Denisa, her mother, and her two sisters have been going on girl trips for the last thirty years. While we have driven or flown all over the country in those thirty years, our annual trips have gotten simpler in recent years. Denisa's 93-year-old mother requested a trip to Kansas City this year. Her priorities were to see our new house, and to visit with our son's family. One of Denisa's sisters also requested a stop at Baskin Robbins, because they no longer have these yummy stores in Oklahoma.
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Girl Trip 2023 - Kansas City Style
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Autumn Invitations
While we have kept busy with projects to get our new house in order, we won't turn down an invitation for fun. Autumn was full of good family invitations. For example, our son's family invited us to the Apple festival in Weston, Missouri.
The first stop was the Red Barn Farm, where we enjoyed riding the pony and feeding the animals.
We tried the apple cider donuts and bought ornamental gourds on this beautiful-weather October weekend.
While the boys headed home for college football games and nap time, the girls went to the orchard to pick fresh apples.
There are few things sweeter than a juicy tree-ripened apple that was just picked. The orchard owners encouraged us to try one right off the tree.
We also got an October invitation to fly to Houston for the Texas fall band competition. Kansas City has a brand new airport that opened in 2023, and we looked forward to experiencing it for ourselves. The art inside the airport is big and beautiful.
Our nephew and niece picked us up at the Houston airport and treated us to five days of fun. We got to play some pickleball in their warm October weather down south.
But the timing of our trip was determined by the band competition that their two oldest children were competing in that weekend. The band first performed at the local high school game. This is Texas--where everything is bigger and high school football is big league. The stadium had a jumbotron, and the players entered the stadium through a three-story inflatable entry and smoke. Welcome to Texas high school football! The football team was pretty good, but we have to say that the band's half-time show was even better!
The big event was the Saturday band competition. We watched as these 6A schools put on flashy shows. The Woodlands high school marched 300 students on the field. Besides all the buses to transport that many band students, it takes three more eighteen-wheel trucks to transport the huge props that are part of this elaborate show. They have five minutes to get everything on the field, eight minutes for the high-energy show, and then two minutes to get off the field. The Woodlands band made the finals, so we were back in the evening to see the top ten bands perform again. It was a great treat!
While the judges tabulated the results, all ten of the bands lined up on the football field. We were excited to see that The Woodlands band got first place and will continue on to state finals in a week. (Spoiler alert--at state they qualified for nationals in Indianapolis. There they came home with an impressive fifth place finish at the grand national competition.)
We flew back to Kansas City just in time to see some of the best fall color of the year.
The trees on our street were at peak color.
The view from our back deck included a kaleidoscope of autumn reds, oranges, and yellows.
Just a few days later we got to celebrate another autumn activity. We started the morning of October 31 at Carter's school. That cold snap caused us to bring out our big wool coats that haven't been out of the closet for many years. But Carter didn't even need a jacket when she walked by during the school costume parade. She's Isabelle from the movie Encanto. This character has long dark hair and turns everything she touches into flowers.
Eli loves dinosaurs, so he was a blue T Rex.
Our son Luke was also in the dinosaur theme, but his costume was riding a dinosaur. He was also carrying a shy blue T Rex that didn't exactly understand what halloween was all about.
But when he figured out that all the neighbors were giving out candy, he suddenly was no longer shy. This little blue dinosaur took Grand-dude's hand and walked all over their little neighborhood.
Yes, it's been an autumn full of great family activities. It feels like we're in a good place enjoying some great invitations!
Tuesday, December 5, 2023
We bought a house--now the real work begins!
After a week of pondering if this was the right house for us, we signed a contract. Now the real work begins! We had really gotten to know the owners' daughter that was selling the house, and she trusted us. So even though the closing date was still a couple weeks away, we started tackling some of the projects around the house. One of those was the gutter system. Instead of funneling the rain water away from the house, it was disconnected and the water was flowing under the driveway and sidewalk. That will have to be repaired, so Mark started working on the gutters to make sure that this drainage problem wouldn't happen again.
In the middle of this busy time, we also got to spend good time with our children and grandchildren. We vowed that we wouldn't pass up any invitations from them. So when they called to ask if Gram wanted to go with the girls to a pumpkin festival, she was all in.
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Is it time to settle down and buy a house?
After living in the motor home for almost nine years, we've started feeling like it was important to spend more time with our children and grandchildren. Is it time to settle down and buy a house? We have enjoyed staying at our children's houses, and they have always made us feel very welcome. We have also stayed in the motor home at campgrounds near their homes for longer stays. But all the campgrounds around Kansas City are about a 45-minute drive from where our grandchildren live. That convinced us that if we bought property we wanted it to be closer to all this cuteness.
We started looking for property in the Kansas City area about a year ago. We envisioned an acreage a few miles out of town where we could put in a RV site with electric, water, and sewer hookups for the motor home. We could use those utilities in the future to build a house on that acreage. But we soon found that nice plots of land had already been snatched up by developers paying huge prices. We also learned that any plots within city limits had ordinances against parking an RV on them.
So we moved on to Plan B. That would be to look for a nice house outside of city limits where we could park our motor home beside it. We drove the back roads encircling Lenexa and other towns in the area. We found out that a brand new battery manufacturing plant was being built nearby, and they were gearing up to employ thousands of people. The housing market was going crazy! We didn't find anything we liked that we could afford in the country.
We went to a few open houses and the parade of homes last spring. We got to know the area, as well as the housing market. We walked neighborhoods and met some really friendly people that made us feel welcome. When we found a house and a neighborhood that we really liked, we found that houses sell fast. Within hours of coming on the market, the sellers might have five offers over the asking price, and some of them were cash offers. This was going to be more competitive and harder than we thought!
We left for our summer travels, knowing that we couldn't do anything while we were on the road. But we got daily updates on houses coming onto the market through the zillow app. We really hoped that the perfect house didn't show up on those listings, because we were too far away to do anything about it.
After months of following the area housing market, we came to a better understanding of what we really wanted. At our age, we thought it was important to have all of our living areas on one level. While stairs are no problem for us now, we planned to live in this house for the long haul. Our son has a large house that is great for big family gatherings, so we wanted a small house. That should be cheaper to buy and cheaper to heat and cool. Three bedrooms and two bathrooms would be plenty for us. Since we have almost no furniture, that would also mean less furniture to have to buy to fill it up. We made a list of all the things we would have to buy immediately: a refrigerator, washer and dryer, living room furniture, dining table and chairs, beds . . . Making all those purchases right away sounded very expensive and very intimidating. We also preferred that this house be less than ten miles away from our son's house, and hopefully on an easy-to-drive route. We preferred a neighborhood with big trees, but we also wanted a house that was less than 25 years old. We have learned that almost all new housing in this area is multi-level, and most have a basement. We preferred an unfinished basement that would give us good storage and a place for our grandchildren to play.
Once we arrived in the Kansas City area to baby sit, we started looking in earnest. We started by looking at five houses that filled some of our wish list items, but ruled them all out upon further inspection. We found that autumn was a slower time for home purchases, and fewer people put their houses on the market in the fall. We were keeping track of all the new listings, but found nothing. . . until . . .
We saw a brand new zillow listing that was "for sale by owner." Even though we were baby-sitting, we took Eli with us to see the house for the first time. That's him, standing at the end of the driveway with the "for sale" sign in the front yard.