Halloween!

I hope everyone had a great Halloween!  It's one of my favorite holidays.

In the spirit of frugality (okay, okay, more-so because we couldn't find what we wanted in the stores, hehe), I made my daughter's costumes (with a little help from my mother in law on the ears and tails!).  I really didn't pay attention to the total cost, but I doubt it was more than $20 total for both.  Just tulle, felt, ribbon, $3 shirts from Walmart, and a few other odds and ends to pull them together.

I think they turned out ADORABLE!  Daddy is a firefighter so our girls dressed as Dalmatians this year.

 Do you make your own costumes?  I had so much fun with it this year I just may try it next year too.

Dreaming...

Whoaaaa... so I've been looking at house listings for well, forever it seems. I never unsubscribed from the daily emails I got when we started looking to buy up here and eventually found this house.

I like to look at them, I like to get ideas for what I would like to have, have an idea of current prices, and I just like to see the insides and see how people decorate, haha.

Well the other night Mike says "Hey look, I found our next house!" and the first thing I notice after the "wow, he is looking at houses," lol, is the price... completely shocked me for him. $230k! When I've been looking at houses I figure I'd probably end up with something around $160k, not as big as we'd like but definitely doable (1600+ sq feet, no smaller)... I asked him if he really wanted to spend that much, because it was surprising and he just looked at me funny and said "Well, yeah!" lol... Mr. We're-So-Poor (bologna, he's an amaaazing provider) wants a nicer house than I was figuring on, which is kinda cool. :o) Nice to know we can go for that dream house and he's on board with it cost-wise, I wasn't expecting that...and I am fine with what I was originally planning, but hey I won't complain over bigger and nicer, hehe. So we've been looking at listings for days and it's been really fun to see what we each want. Ideally 4-5 bedrooms (room for more kids! hehe), master bath, two story, two car attached garage, separate dining room, basement (preferably finished), nice big yard (fenced would be nice but we are willing to do that ourselves)...no idea of the square footage but from what we've been looking at it'd be 1900-3200sq feet, lol, big differences but it just depends on the house.

And he says as soon as we pay off the car we can list this house and start seriously looking to move. I am kind of excited. :o) I really do love this house, but we knew going in it was temporary. It's 1425 sq ft, but we are already bursting at the seams, and we really don't like that it's a townhouse. It doesn't bother me for temporary at all, this is a really nice house, nicest place we've lived yet, but definitely knew it was temporary. I am just nervous about selling, we paid 134k for this place, well, are still paying, plus putting in the fence (4k), and we want to replace the downstairs flooring (who knows how much $$$ lol...but think it's neccessary for resale anyway) and I am not sure we will be able to break even...I am okay with losing the interest we've paid, considering we would have been paying rent if we didn't buy this house, but it would be nice to not lose any more than that, lol. I see lots of houses in our area sit for sale for awhile, but since I am nosy I do look at pictures of the insides/yards and ours is definitely nicer, lol.

I suggested renting this place out but I don't know how well that would work out, I mean it would put us in a higher tax bracket, I don't know if we would have trouble getting a new mortgage while still having one and ...I don't know.................

I am still sick of moving but we have been here longer than we have been anywhere else so I guess it would be okay to move one more time into our FOREVER house! :o) Love the idea of that. Moving and knowing it will be where our kids grow up and we have our grandchilden over and family gatherings...

Random

Have you ever just randomly remembered something and can't get it out of your head?

My senior year of high school, I was in my last class of the day when the office called the phone in the room (normally they would just do the intercom thing...) and the teacher asked me to go to the office. I was a little curious, but obviously I went. When I got there, my parents were sitting there and then started flipping out on me, yelling at me and telling me that I knew why, asking why I would do it. I was SO confused, I didn't know why they were there, or what I had done.

Turns out someone had called the school, pretending to be my mom, and asked that I be dismissed early, that she would pick me up in front of the school. The receptionist/secretary recognized that it wasn't my mom, and immediately called my parents. She did not however, bother to write down the number that was on the caller ID...and then she said there was no way she could go back and get that number. Everyone thought that *I* had orchestrated some big plan to get out of school early...seriously? I was such a goodie two shoes...and if I wanted out early, all I'd have had to do was ask my mom, the day before that actually was a school day for me, and not for Mike, so my mom let me stay home too and we went galavanting around Gettysburg... and of course no one believed me when I was clueless as to what had happened. I mean, I left my books and all of my stuff in class when I went to the office, I was obviously not expecting to be leaving the school for any reason or I would have taken my things with me. On top of that, I was supposed to stay after school for an Art Club meeting, and Mike was going to pick me up after (and I had no way to contact him to tell him not to, so he did go and sit in the parking lot for 2 hours after my meeting was supposed to be out, waiting for me, before he just went to my house to see if I was there...and my parents made him leave without seeing me.) I got in SO much trouble, I was grounded, I wasn't allowed to see Mike (and with a new relationship where we were in the phase of spending every possible minute with each other, that was torture! lol)... I begged and pleaded with them to believe me but they didn't. I don't even remember how long it went on...too long since I hadn't done anything wrong.

We still have no idea who called the school and that really bothers me. My mom called around to a bunch of people asking if they knew who called, got nowhere. Why on Earth didn't they just write down the number on the caller ID...? (and really, why couldn't they "go back" and get it after making other calls??)

So I have no idea if it was like some random prank, or something more serious... After hearing from my father this year, I learned that his wife works for the public school system in MD...I wonder if she was able to somehow find my information and called them hoping to be able to pull me out of school that day? Seems unlikely, and really, not nice of me to think that way. Either way, crazy odd and still bothers me to this day who would do that.

Four!

My sweet "baby" girl, is now FOUR years old!

Where has the time gone?