And the Big News is...

We're buying a house!!! I almost hesitate to write this, since we haven't had the house inspection yet and it's being sold "as is," but barring anything huge, settlement's on February 25th and we'll officially be first-time home buyers (with the very generous assistance of my mother and step-father). We decided several weeks ago that we wanted to live in Ashburn, which is a planned community west of here, just past Dulles Airport. It's definitely one of the safest places in the country, and a good place for Samantha to grow up, go to school, make friends, love life. I love that she will have the opportunity to live in a house with a yard. She can plant a little garden in the spring, and play in the sprinkler in the summer. She can ride her bike on the sidewalks in the fall, and sit in front of the fireplace in the winter.

It's a 3 bedroom, 3 1/2 bathroom end-unit townhouse, so of course, there are lots of stairs. Gotta step up (ha! No pun intended!) the work on going up and down stairs, and definitely gotta buy some gates. I think we'll transition her to a big girl bed when we move, rather than having to dismantle and re-build the crib. I don't expect she'll have any problem with that. Her room will be small, but there are two small rooms next to each other so she can have one as her play room. No more saving quarters for the laundry facilities down the hall. Oh, and there's a hot tub outside of the walk-out basement. :-) I have no clue how to take care of a hot tub, so if any of you know, please drop me a line!

I didn't take any photos of it, since the owner still lives there and it would've been a bit weird photographing all of his stuff, and his listing agent never posted a photo on the internet. Oh, by the way, it was on the market for two whole days (!!) before they got 4 bids and took it off! We had figured that it would be a total long shot for us to actually get the winning bid, but thanks to the advice and guidance of our brilliant agent, Mitchell (if any of you are thinking of buying in the DC area and want his details, let me know), we did it!

Wish us luck on Thursday for the inspection...

Okay, I leave you with another photo of Sammi from last week, just because I can't bring myself to write another blog post that has no photos. Oh, by the way, thanks to those of you who commented on my blog header photo--believe it or not, the only reason I never put a photo up there was that I didn't know I could! Then I had this epiphany and realized that it was rediculously easy.