2008 In Review

2008 turned out to be a pretty busy year. We thought it might be a little more calm than 2007 was after all of our travel, but we were wrong! :)

In January we found out that Christine was pregnant. That started the work in our old house to start making sure we had room for the upcoming addition to our family. We cleaned out the room Christine used as an office and we used the treadmill in, planning on making it a nursery.

We cleaned a lot of stuff out and went through the rest of the house and had a pretty good sized yard sale. This turned out to be the most expensive yard sale you could imagine! One of the items we had was our old treadmill. The lady that ended up buying it couldn't fit it into her car, but we offered to drive it out to her house. So later that afternoon we drove out to her house. We noticed that there was some new house construction in the area, but the last time we looked at hew houses was during the middle of the housing boom and prices were crazy. We thought we'd stop and take a look just to see what prices were like. We were pretty surprised at how much prices had fallen. Two weeks later we had written an earnest check for a new house!

We had thought we'd look around some before then, so it wasn't completely out of nowhere, but we happened to stumble into the right situation with a spec home at a pretty good price that would be ready in plenty of time for us to get settled before Zach was born. So we had to move quick to get our old house ready to sell as soon as possible. We rented a storage unit and cleaned the house out as much as we could, had the entire interior of the house painted, and did some landscaping work. After a few weeks we were ready to put the For Sale sign up!

We were lucky enough to get the house sold for most of what we were asking for after only 3 weeks. The timing couldn't have worked out any better since they wanted to close about two weeks after we closed on our new house. Thanks to a lot of help from friends and family, we were able to get moved in without too many problems (though there's still a mess in the garage....).

Also during this time, I accepted a new job. I was given the chance to work from home doing some web development and database work while doing some management work that would be similar to what I was doing when I left my job at Lockheed Martin. With Zach on the way, this was a great thing to come along! So now I get to work from home and be around during the day to see what's going on. Sure beats the 1 hour+ commute!

And the biggest news of all, Zach was born September 12th! He was 22 inches long and weighed 8 lbs 3 ounces, even though he was almost 3 weeks early. Christine had to be induced because of her blood pressure being really high, but everyone is healthy and is doing really well. It's amazing how much Zach has grown and changed in just 3 and a half months! We can even tell a difference week to week sometimes. He's been really easy on us too. He's been sleeping through the night for a while now, sometimes as long as 9 hours or more. And he's almost always in a good mood. Unless he's hungry, then watch out! :)

So 2008 was a pretty busy, but great year. We're hoping to have even more fun in 2009!