Friday, July 18, 2014

Welcome Back

Well, well, well. Look who decided to rejoin the blogging world. Yep, that's right ladies and gentlemen, Kayla's back blogging about our crazy life and how it just keeps getting crazier. 

I left for work at my normal 4:30am this morning before I remembered that I actually work an hour later today. So I came home and poured myself another cup of coffee and decided to do a blog entry.

A lot has changed since my last posting. Emma will be 3 next month. We sold our house and moved into a smaller, much more convenient house closer to my parents, and we've had another baby, a boy named Levi Phillip.

While just glancing at homes for sale in our area online, I found the house that Jake and I rented 5 years ago for sale for $100,000 less than what we had purchased our home for (we call it our "Mummy View" house after the street name). We decided that we should put ours on the market and we may just get the price we wanted for it. Well, we did. We then went to put an offer on the "Essex" house and it was pulled from the market that day. Now what were we going to do? There are a lot of homes for sale in the area we wanted to be in, but not very many nice homes. We needed to be closer to my parents. We were driving 40 minutes before work to meet them 1/2 way so they could babysit Emma. Then another hour + after work to go pick her up everyday. Well, since we rented this house before, I had the owner's address. I sent him a card explaining that we wanted to buy his house, etc. He emailed me saying it was going back on the market the next day. We made a full-price offer and it was accepted before it even hit the market. We lived with my parents for about 6 weeks while we were in between but that was no big deal. We knocked $80,000 of debt off our names and lowered our mortgage payments by about $750 per month. It was one of the best decisions we've ever made.

Since moving, we've (happily) had to scale back and down size some. We've both been reading a lot about contentment in the Bible and have found it. Wow, what a great feeling. Realizing you don't need something and not even wanting it because you know it's silly to spend hard earned money on something meaningless in the grand scheme of things is really liberating and refreshing. Of course, we have our moments where we want to spend, spend, spend and buy something nice (aka pricey), but we just make the decision to save the money and pay cash for it at a later date. We don't deprive ourselves, we just make much better choices.

Recently, my dad found out he has stage 3 pancreatic cancer. He has completed 1 round of chemo and has 2-3 more before he goes in for surgery to remove it. The doctor is confident he can remove the entire tumor. He has lost over 30lbs and clocked in at 142lbs yesterday. He's just skin and bones. He has a very hard time swallowing (chemo attacks the multiplying cells in the body including the digestive system starting in your throat) and has no appetite. We have been praying feverishly.

Not long ago, Emma and I were baking cookies for when Jake got home from work. I was very careful not to let Emma lick the beaters after we added the raw egg. Just before we scooped them out to put on baking sheets I took a bite of the dough and I suddenly realized what I had done. Now, don't get me wrong, I love cookie dough. I remember eating raw dough making cookies with my mom as a kid. It wasn't until relatively recently that there was a big push about not eating the raw egg in the dough and the age old tradition became taboo. I eventually did give Emma a bite (or two) of dough since she had seen me take a bite and, really, it is sort of a tradition. Does that make me a bad mother? Am I to be reported to CPS? I hope not.

Are there any traditions that you know of, or maybe even are part of your family history, that are now taboo or discouraged? I'd love to hear about them.