Recapitulation

Much time has passed since I seriously "houseblogged" (~1 year). This pretty much means that I have previously had little to blog about house-wise. Before I get into the Here-n-Now, lets start off with a quick summary:

2006 - Fall & Winter
- We close the deal on our first house, after much hunting in a blood-thirsty market [peak of prices, no less]
- Initial preparations begin, those that make "living with" difficult; many lessons are learned ['if it matters, do it yourself' if you can,for example]

2007 - Spring
- We move in and the progress slows to a crawl as our infant learns to do so herself.

2007 - Summer
- We confront our first domestic emergency.
- Our firstborn gets a much-needed Heart operation and spends the whole season in Hospital.

2007 - Fall & Winter
- We get back into the swing of Life and spend most of our time just being together in an half(done)house. Little house improvements are made, while fewer are mentioned here [perhaps a post-post is in order...]

2008 - Present
All of this year has been about our nuclear family sofar. The first part was dealing with the diagnosis that our firstborn's heart was actually failing, despite the surgeries. We did all we could to get her on the Heart Recipient's Transplant List, and a mere 55 days later we get the Call. We also got a little visitor (aka - daughter #3 is born).

TODAY

We are a week away from reuniting back at our bayside prarie palace, as Michaela should be relased from Stanford [Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital] soon. My gas bill will drop by 2/3rds and we can start to look at real home improvements/restorations. It won't be long now until our first two daughters can wield a hammer...