Last weekend we traveled to Shreveport to see my parents’ new house. They recently moved into a smaller patio home and this was our first opportunity to see it. We met my grandparents and Aunt Marci in Lindale on Friday night and then headed over to Shreveport on Saturday morning. Since we were all together, we celebrated my birthday a few days early. Jennifer amazingly smuggled my gift, an acoustic guitar, all the way from Houston. I didn’t even know she had hidden it in the truck while we were driving. We had a good time spending time with my family, it was one of the reasons we decided to move back to Texas so that we could visit more often.

Since I had received a guitar and I haven’t played an instrument since sixth grade, I signed up for lessons. Starting on Tuesday, I’m going to have weekly lessons at Smack Guitars in Missouri City.

On Friday, Jennifer took the girls to Geopalooza at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Abby has shown an interest in geology recently and so, we thought this would be something she would want to go see. They looked at all different kinds of rocks and got their very own geodes at the end. They also explored the  Butterfly Center and had a great time.

This weekend we went and looked at a couple of rent houses over in Sienna Plantation, the area we would eventually like to buy a house. We figured this way if we did buy a house in the area, the girls wouldn’t have to switch schools. The houses were smaller than we were wanting to buy in Houston, but about the same size as the one in Orlando. We decided on one that had three bedrooms upstairs for the girls and a small play room. We figured that upstairs would be the “girls’ domain”. Downstairs was pretty compact, but enough room for us. We figured it was good enough as temporary space for the next year, so we went ahead and put in an application for it. We are now waiting to hear back if we are approved. It’s going to be tough paying rent and a mortgage for the house back in Florida, but we figured it’s time that we move into our own place before school starts.

This week our house was inspected from the people who are going to buy. This is usually a very stressful part because you don’t know what they are going to find. In fact, we still haven’t heard the exact list of things they want us to fix. The only thing we heard from our Realtor was that “nothing major” was found. So, hopefully, when we finally do get the list it won’t be too painful.

In three weeks we will close on our house and we currently have no place to go. I franticly looked at houses nearly every evening all week. We decided to go with a house that had almost everything we wanted. It has four bedrooms, so that all the girls will have their own room and Emily and Isabelle won’t have to share anymore. It has a three car garage so that we can actually park the cars in the garage and have enough room for all of our extra stuff. It’s on a loop, so that only the people who live in that section should be traveling down there. It’s also only a couple of blocks from the elementary school that Abby and Emily will be attending in the Fall. We put in our initial offer today and hopefully will come to an agreement on it by the end of the weekend. Wish us luck.

Well, I made it back to Houston all in one piece. The day started at 4:45 in the morning (which is 3:45 in Houston) with scraping the family out of bed and getting them to take me to the airport. I gave Jennifer and the girls kisses, took my bags out of the truck and headed out on my trip. The only problem I had was at the security. I was wearing some cargo shorts and I didn’t realize the belt had a metal buckle. Of course it took me three trips through the metal detector and the TSA guy saying, “are you wearing a belt” for me to remember. So, I had to remove my belt. Oh well. After that, the flight went fine. I picked up a Bacon Egg and Cheese Biscuit from McDonald’s and practically walked straight on the plane which was boarding as I walked up to the gate.

We had someone come and look at the house today. Our Realtors forgot to call us, so they caught Jennifer while the house wasn’t in “showing condition”, but not all that bad. The man looking at the house were from Tampa and they liked the house. The guy is going to bring his wife by to look at the house when they get a chance. We have another showing tomorrow. So, that’s four showings in four days, which isn’t too bad after not showing it at all for two weeks.