Kolby's First Webb Family Vacation

We were hanging out with my parents and Brad & Remy the other night and started reminiscing about our first vacation as a family of 7. It was August 2007 and Brad & Remy were weeks away from their wedding date and Kolby & I were just a few months away from ours. We took a trip to Wyoming to visit Yellowstone and spend some time horseback riding at a dude ranch. My family is pretty crazy and isn't really risk-averse so our vacations typically end up a little on the wild side. This took some 'getting used to' for Kolby.

Our first stop was in Jackson Hole, WY and our first activity was a whitewater rafting trip... on which Kolby managed to fall out of the raft. Poor kid. It was the very first day of his very first Webb family vacation--- you would have thought he could have lasted a little longer than that! We still all laugh every time we think about it and we laugh especially hard every time we look at the pictures.

When we got the pictures out to look (and laugh) at the other night, I decided to scan them and subsequently decided to post them here for everyone to enjoy. These pictures were taken by the rafting company, FYI.

Picture 1: The whole family happily paddling along with our guide. Starting at the back left there's me, Mom, Brad, Remy, Russell, Dad, and Kolby. We were about to hit a pretty big swell so we voted for Remy to move to the front and just ride the raft like a buckin' bronco. So far, Kolby looks like he's hanging in there.Picture 2: We approach the swell--- Remy gets thrown forwards while Kolby quietly slips out the back. This picture cracks me up because it looks like there's nothing too crazy going on with the raft yet Kolby somehow loses his hold and has no hope of recovering it. We hadn't even hit the swell yet.Picture 3: NO IDEA what's happening here.

Picture 4: ????? Seriously???
Picture 5: I was the ONLY person who knew Kolby had fallen out (I watched the whole thing happen... see pictures 3&4!). Everyone had their eyes locked on Remy (even the guide) to see if she'd be able to hang on, which she did. In this picture you can see I'm frantically looking for Kolby in the direction he had fallen out but he was resurfacing (rather creepily) on the opposite side of the raft. Mom and Brad had NO IDEA that he had fallen out nor that they were banging him with their paddles! Picture 6: The front of the boat is laughing at Remy's wild ride, Mom is trying to figure out what keeps getting in the way of her paddle, and I am SCREAMING "Kolby fell out!!!" at the top of my lungs. All this happened in a split second but it seemed like an eternity before I could get anyone to realize Kolby was gone. At this point, our guide was the only one to notice Kolby clinging to the side of the raft for dear life.

Once I realized where Kolby was, I grabbed him by the life jacket and pulled him out of the water and into the raft in no time. The guide had hollered for me to let go of him and he said that he'd pull him in once we got through the rapids but I was not about to let him spend one more second outside that raft. Talk about the power of adrenaline... I pulled him up and out of that water completely by myself. [And he's not small... just take a look at picture 4 again.] If not adrenaline, it could have also been the power of a bride-to-be who already had her wedding dress and was NOT about to lose her fiancee that gave me the strength to get Kolby back in the raft. Either way, he made it back safely and lived to tell "his side" of the story. Basically, he just never thought he (or anyone) would actually fall out so he wasn't hanging on that tight. He fell (flipped?) out and wound up resurfacing underneath our raft but had the presence of mind to guide himself to the edge while even remembering to keep his legs up so they didn't get caught on any rocks. He said it all happened too fast for him to be scared and all he could think about was how cold the water was.

Such a trooper!

Lost and Found

We celebrated Kolby's 24th birthday on Thursday by heading out to the Rangers game with his family.
Check out these great seats!

The game was great, the weather wasn't too hot, and the Rangers won.

Unfortunately, when we called my parents on our way home to check on Maya we found out that she had escaped from their backyard. We rushed home to look for her and searched the neighborhood until 1 am with no avail. We had to go to bed that night knowing she was out on the streets somewhere which was NOT fun. We woke up at dawn yesterday morning to start our search again. I made signs to put up everywhere hoping someone might have spotted her at some point and could give us a clue as to what part of the neighborhood she was running around in.

It wasn't long before my phone started ringing with calls from people who had seen her at some point in the night. Then we finally got a call from a lady who was on a walk and had just seen her on the street that my parents' house backs up to. So we headed that direction and got another call minutes later from a man who had her by the collar at his yard sale. I guess she was just in dire need of a garden gnome to give Kolby for his birthday.

As much as we brag about Maya for being the best dog ever, she does have ONE awful flaw. When she escapes (which isn't very often- it had been almost a year this time), she is in no hurry whatsoever to come home. Although she has a great sense of direction and we never find her more than a few blocks from home, she gets on her own time frame and likes to soak up the freedom for as long as she possibly can. It's annoying to say the least.

So Happy Birthday, Kolby! And Maya says she's sorry for ruining it there at the end.

New House!

I thought I'd share some more details about our new house in case anyone is interested.

It is a pier & beam house (I'm still not totally sure what exactly that means, but I know it is an alternative to a slab foundation), was built in 1957, and has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. There is a nice-sized living room and a there is a large breakfast area off the kitchen where we'll put our dining table. The entry, living room, hallway, and bedrooms have the original hardwood floors. The house is in really great condition and the sellers have made a lot of updates during the 9 years that they've been there.

The kitchen cabinets are original, but there are new granite countertops (AWESOME!), a new tumbled marble backsplash, and new ceramic tile floors. The sink, electric cooktop, and dishwasher are new as well. Here is a picture of the kitchen (all these pictures are from the listing website):
The sellers completely remodeled both bathrooms (down to the studs). These first pictures are of the guest bathroom, but I wish I could post pictures from a typical bathroom in a 1950s house to make you appreciate how amazing these bathrooms are. The bathrooms in the other houses we had looked at were AWFUL. We love the beadboard (which is also in the breakfast area) and the tiled tub and the vanity area. And the new ceramic tile floors. We pretty much love everything the current owners have done to update the house, which is so great.

Below are a couple of pictures from the master bathroom. The first thing you'll probably notice is that it is tiny. There is just enough room for the sink, toilet, and shower. This is true for ALL houses of this size that were built in that era. It is a negative attribute for sure, but we decided that the "positives" that go along with such a unique and quaint house are well worth the sacrifice. The wall to the right of the sink is nothing but built-in cabinets, which will be great for storage. The sellers replaced the old tub with a large tiled shower and it looks really great.

I didn't want to post pictures of the other rooms since they'll look totally different once we put our furniture in them, but our plan is to use one of the extra bedrooms as an office and the other as a guest room. The house has a great yard full of great trees: magnolia, crate myrtle, cherry laurel, bradford pear, red oak, pecan and hackberry. I love that they are all different. There is also a cedar deck off the back of the house and it and the backyard are shaded enough to actually be usable even during the summer. I'll post plenty more pictures once we get settled in.

It is such a great house!

The Road to Get Here

It has been one crazy week!

We moved all of our stuff out of our apartment and into a storage unit last weekend, stayed with some friends in Waco for a few days while Kolby finished school, and moved into my parents' house on Thursday night. Kolby landed a part-time job on Friday morning and then we looked at 10 houses on Friday afternoon, made an offer on one on Friday night, negotiated the price on Saturday, and signed a contract for a new house on Sunday!

Kolby has loved teaching English these past two years, even more than he thought he would, but he is certainly excited about having a break from full-time employment. The graduate program he'll be starting in July will carry a time commitment of about 20 hours a week so he had been looking for a job to fill the rest of his time. On Friday, he interviewed at a college prep place for a position to teach classes for the verbal section of the SAT test. As a male English teacher, Kolby seems to be a hot commodity (this was true at both the schools he's taught at and rang true for this place as well) so he was able to lock in that job with ease and will teach some classes this summer as well as during the school year. It sounds like a great gig for him. Once again, the Lord provides.

And now for the house hunt story. We started casually looking at neighborhoods pretty soon after I applied for a job back in April. I knew the job was a long shot, but we didn't want to be way behind in the search for a place to live if things did end up working out. Anytime we would be in the area for one reason or another, we'd drive around and weigh the options for various cities and even neighborhoods within those cities. We landed on a particular location pretty quickly. It is actually the neighborhood that Kolby grew up in before they moved when he was in 4th grade. His parents have several good friends that still live in that area and they all rave about how great the neighborhood is and how well it has held its value over the years. The more we drove around it--- the more we fell in love with it. It has a great variety of houses--- there are some big expensive houses that help support the home value of the smaller houses like the ones we were looking at. The vast majority if the neighborhood was built in the late 1950s so the houses are old and unique-- and all of the lots are covered in awesome mature trees. There is a great park that is right in the middle of the neighborhood and every street has sidewalks on both sides so its a great place to go on walks and spend plenty of time outside, especially since all of the trees provide shade from the blaring Texas sun. Basically, it's just an awesome neighborhood.

So, we'd been looking in that neighborhood for awhile and we would look at houses online and once we found a handful that we liked, I would try to make appointments to see as many as I could and then just drive up for the day while Kolby was at school. There were also a couple of houses that we found online and asked either my parents or Kolby's parents to go take a look at them for us to see if any were worth a trip up to see them for ourselves. This was a pretty frustrating process because the houses that we liked would usually go under contract before we were able to see them in person. Where we were looking was such a popular neighborhood and the sections of it that had affordable houses for first-time home buyers like us were insanely popular because of the 2009 tax credit. At various times we had gotten our hearts set on a house only to see it get snatched up before we could do anything. By the time we moved up here on Thursday, we were confident in our decision to buy a house in that neighborhood and were hoping things would have a much better chance of falling into place now that we were in the area and ready to make an offer as soon as we found the right house.

This past Friday we spent most of the day looking at house after house after house. A local realtor showed us several, and then we just drove around the neighborhood and ended up looking at a couple more by just calling the phone number on the For Sale sign in the yard. As we were about to head home we happened upon this super cute house that was listed at a price a bit out of our range. We decided to call about it anyways, and this sweet family let us come in and see it. It was love at first sight. The whole time we were walkling through it Kolby and I were exchanging this dropped jaw "oh-my-gosh-this-house-is-awesome" look behind the seller's back. It was so perfect it made our stomachs hurt. At the end of our tour of the house, the seller told us that they had just dropped the price THAT DAY by $6,000 and that because we hadn't signed on with a buyer's agent that they would take off an additional $6,000 (this is the amount they would have had to pay to our realtor if we had one). Seriously?!?! We made on offer pretty much as soon as we got home and we signed the contract on Sunday after church. The house is so much more than I could ever have hoped for! We are bounce-off-the-walls excited about it.

This post has already gotten insanely long, so I'll post more details about the house itself another day. Hopefully by then I can get some pictures of the inside. We're so excited!!

We Bought a House!!!!

Technically we haven't bought it yet, but we did sign a contract today and assuming all goes well with the inspection, appraisal, etc.--- we'll be homeowners as of July 6th!

It is the CUTEST little house in this AWESOME neighborhood and it is absolutely PERFECT! It was built in 1957, is "just our size" at 1,500 square feet, and has the original hardwood floors throughout the entire house (except for the kitchen and bathrooms which are brand new tile). There are a lot of mature trees on the lot, including a magnolia tree in the front yard which I LOVE. I'll post some more details tomorrow, but I just wanted to share the news while I had a minute!