putting The Jerk to bed

Putting Lincoln to bed these days has been a lot like putting The Jerk to bed.

If you have never seen the famous scene from the 1979 classic, then you won't get this, but Lincoln has required taking everything in his bedroom to bed with him.

When we start to rock he goes around the bedroom to get any book, toy, blanket and pillow available.

"All I need for bed is this pillow. Oh, and this teddy bear, but that's all I need is this bed and this pillow, oh and this book I need that. And this car, but that's it, this pillow, this teddy bear, this car and maybe this blanket. I need this blanket."

Then he climbs in our small glider with me and we rock. Then when he goes to bed he has to have everything with him.

I really need to clean everything but 1 blanket, 1 pillow and 1 book from his bedroom.

in the meadow we can build a snowman

Well, it is snowing again. School is delayed 2 hours this morning.

But really I don't mind a little snow. Truth be told I kind of like a nice, new snowy day.
IN DECEMBER

Will winter ever end?

Until this year I never really considered St. Louis southern.

this n that

It has been a long couple of weeks. The sickness made it's way around the Welch household. It started with Cooper, then Lincoln was sick on good Friday as we drove to Illinois. Once in Illinois I was out for a while managing to make it to church for Easter and that was about it. Then we went to St. Louis for a couple of days and Val ended up with it. We came home a day late because Val was to sick to make the 9 hour trip. She missed most of last week.

We have had a couple of more showings. We had one the Saturday after Easter, one this Sunday and one this evening. So we are still hopeful that we will sell our house sooner than later. There are a lot of houses in our neighborhood for sale and apparently a couple of more may be coming on the market.

We found out that we don't have to sell our house to be able to move forward with buying a house in St. Louis. Since we have no other debt our debt to income ratio is still workable with 2 mortgages. Obviously this is not the preferred scenario. It would be like having an expensive cabin "up north."

We looked at a bunch of houses while we were in St. Louis. We got a good feel for the area we are moving to. We plan on going back in early May to earnestly look for a house. While it sucks to try to sell a house right now hopefully the market will work in our favor on the other end. I think Val only has 123 houses currently saved on realtor.com.

winter wonderland

Woke up this morning and it is snowing. Lightly today and maybe more overnight. We are only days away from spring break.

Both boys are sick, Cooper the worst. He has been coughing all night. I am slowly trying to get laundry and stuff done around the house.

After hearing "We really like the house, but we found something cheaper," several times we have decided to go ahead and lower the price on our house to try to get it sold before we move.

everybody's working for the weekend

On Monday realtors from the Monticello Edina Realty office toured the house.

I was feeling a little discouraged after one group said our price should be $250,000. Basically the price we paid 4 years ago.

But we have been getting traffic. On the site we now our house was included in search results 2187 times. There have been 271 requests for detail pages about this property. And there have been 23 Virtual Tours run for this property. So we are up in all of those since Monday and we have 2 showings this Saturday.

housing update

Another showing tomorrow at 11.

As of today our house was included in search results 2079 times. There have been 250 requests for detail pages about this property. And there have been 19 Virtual Tours run for this property.

more showings

We had another showing yesterday afternoon and one today at 4.  I was running the computer at church when I got the call.  I hope that it's not bad that I went into the hallway to answer the call.

Community center here we come.

all about the Hamiltons

Well, today I earned a nifty 10 dollars. That's right, count them, 10. Now granted it's no 30 dollars for eating suddenly salad, but I didn't have to eat anything or give my opinion. All I had to do was sit there and let them tell Lincoln that a car was a bear.

Awesome!

good night

It is 11:30. With the hectic day tomorrow I am trying to get most of the cleaning and prep done tonight for our showing tomorrow. I think I have the place put together about as well as I can before tomorrow.

We will see what happens tomorrow.

Another Showing

We have another showing tomorrow (Wednesday) from 1-2:30.

Tonight our small group is going bowling in Buffalo. Cooper has been looking forward to this for a long time. Tomorrow Lincoln is going to be participating in a study at the University of Minnesota.

I think it will be a late night getting the house ready, but if we are closer to a sell it is well worth it.

Thanks again for all your thoughts and prayers. I will keep you posted.

housing update

There is no big news to report on the housing front.

We do still feel good about our chances of selling our house before we move this summer. We have had a couple of drive bys. Not in the SoCal definition, but people stopping to look at the house and pick up a brochure. Also there seems to be movement online.

As of today our house was included in search results 1778 times. There have been 211 requests for detail pages about this property. And there have been 15 Virtual Tours run for this property. The last one is promising because we had been at 11 for a long time (I think mostly from my mom) and just this weekend it jumped to 15 (she promised to stop looking at our house online.)

I will certainly report any big news, but that is where we stand right now. Like I said we still feel good that as we move into spring things will start picking up.

Thank you to all of you that have kept us in your thoughts and prayers, we appreciate it very much.

TWO

I know it is cliche, but the time really has gone fast. It is hard for me to believe my little guy is 2 years old today.

Happy Birthday Lincoln.

somethings wrong

There is something wrong when you walk outside in -3 temperatures and think, "wow, this isn't so bad."

the long journey home

We went to St. Louis this weekend to check out neighborhoods and get some ideas about the area we are looking at moving too.

The trip went well and I met up with an old friend I hadn't seen in ages who lives in the area.

On the way back, however we got caught in some pretty nasty weather. We stopped at 12:30 in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa to gas up and grab some lunch. The McDonalds was closing at 1:00 because of the weather. So we spent the night. The next day the roads were still treacherous through most of Iowa. Too many cars in the ditch to count.

The house is still not sold. We had a showing over the weekend, but they ended up buying a bank owned home. This week my mission is to get the carpets cleaned.

another showing/preview

I just got a call that we will have another showing tomorrow.

Actually she called it a preview. I really didn't spend a lot of time on the phone discussing the difference. I know for me it equals cleaning and getting out of the house.

If I understood her right, it may be a relator taking a first look for their client, before they bring the client in. Either way it seems like at least one step closer to the possibility of selling our house. We will see what happens.

I am very thankful that I had already made arrangements with Margaret to watch Lincoln for a while while I caught up on cleaning. This gives my cleaning new purpose and I think will make me a little more motivated.

Very much worth the Dr. Pepper and Mighty Putty.

It will be at 5:30 tomorrow evening. Thank you to all of you that have helped out either getting our house ready or praying for us, or both.

First Showing (follow up)

So, we had our first showing this morning. Apparently everything went well. They spent and hour and half at the house and their only concern was the size of the living room. So we will see what happens. It is nice to have the first one under our belt and feel like there are at least some people looking.

Later the photographer came out and took pictures of the house.

You can see those online.

First Showing

Well, our house officially went on the market a week ago this Monday, and we have our first showing this Monday at 8:30. The photographer is scheduled to come at 10:00 tomorrow to take pictures for the virtual tour.

If you happen to read this before 8:30 Monday you may say a little prayer. We are excited to get the process underway.

Just put the kids to bed after the Super Bowl and I am trying to get the house cleaned up for tomorrow.

Abraham Lincoln Quote

"I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice."

the gateway

It's official.

Most of you already know that we are planning on moving to St. Louis this summer.

So today, the house officially went on the market. A special thanks to our small group who came over Saturday and helped us get projects done and maybe took a little something home (hope you enjoy the KISS doll)

The temporary sign is in the yard and I have the house on "ready to leave" alert. We will see how well I can keep that up. The photographer should be out later in the week to do the virtual tour. I will link to it once it's up so those of you who haven't been here in a while can see some of the changes we have made to the house.

So here we go. It feels more official now with the house on the market and I think after the first time I have to pack up and quickly leave the house it will feel even more so.

Growing Up

I don't know if it is the time of the year or things in life or just finding this song that made me reminisce about Cooper growing up. But here is a little video to Ben Folds Still Fighting It

My favorite line:

And you're............. so much............... like me
I'm sorry

for Angela, from Bono

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