Easter Weekend

Well, Easter was our last holiday here in Pennsylvania. Knowing that, we invited my parents, Mindy, and Von down to stay with us for the weekend. We had a great time. They all traveled down on Friday night just before Ryan had to leave for work. We ordered pizzas and watched Mindy and Von's wedding video that Ryan had just finished earlier that day.

On Saturday mom and Mindy wanted to head to the mall (the shopping in Williamsport is seriously sad, people--Exton is practically the holy grail). Surprisingly enough, all of the boys joined us. They bailed out when it came time to head over to Babies R Us, though, and went to Barnes & Noble instead. Mindy's registered at Babies R Us and wanted to take a look at some of their stuff (again, Williamsport--the closest Babies R Us is 60 miles away..)

Here's a pic of Mindy in all her pregnant cuteness.



That picture was taken over a month ago (in their new house!). Can you believe she still has two months to go?

After almost dying from cuteness overload we headed back to the apartment and invited Ryan's family over for dinner. My dad made lasagna and we all had a great time, except Shanna who had to be at school (what is wrong with these colleges? Geez.)

The next morning we headed to the Joseph's after church and enjoyed an amazing Easter dinner before my family had to leave to get back home. It was a really great weekend. I'm so glad we were able to spend it with both of our families all together. I know that holidays in the future are going to be tricky and it was wonderful that our last one here could be so memorable.

Speaking of which, the best quote of the weekend goes to my mom: "You could have hyphenated your name and been Stroble-Wubbles."
You definitely had to be there, but trust me, it was hilarious.

Number of boxes packed to date: 8

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Blogs and Websites We'll be Reading After We Move

After we move, Shelsy and I both really want to stay in touch with friends and family back here in the frigid North. :-) We already follow blogs from quite a few of you, but if there are more, we want to know about them!

So, if you're blog or website isn't on the list, let us know about it in the comments! Or send us an email! After we have a good list made, I'll add a Links page and make that little Links button to the right actually work. :-)

Friends' Blogs that we currently read:

Matt and Meg Hayes
Sarah Sharp
Joel Petit (hasn't updated in a year, I'm giving him a hard time)
Steve and Katie
Kristen Chase
Life in Philly
College Shambles (yeah, even though we're not in college anymore, I still read it)

So...did I miss anyone? Let me know if you've got a blog or website that we can read after we move!

Top Ten Memories with Friends

A quick disclaimer. If I were to include memories with just my family, this post would never be possible...there's no way I could narrow it down to 10. Maybe I'll post again later about good memories with just my family, but for now, in the interest of brevity, I'm sticking to memories with friends. :-)

This list was very hard to make. And I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I forgot. If you can think of a glaring event I forgot, let me know in the comments!

So, here we go, in no particular order:

1. The NYC E-Team
   One of the best trips I've ever been on, hands down. From inside jokes to trivia from Joseph (Grocery), it was simply a blast. And it was amazing to see God work in the Brooklyn area through the church there. It was a lime green, hot chocolaty, harkin' good time, and I'll never forget it.
2. Camp Sankanac
   Those of you that are smiling and nodding already know exactly why this is on the list. Some of the best homeschool memories happened there including tipped boats, hayrides, and the scare-the-moms wire bridge. And who could forget Mr. Jan's speech and running to claim canoes during lunch?
3. Homeschool Plays
   I thought long and hard about whether to pick one individual play or to lump them all together...and I just couldn't pick one over the others. They each had their unforgettable moments, including Aaron's angel song, Noah's performance as GT, the fog rolling off into the crowd, and Mr. Parris dismissing us by animal group when I was the donkey.
4. YouthCamp '99
   Far and above my favorite year at YouthCamp. Who can beat having Eric Carey as a team leader and the only guys on the team being myself, Curtis, Ian Morris and Mike DiMaio? We even got to help Mr. Isabel in the kitchen one day. This was also the year of the legendary, "Mike DiMaio threw a rock in my cabin!" (during which, I was in said cabin), and the year of the turtle in my sleeping bag. Going to Hershey Park was icing on the cake.
5. Six Flags
   I guess we mostly went with the O'Neill's, but there were quite a few times we went with groups of friends as well. Such immortal jokes as "hey, look, vandalism!" and "it's in the water" were born there, as well as Aaron's incredible ability to locate money on the bottom of the wave pool.
6. Hanging out at the Welch's
   I know it sounds cliche, but it really was a lot of fun. From ever so briefly writing that book with Jonah, to learning the joys of a fine cigar, to filming Stacie's song, a lot happened there. It's also where I first started hanging out with Shelsy, so it's definitely gotta' make the list. :-)
7. Fort Night
   Pure fun, through and through. This night involved zero sleep and lots of Halo all while under carefully put together blanket forts. No, this wasn't when we were little...this was only five or six years ago. The most memorable part of the night, by far, was enjoying donuts Mat had salvaged from the Dunkin Donuts dumpster.
   
8. Celebration
   Again, I couldn't come up with a specific year that I remembered more than the rest. There are just so many memories from various years at Celebration that I had to include them all. From playing Ultimate Frisbee on the football field, to getting Taco Bell late in the evening, to climbing to the top of the bleachers and watching the white fans wave below. I actually got really nostalgic about Celebration earlier today.
9. Driving to Pittsburgh with Mat
   Back in the day, when Mat still worked at PALCS, we took a trip to Pittsburgh for the grand opening of the office out there. And we took our trip in a 26 foot Penske truck loaded to the brim with furniture. We stayed with one of the employees that night and drove the truck back the next day after off loading and assembling the furniture in the still-under-construction mall. That was a fun trip!
10. Christmas Craft Workshop
    Who can forget this staple event? From the original days of having it in the side room at the Community Center, then moving into the gym, then finally to the new building. Carrying our various creations over to our paper bags, moving up through the grades until we were finally with the older kids making awesome woodworking projects with my dad. Quality events...and I still wish I were young enough to attend.
    

So there you have it. How'd I do? If you think I missed something, leave a comment and tell me about it! :-)

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Our Apartment

We got our application for the apartment in the mail yesterday. I was pretty excited because the woman I talked to said she would include a brochure. I don't think this place has a website, so we haven't even seen any pictures so far (scary, I know) and I was excited to see the pictures in the brochure. Well. Standards for brochure-making apparently aren't very high at this place. It's just a tri-folded piece of card stock with some colorless floorplans and a map. A few lines of text here and there, their phone number and address, and that's it. The images aren't even lined up with the folds, so some of them creep over onto other sides of the brochure. Ryan made a comment that maybe they'd hire him to do graphic/web design.

Oh well. My disappointment at having no pictures to look at was pretty much immediately forgotten as I excitedly pored over the floor plan for the model we are hoping to get. That's it in the picture. Isn't it wonderful?!

Let's go over some of the finer details:

- a porch!
- a window in the kitchen! that looks out onto the porch!
- it looks to me like there are double sinks in the kitchen. yay!!!
- a patio!
- a third bedroom! (kind of obvious, but it's a big step up for us. :-)
- a linen closet! I feel weird being excited about that, but we don't have one now, so it must be exciting
- do you see the size of that closet in the master bedroom?! it's almost the size of the bathroom!!!
- it appears that there are two windows in the master bedroom: one regular window and a sliding glass door that leads to the...
- terrace! I don't even know what a terrace is, but look at it! It's huge, whatever it is, and sounds AWESOME.

So, um, yeah. Needless to say I'm pretty excited. I would still have liked some pictures, but I'll make due with this for now.

Number of boxes packed to date: 2

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We Found A Place To Live!

This is NOT it. :-) But we do think we managed to find a nice apartment for us. It started with us going to Panera (for the free WiFi) and looking up apartments. After we came up with a nice looking list, I set to work the next day calling them all--asking a series of pre-determined questions. After a few hours I had a pretty good idea of which places I liked and which were definite NOs. Our #1 choice turned out to have REALLY bad reviews on apartmentratings.com. So we started using that site as a reference for which places we should be looking at more closely.

Then we found a place with 80% satisfaction--the highest on the site. From the reviews, everyone loved living there--many of them had been living there for a decade or more. But when I called for more information the woman told me that we probably wouldn't get a 3 bedroom. She had been working there for 4 years and had only seen one 3 bedroom become available. From the reviews, it sounded like this place is pretty hard to get in to. Plus, they only require 30 days notice for their tenants to get out of their lease, so she wouldn't know what the availability would be for May until the beginning of April.

Ryan and I decided that since this place sounded so nice, we would try calling at the beginning of March as well as the beginning of April just to see if there was anything available. So I called on Monday just to see and she said she had a 3 bedroom and a 2 bedroom available. I could hardly believe it. So we had her reserve it for us while we overnighted our security deposit and she mailed us an application.

So we're really close to having a home! I'm a little nervous about moving into a place I've never seen before, and I'm still hoping we can have a chance to go down sometime before we move just to see it. But I don't know if that's going to happen. So I'm just going to trust that this is the right place for us--I mean, the fact that there was a 3 bedroom available is just one more example of God working things out for us.

The last big piece of the puzzle we still need to figure out is employment. Ryan has a few options he's looking into, and I'm hoping for some kind of singer/performer/character role at Disney (one can hope, right?) so I'll probably wait until we move so I can audition. Then if that doesn't pan out I guess I'll look into some other options. But I have faith that these little details will work themselves out in time. :-)

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Thanks for the Replies!

It didn't take long after I sent the big email yesterday before the replies started coming in. Shelsy and I were both very encouraged by the number of friends who replied to my email with messages of support and love. It means a lot that our friends want to encourage and support us even though they may not like the decision.

There are definitely some replies that I need to share, though. First of all, the award for the very first reply goes to...Grant Clark! And now, some notable quotes from the reply emails:

"The weather will be much better, huh??" --Matt Hayes

"Please add us to your “encouraging and supportive, but obviously sad” list!" --Mick Burke

"So, do you think that extra room is big enough for my family?" -- Kenny Lynch

"I think that Metro Life should give you a membership signing bonus and also that we as a church should get some kind of monetary dividends from them!" --Jamie Leach

"That is cool as nails dude!" --Nick DiMaio

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The Saga Begins

Well, here it is, our brand new website. I hope it helps you all follow along with our moving adventure. Shelsy and I will both be updating the site as often as we can...which shouldn't be too hard, because there's a lot to tell.

We'll also be posting some other fun stuff, too, such as our favorite memories of living here, or videos of me trying to get all of my computer junk to fit in just one box. :-)

It's definitely our desire to stay in touch with all of our friends and family up in the frigid North. I'll have you know that the high in Orlando tomorrow is 84. Just sayin'.

Stay tuned, the adventure is just getting started!

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