Real Friends

I know it's been awhile since my last post. Things have been very busy around the Pritchard household lately. Mostly, we've been working on planning a big, fat, fabulous 30th birthday party for our dear friend Rebecca. The party was on Friday night, and it was wonderful. Everything went just the way we wanted it to. We spent about 4 months planning and preparing for this party, and part of me is kind of sad that it's over! But it really was a perfect evening- good weather, good food, good friends, and I think our friend Rebecca felt really loved and special, which was the entire goal of the party, so that was awesome. I could go into lots of detail about the party, but what I really want to say about it is this: Planning a party of this scale is a lot of work. I won't lie. It's lots of hard work. But I can not tell you what an absolute joy and pleasure it was for us to be able to do this for Rebecca. And I'm not just saying that to try to sound nice. I really mean it. When you have someone in your life that you care about as much as we care about her, it really is a joy to be able to do something fabulous to bless them. Rebecca's friendship has been such a blessing to me over the past 10 years that I can't even begin to show her how much I care about her-- a big party is just the tip of the iceberg! Everyone should have a friend as great as Rebecca. That would be awesome! Thanks, Jeanne, for being such a fabulous, lifetime friend! I love you! Hooray for God for picking us to be friends!

I'll try to post pictures from the party soon... but I'll have to get some from Jason first, because I was so busy, I forgot to take any!

Also, in case you are curious, all is well with our house-buying process. It appraised for $7,000 more than we're paying for it, and we close on September 15th. Thank you for your prayers!

Home Owners?

I love the Northwest. I love how we have 4 distinct seasons, and it never gets super duper hot or cold. I love the trees and the mountains, the lakes and the rivers, the plants and the flowers. I love Seattle and Portland. This is a great, great place to live! But we pay for it, don't we? I am overwhelmed by how expensive everything is. Since I got married, I've really been feeling like we will just be stuck renting forever (think squints from The Sandlot- FOR-EV-VER). Home ownership just seemed like such an unattainable goal. I didn't know what to do to even begin to reach it. However, my best friend from forever happens to do home loans for a living. So, we set up a meeting with her this past Saturday to discuss what we could qualify for, how we could make it work, etc. To be honest, I thought we would be at least a year out from even being able to seriously think about buying a house. But she is really good at her job and encouraged us and helped us figure out a way to get into a house. So, we thought we'd start looking around. We drove around town looking at what was for sale. And then we found it. The one and only house in our price range happened to be a well-kept, super-cute 1926 craftsman. Tiny, but that's all we need right now. So we put in an offer. CRAZY! Our real estate agent (whose kids I baby-sat for 8 years before college) said we're not going to see anything else like this come around for awhile, if ever. So we went for it. They accepted our offer! Our inspection is on Sunday afternoon, so hopefully that will go perfectly and as of September 15th we will be homeowners! Any prayers you could offer up on our behalf would be very much appreciated. Here is a picture of what will hopefully be our first home:



Hooray for God for answering our prayers and helping us get out of the rent cycle and for providing all of our needs and a lot of our wants!

*** Update *** We had our inspection yesterday. The current owners are going to do a couple of small things for us like getting the chimney cleaned, but other than that, we're set. Now we just have to wait for the appraisal from our lender, and then we will be done and we should close on September 15th. Hooray!