A brief visit in downtown Seattle

This is a little out of order, but I wanted to post some fun touristy pictures before a whole bunch of house pictures! 

My Brother, Kevin, lives and works in Denver. He often has a work conference that takes him out of state. Funnily enough, his last work conference was set to be in San Antonio while we were still living there, but Covid took care of that one. He learned later that his next conference would be in Seattle, right after we were set to move there! Unfortunately the timing for our family was not the best, as Kevin arrived on a Tuesday and we closed on our house on Thursday (and weren't even sure what day we would close on the house at that point). So we decided it would be best to just get together on Saturday for some downtown Seattle fun!

First on the agenda was the Space Needle! If you go earlier in the day it's a 'little' less expensive!

The kids played around on the playground for a bit before it was our time slot to go up to the top of the space needle.

Alex liked these 3D printed models of the space needle that showed you its different construction phases as you waited in line.

They even had a massive LEGO space needle

It was a bit cloudy so we couldn't see Mt. Rainier, but you could see other nearby mountain ranges and landmarks

They have a lower observation deck that spins slowly and you can see through the ground. I swear that wasn't there in 2017 when we last went to the space needle. It was a little unnerving!

It was also September 11th- the 20th Anniversary nonetheless, so down below you could see these firetrucks and a whole slew of firemen in their dress uniforms standing at attention for long periods of time.

This may look like a statue, but this woman is completely dolled up just to look like one for the day and pose for pictures. Alex gave her some money and got some special attention!

After our time at the Space Needle we headed over to Pike Place Market. I just love the flowers and different food vendors. And don't forget the fish!

Oh, and the gum wall. Still SO gross.

And then we walked down by the water for a bit. 

That was more walking than I could really handle so we started heading back to the car when a street magician was starting up his show. He did a really awesome job, just could use a little help on his timing because we were there for like 45 minutes! Kevin was part of one trick where the guy guessed his number, but revealed his guess inside a vest on the price tag- crazy. The final trick involved a signed playing card that was folded and then somehow ended up inside a fresh lemon. Then to everyone's surprise this guy on the right that was called from the audience as a helper ended up proposing to his girlfriend! Nuts!

While I may not have picked that exact day and time to spend a day in Seattle, I'm really glad we had the excuse to escape all of the house drama for a bit. The weather was perfect and the company was even better. So glad we could meet up with Kevin and keep making memories together, even in our new digs!

More from our time in Idaho, and the drive to Washington

Time to play a little bit of catch up on the blog! 

We were so blessed to be able to have a landing spot in Kuna, Idaho while we were trying to figure life out. We spent a bit more than three weeks there. We stayed at Brett and Kristina's house, which was full of family and had plenty of space for us to relax into the house a bit. 

Here are some more pictures from our time there!

Juliet found a praying mantis

Spending time with Nana Dee

So in love with this picture

A trip to Kuna Caves!

If you've never been to Reed's Dairy, go! (they're in Idaho Falls and Kuna)

Don't leave your ice cream close by, Papa Jon might think it's his

Cade and Finn were two peas in a pod during our time there!

After Finn picked up Cade, Dee wanted a turn too! :)

We decided to head out to Washington about two weeks before we closed so that we could start getting things moving for our new house. We had a week in a hotel on base and week in the Bennetts house next up in our places of temporary living.

Here are a few pictures from our drive to Washington from Idaho. We stopped at this "castle" that was way up on a cliffside and took a few pictures. Portland was shortly afterwards, and so was the traffic!

I'm going to do several short blogs about some little adventures we've had while trying to get established here in Washington. Keep checking back!

Moving- Part 3- Boise and Beyond!

Well, I left off our last blog with us ending our road trip in Boise, Idaho. We have been staying here with Dan's sister Kristina while continuing to search for a house. 

Our first weekend in Idaho, Dan and I continued on to Washington so that we could meet our realtor, look at some houses in person, and get a feel for the different areas we had been looking at houses. We drove out Thursday and left the area on Sunday. 

One of the first things we did in Washington was go out to dinner with our good friends Joe and Amy! The Bennett family were our good friends in Colorado and we're super excited to be at the same duty station again!

Amy took us down by one of the many waterfronts to search for crabs and creatures. We'll have to come back when it's low tide, but this is something the kids will love!

That's the puget sound behind us! There may be a lot of traffic, but it is beautiful

This may not be worth two pictures to anyone else, but it's worth like a thousand to me. Way back when, skittles decided to change lime to green apple and it's gross! A few years ago they had a limited release of skittles the way they used to be, but they only had them available for so long. This summer they said they were going to release packages of all lime skittles but we never found any until we were at the PX in Washington! I was so excited I bought all 15 packages they had at the store.... I mean, they were only 75cents too, how could I not!?

Eating skittles the way they were meant to be eaten!

Friday we spent a lot of time in the car and a little bit of time in houses. We drove through Lacey, Olympia, Yelm, Roy and the housing on base. We fell in love with the town of Yelm, and saw that they were having a Jazz in the Park night. We came back to Yelm that evening and had a wonderful night enjoying live music, having homemade kettlecorn, a local pizzeria and browsing some local shops. 

We also realized the the Ft. Lewis army band would be playing at the Jazz night so we had to catch their set! Of course Dan knew like half the soldiers and one of them was even one he had put into the army during his recruiting period! Now he'll be working with him, talk about full circle!

Friday evening we realized that there had been a miscommunication with our realtor and his search parameters had only been showing us houses up to a certain price, but we had room in our budget to go up a bit more. So, probably much to our realtor's dismay, we scheduled 6 more houses to look at with him and 1 rental that could possibly work out as well. (Also, I have to add that we looked at some rental homes on AHRN which is meant for military families, and both houses we were interested in turned out to be terrible experiences. One was a scam where they wanted us to pay the application fee before seeing the place and fill out this word document of questions including our SSN and other sensitive info. The second house, the lady was extremely put off by the fact that we were touring houses to buy and to rent. She waffled back and forth all day as to whether we could come and see the property or not. In the end we never saw the property because we decided we wouldn't want her as our landlord if it was this hard just to work out a showing.)

Saturday was a looooong day spent looking at those houses. We found a few we liked in yelm and one in lacey, but all them needed some work. It's hard to already think about paying this much for a house and have it not be move-in ready, but we also recognize the investment opportunity if we fix it up. We talked with Joe and Amy about it over dinner at their house on Saturday night and decided on Sunday to make an offer on what we call the "Blue Box".

Long story short, our offer was accepted, rescinded and then resubmitted at a lower price, and then the sellers countered with something in between our two offers, which we accepted. We are officially under contract! Earnest money has been paid, inspection is on the 18th and loads of paperwork has been signed already just to get things moving. Closing date is set for September 8th, but since the house is already vacant we're hoping to get in a little bit sooner since that's right when school starts.

And did I mention the house is in Yelm? We're excited to be a little bit out of the busy parts of WA and have that small town feel. And after putting in offers on 8 houses, and spending the last two months working with our realtor, we are so relieved to be taking the next steps in the housing process.

That means we'll be spending a few more weeks here in Boise with family, and we've been making sure to create good memories with them. We're also super stoked to only be 8 hours away from them for visits while we're stationed in WA.

We've been swimming in their backyard pool and hot tub...

Getting acquainted with their family pets- this is their cat pancake. Look how close Carson got!

Dan took all the kids up to Kirkham hot springs. They had a blast!

Alex's allergies were acting up so I had him take a Zyrtec before leaving- maybe not the best idea

Don't worry, they're not dead, lol

Steam coming off the rocks

Think they were a little worn out afterwards?

Motorcycle rides... before said motorcycle was taken away by the insurance!

Celebrating Nana Dee's 84th birthday!

She put the cakes together so she had a better shot at getting all the candles blown out- and she did it!

And getting pedicures!

Transitions are hard. This has been our hardest PCS in our military career, and we know we're not done yet. I would love to fast forward to Thanksgiving our Christmas when all the boxes are unpacked, kids are settled in school, Dan in his unit at work and me... well I'll keep figuring that out. I hope to continue as an accompanist and do some piano lessons as well. Gotta keep up with that cost of living in WA!

Thanks for all the prayers for us to find a home, we are stoked to make this home ours. We'll be painting and carpeting as soon as we close! Anyone wanna help? :)