Sorry for skipping yesterday. I was trying to upload this adorable video of Ella telling all about spiders, but I couldn’t get it to work. I let it try overnight and it still wouldn’t work, so I don’t know what the deal is. I’ll be sure and put it in the pictures folder on the right (when I get the pictures uploaded).
Since I was thankful for our church on Sunday, Tuesday I was thankful for the FBCA preschool, Mrs. G, Mrs. J, Mrs. K, Mrs. P, Mrs. L and Pastor Kim (They actually do go by their full names, but since I didn’t ask their permission to talk about them on the blog, I decided to just use the first letter of their last names).
Deciding to put Ella in preschool was scary. Just making the decision to let her out of our house for several hours a day was scary, let alone putting her in a class with a bunch of other kids that may or may not understand her fragile skin. Once we made the decision, I did my due diligence and looked at several preschools in the area. Some were WAY too expensive and there was no way we could have afforded it. Others were a full 5 days a week, 6 hours a day and since this was Ella’s first year I wanted to ease her in a bit. One that I looked at said that they would call the ambulance immediately if a child fell down and got hurt. I had visions of Ella going to the hospital 20 times in 1 year and each time the hospital doing more damage than necessary because they didn’t know anything about her disease. Another specialized in working with kids with disabilities, but when I looked closer they focused a lot on kids with developmental disabilities, and I don’t want Ella lumped into a category that she shouldn’t be in.
After an initial meeting with the preschool directors, I felt in my heart that FBCA preschool was the right place for Ella. I’m not sure, but I don’t believe they have ever had a child with special needs before, so this was a leap of faith for them too. Words can’t express how happy we are that Ella is in preschool at FBCA. Her teachers are incredible and go to great lengths to make sure she’s doing well, and to make sure we’re happy with how things are going.
Today I am thankful for our house. I love our house. It’s not very fancy and it’s not very well decorated, but it is definitely home. We searched for 7 months for our house, and this was our 7th offer…yes, we had put in 6 other offers that didn’t pan out. Both Joe and I were extremely frustrated by the whole process. We wanted to stay as close to DC as possible (if you’ve never experienced DC traffic then you wouldn’t understand exactly how long 8 miles can be), but we didn’t think there was anything close that we could afford. Our realtor kept showing us houses farther and farther out because that’s where we could actually get a nice place that we could afford.
One day Joe came across a foreclosure that was just down the street from us and also in our price range. We had looked at dozens of foreclosures and honestly, I had very little hope that this one would be better than any of the others. Fortunately when we came to look at it, things weren’t nearly as bad as the others we had seen. Sure, it needed to be cleaned up and given some TLC, and sure there were cockroaches EVERYWHERE (emphasis on EVERYWHERE), but all that was fixable. Most of the others we looked at would have cost at least $100,000 to be livable, but this one was actually in pretty decent shape. Nothing a maid, a new coat of paint and some carpet couldn’t fix.
Needless to say we got our beautiful home, in our price range, and it’s more than we ever thought we could get. It has everything we needed, and everything we wanted. It’s perfect for us.
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