Signs of Life : The Brownie Chronicles

My older three kids plus their cousin, D! Have I mentioned how much we love Austin?  Well, we do!  We adore this house.  Of all 3 homes we've owned, this is by far my favorite!  While I did really enjoy our location and pool in Highland Village, this house is arranged better and is easier to maintain.  In our 15 years of marriage and ownership of 3 homes, we've learned that extensive landscaping is beautiful, but also costly and a ton of work!  We have a few pretty shrubs and plants in the front yard.  There are two trees in the back, but otherwise, it's just a grassy backyard, which means easy maintenance.  Of course, we have the fabulous team at The Austin Lawn Service taking care of our mowing and trimming, so the amount of work we have to do in the yard is minimal. We had hoped for a one-story home, but with the layout of this house, we don't mind two stories at all.  The stairs lead to an open "balcony" hallway that looks down to ...

Ken and I have started that exciting and horrible search for a home in Austin.  It can be so much fun, but also tedious and disheartening at times. Over our 15 years of marriage, Ken and I have learned a few things about the difference in wants and needs in a home.  We've also learned (the hard way) that some of the wants that we felt were needs end up being a big, expensive pain in the rear!! (Beautiful, extensive landscaping for example.) We adored our home in Highland Village.  It served us well for the 4 years we lived there.  The neighborhood, the pool, the schoolroom, the location were all dreamy!  Then we hit the jackpot finding this place to rent.  It was scary to move from a pretty big house on a half acre into an apartment, but the Regency has been an excellent home.  I'd recommend this place to anyone moving to the Coppell area. We had our share of trouble with neighborhood kids, but that has all died down.  The kids have foun...

Whew! *big sigh* After six months of paper-chasing, the adoption documents are out of our hands.  You may remember that we sent all of our sealed documents , called our dossier, to CCAI (adoption agency) over a month ago, but there were several mistakes we had to resolve.  The biggest mistake was our medical forms being incorrect.  We had a few other delays thanks to Snowpocalypse 2011.  Chinese New Year is coming to a close, therefore documents will begin again flowing in China. CCAI will have our corrected documents tomorrow and should be able to send them to China next week! That's our prayer and we are trusting it will be so!  I'm still working on ways to add tabs to this site to I can move our prayer request and process pages, but until the, you'll find them by following the links. Today marked showing #17. We have another showing scheduled for Saturday, then an open house Sunday.  This open house is a "Paint the Town Red" event for other Kelle...