The First of Many

On Friday it was time to say my first "Good-bye." It wasn't easy, but I made it through with only a few tears. For the past 2 years we've been participating in Parent's As Teachers through our local school district. This has meant a weekly play group and monthly meetings with "Miss Nicole." Friday was our last play group of the year and since we will be leaving at the end of June we won't be able to participate in the summer playgroup that runs through July.

We also held a garage sale yesterday. We did pretty well. We sold our bedroom furniture (everything but the bed which we are keeping), our kitchen table (we have the card table for our dining table now), lots of yard tools, and various other odds and ends. We have also given away all the baby clothes (so unless there is a major surprise we are done in the baby department). But there is still so much left to sell we will probably have another sale in a few weeks. We want to take as little as possible with us and then, as we can afford to, buy new and in the mean time we will go without.

I think we have decided to not live in Buckeye for the first year. It is a hard decision since that means Jon will take our only car to and from work everyday leaving me without transportation, but in an apartment complex with a pool and playground I am sure we can keep busy. Also if we are lucky we will be close enough to a bus line and be able to get around the Phoenix area pretty easily. Buckeye apartments are limited to only a few places and they are priced a bit higher than we'd like to pay so if we get a little closer to civilization we can find a more reasonable rate for rent.

After a year we will try and buy in Buckeye on an incredible HUD program called Teacher Next Door, where we can buy a HUD home at a 50% discount as long as we live there 3 years and it's within the district boundaries. Some friends of mine in AZ say that there housing prices are still falling so waiting a year will get us an even better price!

That is about all there is to report now. Tuesday I plan to call several apartment places but worst case we have found one that sounds alright enough for a year. And of course we try and pack up more stuff every day. Slowly but surely, this is going to happen.

Things are slowly getting packed up, about 1/5 of our garage is storing packed boxes just waiting for moving day.