On Cloud Nine

I have my written job offer.

I did another sit-in with my new dispatch center.

We found a rental house.

That was the quick and dirty. Now here's the more drawn out explanation. On Friday, Nathan and I left the boys with my parents in Baker while we went to McMinnville to find a place to live. As much as I wish we could have done this online, there's just no way to tell what kind of a place/neighborhood you're moving into with the pictures they provide online. So we decided it would be better to go look at places in person, which also gave me another opportunity to sit-in at YCOM (Yamhill Communications).

I did my sit-in on Friday evening and it was great. I had a blast and am TOTALLY pumped about getting started on what is going to be a fairly painful training program. But hey, at least I'm going to GET training!

Before my sit-in, however, Nathan and I squeezed in a few tours of rental houses. The first one we looked out was a definite no...they wanted a lot of money for a fairly run down house, no AC, no stove/fridge in the kitchen, super creaky all wood floors (not good for soon-to-be-crawling babies), and located on a really busy street. We didn't get to go into the second house that day, which looked a lot better on the outside than the first house did and was in a much better neighborhood. We did get to go inside that house on Saturday afternoon and it wasn't nearly as nice on the inside as it was on the outside; it was pretty run down and smelled like on marijuana smoke. Another no.

The next two places we looked at, both duplexes, were amazing! The first one was in a super quiet neighborhood bordering farming fields and was beautiful inside. The only drawback we saw was that there was no dining room. We were going to have to put our dining room table on carpet and that just doesn't work very well with two babies. Plus the neighborhood was almost too quiet...the houses were all super new and you didn't see a single person outside while driving through the area.

The second duplex was equally as beautiful but didn't have those two minor drawbacks I mentioned in the first one. It's in a great family neighborhood on a narrow street so people can't zoom down the street, and we saw a lot of families out walking down the many walking paths in the area and playing in their front yards. There's a dining room attached to the kitchen but separated from the living room, and the third bedroom is just off of the kitchen which will make for a great office so that the upstairs is only our bedrooms/bathroom. Speaking of the upstairs, there's a large bathroom at the top of the stairs, which is also attached via a sliding door to the large master bedroom, which is complete with a huge walk-in closet (insert happy dance here)! The ceilings are really high and everything feels really wide open.

The room that will be the boys' room is even longer than our room is (because of the bathroom attached to our room) and has two smaller closets. Did I mention that there's a full sized bathroom downstairs off of the kitchen as well? The whole thing is very new construction, with AC and automatic sprinklers, and a perfect sized backyard with high wooden fences. Basically, I'm in love with this place and wouldn't mind living in it for a few years. We turned in our application for the place, along with our screening fee, and should hear in the next couple of days whether we got it. I'm not worried though. I would attach the photos, but I can't save them from the property management's website.

We actually spent Friday night in McMinnville at a hotel so we could spend more time there. That night we went out to dinner at the Golden Valley Brew Pub, which brews its own beer. The beer was pretty good and the food was delicious, I think it's our new Barley Brown's. After that, we went to the McMinamen's Roof Top Bar. As the name suggests, it's a bar located on the top of McMenamin's Oregon Hotel, which is in downtown McMinnville. Waaaay too cool.

On Saturday, we slept in a bit, went out to breakfast that the Union Block (a coffee shop downtown), and then decided to go into the Beep Beep Baby Boutique that we were parked across from. We met the owners, a really nice Christian couple who had just moved to McMinnville three months ago and have a 7 1/2 month old girl who was born less than a month after the boys. We ended up hanging out in their shop and talking with them for an hour and a half, and we plan on having them over for dinner after we get settled in. They actually go to the Nazarene church, so we will be checking that church out when we get there.

That afternoon, we went to a couple of wine tasting rooms and then headed up to Johnny and Laura's for the night. After an long evening of good food, good wine, and good friends, we went to sleep, had breakfast with them in the morning, and then drove home. It was so nice to get home to the boys, who had visibly grown like weeds in the three days we were gone, but we can't wait until we're all over in McMinnville. I definitely fell in love with the place, and we're so excited to start our life there. Only 6 days until my last shift with Baker Dispatch and only 13 days until moving day!

Now we just have to pack!