pittsburgh...) The other room will be the office/study/bookholder room. It also comes with a desk and some other IKEA storage. It is a perfect get away for Jon to study in. There is a door that shuts off the 2nd floor from the 3rd floor so it will be quiet while Jon studies.


Other features:
The house has a small, but not fenced, backyard that we would like to seal off so the boys can safely play outside.

It has a really front porch with a porch swing. I am looking forward to that!

The house is 3 blocks from the school; one block from the park; one block from the farmers market; a couple blocks from the dinky movie theatre and several seminary families live on the block and behind us too.


The 2 biggest prayer needs we have are:
1) Selling our house! Pray, Pray, Pray! We just dropped the price and are doing "our" part to get things moving. The rest is up to God.

2) Find out which donors want to transfer their support from IV to Christ Church.

There are lots of things still up in the air but having a place to live makes it easier and it pleases my desire to nest and set up the house.


Other things to note:
We did celebrate our 7th anniversary while we were there. We went up the Duquesne (pronounced doo-cane) Incline to Mt. Washington (HERE is a better picture) and ate a very nice and romantic dinner at the top of the mountain. I had Filet Mignon stuffed with spinach and feta cheese (yummy!) with some green beans and banana bread pudding for dessert. Jon had Mahi-Mahi with some herby mashed potatoes and a dessert drink--I don't remember exactly--but it did have Bailey's Irish Cream in it. We talked about all the memories from each year of marriage we could think of. We noted how the first 2 years seem so different than the other 5. We had lots of memories of being in our first apartment and had some good laughs thinking back. We couldn't remember much about the first year we were in our house (3rd year of marriage) because the memories of having the boys overruled being childless in the house. I remembered more about being pregnant than anything else.

Jon and I decided that we are going to refer to the 7th year as a year of special celebration of our marriage because neither one of us like the stereotype mentality that the 7th year traditionally has (The 7th year itch--to ditch the marriage). We had a lovely evening together and I seriously think I have the best husband ever. He is the perfect man for me and I really do love him more now than I did 7 years ago while we were standing up saying our vows to each other.