Birmingham and Blessings

So, it feels real now. Birmingham is going to be our home for a year! Last weekend Mark and I made a trip to Birmingham to look for housing. The blessing is instead of feeling overwhelmed and sad, I got a bit excited. We found an excellent area to live in with parks, churches, shopping, and dining all within walking distance. AND the house we ended up finding is amazing! We still can't believe it's real! We spent Friday touring the area and a few houses with a realtor we had contacted and decided upon the area of Homewood to live. If anyone needs a realtor in Birmingham, Jill Upchurch is awesome! It was great to get a feel for the area before we made a decision. We decided to buy internet in our room so that we could make more contacts and look up housing on Craig's List a few more times. It paid off. Saturday we drove around Homewood and called and called and called some more. We even knocked on a few doors with "For Rent" signs in the yard. We saw a lot of cute houses, a few not-so-cute houses, a townhouse, a couple roaches, and a lot of TINY houses. But all the calls and planning and hours on Craig's List and driving paid off and we found a great place with tons of space, a GARAGE (unsual in this area) and a huge space above the garage for guests! (PLEASE come visit us!!!) God has blessed us and made me feel like I will be okay there! Now we just need to find a preschool for Annika. Mark and I enjoyed our time getting to know the area, getting confused by my stellar navigational skills, and having time just the two of us to have dinner and discuss our day! Annika and Cole made lots of memories at Grandpa and Grandma Bouman's house---thanks g'pa and g'ma! (Grandma, Cole was looking for you the next night so you could read him a story...just thought you'd like to know!).