Catching Up...Again

Wow, I can't believe it's been so long since I've blogged! There's so much to catch up on. I haven't blogged for 2 reasons. 1) We've kept ourselves pretty busy lately and 2) I just haven't felt like it. I don't really feel like it at the moment to be honest, but when I think back and I can't remember what all we've done the past few weeks, it's just a reminder that life is FLYING by. I want to document it so that we have something to look back on when I think I'm bored. Haha.

I'm going to try to keep this as organized as possible...

Debt:

We were debt free for a bit (except the house and car - Our car interest rate is lower than our bank interest rate and let's be honest, the house debt will be around for quite a while). I'll explain the little bit part in a second.

We've made a couple extra house payments. It wasn't easy to re-allocate this money, but we've figured out how much more we need to pay monthly to be where we want to be with the house by the time we moved back home. I'm not sure we'll stick to it 100%, because having the money to move back home is a priority. 

House Things:
We have now been in our house for 2 full years! Where is all the time going?!?

We have our new heat pump. I was not excited about this for a while because it's costing us a big penny. On the day I stayed home to have this done, it was in the 90s though. At that time, I was probably to spend every dime we had to get one if we had to. We had a home warranty, but they would only pay for a very small portion of it. We had to decide to pay cash or finance it. The contractor offered 0% financing for 3 years. We went back and forth and eventually decided to finance it. This way we can leave our emergency fund alone and we can take the monthly payment out of our house budget. But the downside is, we have debt again. Blah.

We were pretty set on building a deck this year...then we got a couple quotes...then we realized how much we were going to be paying for our heat pump. The deck is out. We don't plan on building one at all now. At first, it was hard for me to accept, but I don't care so much anymore. The lowest quote we got was over $5K. We only plan on being here for 4, maybe 5 years. That's over $1K per year, not including the money we will spend to maintain it and furniture. When we broke it down that way, it just wasn't worth it. If we were selling the house, we would be more likely to do it since it would up the value of the home, but since we're renting, it's just another thing to maintain over the years. 

We bought the paint for the guest bathroom cabinets. Now we just need the time to put it to use. I'm excited about it, because it's potentially a color we will use to pain the kitchen cabinets.

Car Things:

I bought a Groupon a while back for window tinting. We've had some scheduling conflicts and one failed attempt at actually getting it done. Since it was their fault that we didn't get it done on our initial appointment date, they agreed to tint the 4 small windows (the Groupon only covered the big 5 windows) at no additional charge and to let us use the voucher past the expiration date. We FINALLY got our windows tinted yesterday!

Vacation:
We just returned from Mexico on Friday!!! We were there for 7 days and we had a great time! It will definitely get its own post at some point.

 This is from the front of our resort on our 5th day. Such beautiful colors in the sky!

This is a pool pic on our 6th day, the first day we got to use the pool!

Family:
Natalia celebrated her 6th birthday 2 weekends before we went to Mexico. We had a great time at her birthday party. I really can't believe she's already 6! She's such a funny little girl. :-) We discovered that Bailey loves to play with balloons at her party, and Bailey also met her first infant. She was really good with her, but she was very interested in her diaper. I can foresee some interesting diaper situations in our future. YIKES!

 Me with Daddy

 I think she's getting a little big for this.

 Holding the baby Bailey met. I forgot her name. She's so excited for her little brother to come, so she wanted to "practice".

This is Bailey playing with a balloon. She will hit it back and forth for you, like she's playing volleyball, then she pops it.

Friends:
AJ and Kristen came to visit for Memorial Day weekend. They got in late Friday night, so we just hung out by the bar when they got here. It was their first time ever seeing it. We slept in on Saturday then went to Baltimore for lunch. We went to our favorite burger place. I got my usual kangaroo burger and Josh got Camel. We split them so we could try them both. They were both very good, but the camel tastes more similar to beef. I prefer the slightly gamey flavor of the roo! We walked to the harbor and people watched for a bit, then we decided to make it back to see the State baseball game. We had a couple other friends over that night too. We didn't really plan on staying up so late, but the game just wouldn't end. After like, the 12th inning, we decided to play Cards Against Humanity and have the game on in the background. I'm glad we did this, because the game went on until 2am! I really wanted to be up for the end though. In the end, UNC beat us and we were all exhausted. I didn't take any pictures at all during this trip. It was a short visit, but we had a great time!

Anniversary:
I'm saving the best for the last...we celebrated our 3rd anniversary while we were in Mexico! We decided to visit Chichen Itza. I'll post more about this later in my vacation post, but this was an amazing day trip! We are coming to love traveling more and more, so this was a perfect way to spend our anniversary!