The Jon Wadley Fam

One crazy home buying process and a month later, we’re in our new (to us) home! This is lame but we’ll add pictures just as soon as we find our camera (actually a new memory card, the current one is full).  Needless to say we are excited.  BriAnne’s family helped us move all of our stuff over on Saturday from the storage unit and then BriAnne went crazy unpacking and getting us all settled in. It actually went a lot faster and with less effort than I thought it would, but then again we just came from a small condo and just don’t have that much stuff…that probably won’t be the case if we ever move again! We love the house and REALLY love the location so hopefully we are there for a good long, long while.

Closed! And while it is very exciting for us to be moving on to a bigger home, the craziness of trying to sell the thing is over and just how much we are going to miss “the OC” is starting to hit us.  We have so many great memories there! Just to give you a little perspective of how long we lived there, BriAnne and I had only been married for a little over 1 year when we moved in…Katelyn wasn’t even a twinkle in her daddy’s eye yet and Ethan was still a speck of dust in the far reaches of Kolob’s galaxy. BriAnne was a teller at the Bank of American Fork’s Pleasant Grove branch – none of the teller’s she worked with have been there for at several years now. I worked for a company that is now completely out of existence. We not only remember when the Whitehead’s moved in, but we remember when the people they bought from moved in. There have been at least 5 different tenents that have lived in the unit next door. Our good ol’ Nissan Altima has been with us the whole time, but I have gone through 4 different vehicles – a car, a jeep, and two different trucks. We celebrated 18 different birthday’s while there (in case you are counting, 6 for me, 6 for BriAnne, 4 for Katelyn and 2 for Ethan) and I somehow made it through 4 out of 5 years of college while there. I finished my 4 year stint on the HOA committee…2 years ago.  Crazy.

Now that we have officially closed on the transaction, we are digging in and opening full bore the home search. For now though, we are staying in a home that looks remarkably close to the one I grew up in…Oh wait, yep – it is the same one.  But it is very comfortable here and it’s got to be every grandkid’s dream to hang out with grandma and grandpa whenever they want! Seriously, going from 800 sq/ft to much more than that with a jetted tub, projection TV and huge fenced backyard has been “pleasant” to say the least. Maybe we’ll find a home for my parents to move into so we can keep living in their house…

Here are a few pictures of our empty condo and the current living quarter status:

And our current locale:

And Ethan loving hanging out with his Grandpa:

So, as we make some progress we’ll post updates here.  Sorry that we haven’t been keeping up with this (if you care) – you can thank a lot of things including the Federal Housing Authority, mortgage lending industry and Elmo.

Yup, that’s right. We want boxes. They seem to be in short supply right now – so if you hear of anyone moving in near you that has a bunch of boxes they’re throwing away… let us know! Oh yeah, and by the way, we got a good offer on the condo and our closing date is May 4th, so unless the buyers change their minds, we’re moving in three weeks!!!

Well, we made it back from our week long haitus to Disneyland…almost without incident. Ethan and Katelyn of course LOVED it, BriAnne had a great time and I was enjoying myself up until I volunteered to stand in the “meet the Disney princesses” line while BriAnne took Katelyn and Ethan over to the little “pay to let us paint wierd makup on your little girl’s face” store thingy.  Meeting the princesses was a 2 HOUR WAIT…I couldn’t believe it. They could just have them wander the park like they used to, but then they wouldn’t make a bunch of money in their little makeup store. Yes, I am a little bitter about having to wait for most of that 2 hours with a bunch of moms and their little girls. BUT, I love my little girl, and this was the highlight of her trip so I bided my time and did what any father who ever wanted a hug from his daughter again would do.

For Ethan we wanted to make sure to hit the Disney train since he loves choo choo’s, and we did that as well. We also did all the regular kiddie oriented rides, like It’s a Small World, Dumbo, and all the others.  Overall, a resounding success.

The “almost without incident” thing came in on Tuesday night. Well, actually we did have one mishap on the way down there Sunday when we figured out that we didn’t realize the minivan we rented had a very effective dual climate system, and while BriAnne and I were feeling great in the front with much needed AC, the kids in the back had the heat on and by the time we hit Beaver they were both beat red, sweating, car sick and throwing up. It wasn’t until BriAnne climbed back into the heat wave before we realized it! AC in the back made a world of difference. On Tuesday night though Ethan started acting sick - like he had a cold, and of course his asthma flared up (exactly like what happened HERE). We went to the beach on Wednesday and by that night he was hardly able to breathe and didn’t sleep well if at all. So, on Thursday (after some miscommunication and about 8 frustrating calls with Blue Cross Blue Shield) we took him to the E.R. in Anaheim where he got the medicine he muchly needed. Unfortunately, by the time we got out of there it was 1pm on a day we were supposed to have spent at the California Adventure park. We figured Ethan should probably rest since he didn’t sleep the night before, so I dropped BriAnne and Katelyn off at the park and Ethan and I went to the condo.

We did take tons of pictures, but we haven’t downloaded them yet.  But, I’m not writing this post totally without image. You see, I sorta screwed Disney over by figuring out how to obtain an image from their “we took your picture when you met Mickey, so now we want to charge you $20 to download it” website, without actually going through the checkout process.  It just doesn’t seem right, them trying to sell myself to me.