It's Halloweeeeen Time....

All day yesterday I could hear that old disney commercial ringing in my head :) Not too much of an eventful day. Laid around with Adam and watched football...okay, let me rephrase...I laid around, Adam (and Nolan) sat on the edge of the couch and frequently stood up, paced around, jumped a little bit, swore, screamed and occassionally clapped. Our Hawks came out on top again after waiting to kick it into gear in the third and fourth quarter of the game. Typical :) But they did it, and we're 9&0 and that's all that matters. My husband thinks he's going to plan a trip to the Rose Bowl. I think he's cutting it awfully close and he's not leaving me here by myself with a newborn and an episiotomy. Hopefully Hayden will show up early enough that this won't be a problem and I won't have to feel like the mean wife keeping my husband from doing something that he really would like to do. We will see. It's all up to baby from here. Hubby needs to submit to that a little bit, I'm thinking. The lil' guy is in control now :)

I didn't even shower yesterday until well after 2, but I did get some important tasks done...o, like paying bills, etc. We finally did get around and take the kids out trick or treating. We stopped at The District, which is like a little boutiquey area right by our home. They were having a Halloween event, and before going, it seemed like a good idea, but after standing in line for 5 minutes with no movement toward collecting candy...we said forget it and jaunted up to our old neighborhood. Glad we did. But it made me sad to be walking around up there. We even trick or treated at our old house, which interestingly enough the reason we were pushed so hard into finding our house so quickly was because we were renting when we first moved to Vegas. That first year was whent he housing market took a dump. I remember when we first moved here and we really loved the neighborhood we were renting in, and the house we were living in, so I would keep my eye out for homes for sale around the neighborhood. Most of them were $600,00 or more at that time. Yeah, felt like we would rent forever and never be able to own a home! Then the bottom fell out and everyone started going into foreclosure...including our landlord. It was good that prices came down, but what a load of stress all at once. We got really clouded by alot of things, like square footage, and size of the yard, and upgrades, and of course now that we've lived outside our neighborhood and paid the price of living in a larger house, we wish we would have purchased a smaller home in our old neighborhood. Especially now that things are really at the bottom, and we could buy a really nice upgraded home for $250-350,00 in our old neigborhood). At the time all this was happening, of course everyone thought that the market had crashed at the bottom. No such the case. The day we found out our rental house was going into foreclosure, Adam and I had just gotten married, and had only been back from our weddingmoon for a few days...in fact it was Valentine's day the night we found out about our landlord's shortcomings. We had gone out to dinner, and when we got home we checked the mail only to find the Notice of Sale for the property we were renting in the mail. Talk about a big slap in the face. So we started looking for a home. Which turned into a nightmare. We literally put in 6 offers only to sit and wait for the banks to come back with either an acceptance or denial. This is two people with clean credit, and a VA Loan with a guarantee. How much more did they want? The problem was they just weren't doing anything, and at the time they were trying to get bidding wars going. I so hate banks. Some of them we never heard back from :( So we found our house and probably acted a little prematurely on it. It was clean, neutral, and it had decent landscaping as well as a few "upgrades". The price was right, and it was owner occupied, which meant the offer being accepted wasn't up to the bank, and we knew our file wasn't going to sit on someones desk for 6 months before they decided to open it and make a decision. So we jumped on it and got it right away. Now we're learning the previous owners did some quick fixes to get the house sold & yeah...some of those upgrades...whatever...again cheap quick fixes to make the house seem more appealing. Because those things were cheap quick fixes...of course they are starting to fall apart rapidly. Grrrrrrr. So it made our visit last night to our old neighborhood a little bitter sweet. How I miss our old neighborhood. We stopped and said hi to a few of our neighbors. We did find out the house we had rented was finally going to auction ( 2 years later!?) The guy that was now renting it is trying to buy it but because it was owned by a man with several properties that had a "property management company" it's tied up with a bunch of the other properties, and it's making it near impossible for him to buy...so thus the auction next month. It's a cute little house in a prime location....wish we had some investment funds set aside to put in for it!

They had the whole street shut down and blocked off and everyone was tailgaiting out in their driveways. There were little hay bails set up all over the street, and a vendor was selling hot dogs and icees and all kinds of fun stuff. Some people had moved their portable fire pits to the middle of the street and were roasting marshmallows, and making smores, and someone had set up a huge projection screen on their garage door and the kids were all gathered around on hail bails watching Casper. That's the kind of neighborhood we used to live in. I so wish we could sell our house and move back up there. It's only a matter of three blocks...but the feeling of the neighborhood is so much more "together". We have nice neighbors here, but they're all older, and not so much into doing cool stuff for the kids. And all the younger families had the same idea we did by going somewhere else to trick or treat.

Adam and I have made it a goal that by the time Hayden is 5, we will sell this monster energy sucking home (ugh..yeah...this is just how energy sucking it is...in 2 months...just our electric bill alone was over $1,000! And that was keeping the thermostat set at 80!) We want to move back up to our old community and settle into a smaller, more comfortable, more energy efficient one story and have our elementary school that we love so much, back. Another reason we're not so enamored with our house any longer...when we first moved in, we were still in our old neighborhood's elementary school area...and within 6 months they re-adjusted the zoning, and zoned us out! We're closer to the elementary now, than we were then, too!! Another big fat grrrrrrrr! O, if we could have it all to do over again. I'm praying for a recovery soon for the housing market. We now need to do some projects to fix our home up, as since we've moved in all the flooring has started to buckle and come up on the first floor. Our french doors on the back of the house have all but fallen apart in a heap, the dishwasher is crapped out, and we're worried about the two air conditioning units pooping out on us, too. So we have some things to do before we could sell anyway.UGH! Sometimes I hate home ownership...honestly besides the "tax deduction", which being 40 grand upside down already, and needing to invest at least half of that amount in projects to get the house up to par, I'm not seeing the benefit any longer. At least not in Las Vegas. But, whatever. We could be in a much worse position. We know people that are 100-200,000 upside down and the banks don't give a shit. Somehow if our house wasn't falling apart it might seem a little easier to take that we are upside down already.