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Well, we're officially grown ups.  We've got a mortgage.  That's right, for the first time in our lives Zach and I are living in house that is actually ours.  We had been looking for almost a year before we found it and everything went through just under the wire.  From going under contract to moving in it was about four weeks.  It officially became ours on September 27th and we moved everything in on the 28th (we also cleaned out of our old place and handed in our keys that same day).  Zach was at the new place telling the movers where to put things and I was cleaning out our old place when I got a call from Zach.  He informed me that the kids were playing in the backyard when all of a sudden 5 other kids just showed up.  Before he knew it there were a handful of kids in our house and Carter and Austin had run around the street to check out 3 or 4 of the houses that belonged to some of the kids.  Just what we were hoping for.

We no live just a little north of the city.  Our house is on a dead end street with a bunch of families and kids.  When the weather's nice the kids all run around and play.  The boys love it!  Tessa too.  The back yard is fenced in so I can send them out while I make dinner instead of them circling my legs wining about how hungry they are.  It's glorious! 

The day we moved in a tree up the street fell across the road and blocked everything for a few hours until a crew came out and cleared.  Because of that we checked the trees on our property.  Sure enough there were three large 60 foot trees in the yard that were dead.  Sweet.  That became our first big project, to find someone to come remove them because there's no way we could do it ourselves.  It was quite amazing to watch the crew work.  The first branch on these trees were probably 20 feet off the ground.  I asked the kids how the worker got up into the tree and Carter said one of the guys wrapped a rope around the tree and put his feet against the trunk and worked his way up into the tree.  Once he was up there he would tie branches off and cut them while the others on the ground worked other ropes to make sure the huge branches fell where they wanted them to.  To load up the largest trunk pieces they had a guy bring his truck with a crane on it.  He then masterfully used that crane to pick up and place the pieces precisely into the back of the truck like a big tetrus game.  It really was amazing how nimble he was with that crane.  As soon as the tree crew drove away the clouds opened and there was a huge rain storm.  We're talking sheets of rain.  This helped us learn that the edge of our back yard turns into a pond when there's heavy rain.  Perfect.