On Friday, we went to Daytona Beach to spend the day with Great Grandpa and Great Grandma. We played at their condo for a couple hours and then went to eat lunch at Aunt Catfish.
The kids played with some of the toys Max brought and Max also took some of his first unsupported steps in the condo.
At around 2, we went to Aunt Catfish together.
After we finished our lunch, the wait staff came out with some key lime pie dessert for Grandpa Rick and we all sang "Happy Birthday" to him.
This past week we had a lot of Shawn's side of the family in town. Chris, Abby, Max and Alex flew in to Jacksonville on Saturday. Diane, Lee, Roger, Great Grandma and Great Grandpa drove up from Daytona Beach as well. When Chris and his family landed, I picked them up from the airport and drove them home. Alex flew in an hour later and Grandpa Rick picked him up and brought him by. Grandma Alice brought everyone over to our house after Great Grandpa Roger had his afternoon siesta.
We were very happy to hear that baby Max did a great job on the flights. They had a flight from St. Louis to Atlanta and then Atlanta to Jacksonville. He fell asleep during takeoff and slept during both flights! Nice work Max!
Connor and Paige were excited for all our visitors, especially baby Max. Paige played with him every chance she could get.
We snapped a few pics of the boys outside before it got dark and also setup the camera so we could get a big group picture of everyone together in the family room.
Andrea and I put out some snacks, and after everyone chatted for a bit we ordered pizza as well.
Connor quizzed everyone on football, but kept the hardest questions for football expert Uncle Chris.
After dinner, everyone played some games. The kids loved playing Snorta with everyone and actually did very well remembering everyone's animal sounds.
Paige played with Max until it was time to go to bed.
In the morning, she played with him for a while too until everyone got up and going.
Connor read to baby Max for a little bit before everyone got dressed.
After we all got dressed, we went to Cantina Laredo for a late lunch and then over to Grandma and Grandpa's house.
At Grandma and Grandpa's the kids played football outside with Uncle Chris, Uncle Alex, Uncle Lee, and me. We did quite a bit of passing and running, it was Connor's favorite part of the whole day.
We ate Grandma Alice's beef stew for dinner and then I went with Chris, Alex, Abby, Connor and Paige to play tennis for a bit at the nearby tennis courts. We all got a little workout and Connor did pretty well playing with the regular tennis ball against his uncles and aunt. Paige played with the orange balls and we fed her quite a few. She's getting more coordinated and hits the ball pretty consistently now if she's not goofing off too much.
Diane and Lee are going to be leaving town later in the week, and so is Uncle Rog. Chris, Alex, Abby and Max are staying through next Sunday.
Throughout the week, the kids went to school and I worked. Chris, Abby, Alex, and Max stayed with Grandma Alice and Grandpa Rick. They went to the beach during the day and to Old St. Augustine. We saw them some evenings. On Wednesday, February 3rd, we celebrated Abby's birthday at Maggiano's. We had some yummy Italian food and we all sang Happy Birthday for Aunt Abby.
Connor had another of his I9 Flag Football games on Saturday. He played fairly well, however they played a really hard team and got beaten by quite a bit. He didn't have as many opportunities to run the ball, and unfortunately didn't score, however he did do a great job as a quarterback and completed some nice passes.
Paige was pretty bored and wandered around in the field nearby and played with her chair. She's always been very good about watching big brother play, she's been to a lot of his games over the years!
This past week we almost bought a new house. Ever since we moved in to our current house, we've kind of been looking over in Ponte Vedra Beach for our next house. We know we'd like to move over there eventually for a number of reasons, and we've been saving up and waiting for the right house to come along. Well, we thought maybe we'd found it recently. In October, we went to look at a house in the neighborhood we like. At the time, it was priced a little higher than we liked, but it had a lot of good things going for it. It had the tile roof I like, a four car garage, a great view of the salt water marsh with a little dock and walkway out to it, golf courses nearby, and it also had a messy bunny in a cage in the living room. Andrea and I referred to it as the bunny house, and we liked it, but didn't think it was worth it to make an offer back in October.
Recently, they dropped the price on it a bit and we decided to take another look at it. We walked through it again and decided we should maybe make an offer. The day before we put in our offer, Andrea had a dream that other people already put in offers and we didn't get it. We decided we'd better not wait so we put in our official written offer. The seller's real estate agent mentioned that other families had been interested and after we put in our offer, another interested party put in their offer, which actually was substantially lower than ours. We thought this was a good sign. Also, the other interested party was really wanting to change the address on the house since it wasn't a lucky number for them. We figured that complication and their low offer would mean they weren't as serious as us and we weren't too worried.
The seller countered our offer with a slight price reduction and we put in our final offer to hopefully meet them where it'd work. Unfortunately the other interested party put in an offer a bit higher than our offer and the sellers sold it to them.
We're a bit disappointed it didn't work out, and it was interesting that Andrea's dream came true. Maybe it was a sign and it wasn't mean to be! We're hopeful another house will come along soon that would be perfect for us.
