Japanese Festival

 We went to the Nihon Matsuri Japanese Festival, for the 5th year in a row. P2 loved hiding under our Japanese hats. We ate yummy food and enjoyed watching the drummers. They also had a magician this year, and that was P1's favorite part. He turned a bird into a bunny, and then made it disappear.

Friends

We were blessed with such great friends in our last ward. We will miss being neighbors, but fortunately we didn't move too far away!

Kite Festival

On Saturday, we went to the kite festival! We had a lot of fun! The little kites they give out fly super well! P1 accidentally let go of his, and it tried to fly away. Fortunately, PE had just gotten P2's kite up in the air, and P1's kite wrapped around it, and we were able to pull it back down.

They also had a big blow-up slide. P1 really wanted to go on it, but I knew he would be scared to do it by himself. So we talked it over with him, and he finally got the courage to do it all by himself! He stalled a little bit, halfway up the ladder with a whole bunch of kids behind him. But eventually he made it up, and loved sliding down!

General Conference

As always, General Conference was a treat! We are so privileged to receive prophetic counsel every 6 months. One talk stuck out to me, but I didn't know why because I didn't need it when I heard it. But less than a week later, some things came up and it was just the talk that I needed.

PE pulls out special toys for General Conference. They are toys he played with as a kid. The kids really enjoy this, and P1 has a good enough memory that when we told him we were going to listen to the prophets on TV, he asked if we were going to pull out the special toys.

I love P2's progression in the following pictures:

New Home

Life has been super busy over the past couple months, mostly due to the fact that we just bought our first home!!!

We are super excited about it! It is in a great neighborhood with lots of kids. And we have a park just a few houses down the street! The yard is great, with beautiful trees and flowers. We love the layout on the inside, because it's nice and open! And it's all one level, yay! And it came with a free lawn mower, which we discovered in our shed!

Buying a home has been quite the adventure. I have definitely seen the hand of the Lord in it. We felt impressed to start looking for a home 2+ years ago, but never found anything that worked. But we did discover that my credit information wasn't being reported to the credit bureaus. So we were able to get that fixed, and I believe that is why we felt like we needed to look for a house then.

A couple of months ago, a really cute house popped up that I just loved! (It's is actually also in the same neighborhood.) I felt strongly that we needed to go see it. Well, it wasn't the one for us, but that's where we met our mortgage lender. We had been shopping around for the best mortgage lender, and this guy ended up being the one we felt best about.

When our house popped up, it was when my husband and I were both sitting at the computer. I flipped through the pictures, and we both really loved it. We saw it the next day, and put an offer in that night. We were 1 of 4 offers before it had been listed for 24 hours. Our offer was chosen, on the condition that we move up some of the deadlines. So as soon as we were under contract, we had to hurry and get the home inspection and appraisal done. So we have been busy, busy!

There really has been some divine timing in all of this. Another example of this is that you are not supposed to change jobs while buying a house, or your loan might get denied. Well, the day after we closed on the home, PE was contacted by someone that wanted to offer him a job. A job that he was offered 6 months ago, and we have regretted not taking. So PE will start a new job at the end of this month! Lot's of exciting new things for our family!