back it up!

Where has the week gone??
Wasn't it JUST Monday? I really hope the whole summer doesn't fly by this fast!

Okay, just to organize my thoughts a bit...
pictures and posts:
my only goals for today were to both edit pictures and play with my camera. I have hundreds of pictures from the last two weeks or so and I need to go through and edit, crop, delete, etc. and I just keep putting it off. So today was my day to get them all transferred onto the computer and dive right in. Also, staying in the photo mode, I was going to take some time to really play around with my new camera and try a few things out, get a little more comfortable venturing out of the auto settings and to really start learning and practicing. Anyway, started a little of that, but then went to go look for my owners manual to help me quickly figure out how to adjust little things here and there, and I can't find it anywhere. I guess we re-organized the house a little too well. So I'm just a little frustrated at the moment and I need to just step away from the camera. I have some pics to share from the last few days (and of course catch up on my record no pics over here), but I'm going to take a break and hopefully get back to those this evening.
Other things I've been meaning to post about (and will elaborate on later):

• We had a little "pool party" over here yesterday with some friends, so I have a few pics to share from that.
• Savannah's last day of preschool today
  
• We're mostly healed up... Ryan's back to walking (and driving)

And I'll try to stop babbling so much and post more pictures.
More pictures of the cute kids-- not the ugly feet. I promise LOL!


BUT for now...
the biggest news...
AMAZING news...

We sold our house!
It is amazing. It was on the market for less than a week, which is an absolute miracle around here. (Have I mentioned how saturated the market is around here and how long people sit with their houses listed? There are houses still for sale right now that we walked through when we were looking for this one 14 months ago.) And it's not even like we had it priced real low, which is what a lot of people ask when they hear how fast it went. It was actually priced a lot higher than the realtors and assements projected.
It went on the market a week ago Monday (but was under the wrong address, so it didn't even come up in any area searches for days after that) and we then had an Open House on Sunday which brought 10 couples through. One of those couples left the open house talking about making an offer and made an appointment to come back the next morning with their realtor. Monday morning they were in our house for two hours(!!) and our realtor had an offer in her hand from them not an hour later. Granted, it wasn't a full price offer, but we did a bit of negotiating and came out quite satisfied.
Like I said before, we weren't terribly worried about the house sale thing, as if we couldn't sell it on our own by the time we left Pfizer would buy us out (we would lose no money) and take care of it. But there were incentives to selling it on our own before that time, not the least of which being actually selling it for more than we paid last year.
We were honestly counting on ending up selling it to Pfizer because of the market around here, and even if we did happen to find a buyer to pay the price we were asking in the limited amount of time we had, still the majority of perspective buyers here make offers contingent on the sale of their home, which we couldn't accept going through the relocation benefits. And which we wouldn't want to accept even if we could because like I said, houses don't sell around here!
Our buyers just moved here from Idaho and have been renting for the past three months and were really anxious to find a house-- perfect for us!
Also we close on our new house June 25th. Our buyers wanted to be out of their rental June 25th and pushed for an "early" closing of June 22nd-- perfect for us! We were having to stay up here through July, but now Ryan simply let his 'higher-ups' know that we have to be out of our house by then and they shuffled things around a bit so he can leave mid-June. The movers will get everything off, we'll close on this house on Friday the 22nd, have the weekend to take a nice leisurely drive down to St. Louis and be just in time to close on our new house on Monday. Could the timing have worked out any better?!

It's just so nice to not have to worry about any of this house stuff any more. To not have to keep the house up and be ready for realtors and buyers to come through, to not have to decide how to deal with our realtor (we were having some ISSUES with her), to just not have to wonder what's going to happen.
We are amazed that it all worked out so fast. And so perfectly. I can't believe it.
But then again, it's not so amazing; not so unbelievable. God really does have His hand in all of this. I'm just so thankful for the nice reminder.
Thanks for your prayers!