2013

Here's 102 blog posts from this year summed up into one. This year was full of exciting adventures for Tim and I, the most exciting being that we finally purchased our first home!

• At the beginning of this year, I was presented with the possibility of having CFRD. Thankfully after meeting a wonderful endocrinologist in Chicago, he taught me how to adjust my diet to keep my sugars in check without having to have insulin injections, yay!
• In February, unfortunately I had to reset my compliance count due to lovely mail order pharmacy mix ups. I did, however, proudly complete 100% of my treatments for 352 days!! I reset my count on March 1st, which puts me at 312 days today!
• Also in March, we celebrated Tim's great grandma's 99th birthday, learned about the new CFF regulations (which caused a huge uproar and debate among CFers), and we got the ball rolling on the CF Living video phone interviews and plans!!
• April was a busy month! Tim and I shot our CF Living footage which was harder than I thought, but SO rewarding! I attended another Great Strides in DeKalb, the TOBI Podhaler was released, our kitten, Ozzie, was born, and I started taking the best thing ever = PROBIOTICS!.
• May was pretty uneventful, aside from me finishing up my first year of teaching! Tim celebrated his 27th birthday and we were able to spend some quality time with our adorable nephew, Isaac.
•  In June, we finalized our first house mess, and found a house that we both loved and went under contract on it. We traveled to Tennessee to meet our newest nephew, Liam, and spend time with family. Tim also kicked my butt in Brett's Run!
• July was a busy, fun-filled month! I attended my best friend's bachelorette party, spent lots of time with family, brought Ozzie home, went to Country Thunder and became a home-owner!!
• Our first chapter of our Day in the Life series finally came out and I was so surprised and humbled by all of the amazing and supportive feedback. I also started my second year of teaching - this year in first grade. And of course, started taking Kalydeco on August 30.
• In September, Tim and I continued to work on our house, we did our annual camping trip with his family which is always a great time, and we attended the most love-filled wedding I've ever been to - Jessie & Jeremy's wedding. :-)
• October is always special to me because its our anniversary month. We celebrated our third anniversary this year and we're not just married anymore, but we're now married home-owners! Tim and I also went to the Peoria Great Strides which was excellent! I was asked to speak there and we also met my blogger, CF friend, Cheriz. Finally, I had my first post-Kalydeco clinic visit where I gained 6lbs, my FEV1 increased by 5% and my small airway lung function went up by 18%!!!
• In November, Tim and I conquered 58 flights of stairs at our first CF CLIMB! Then I signed us up for the CF Rock Rivers 5K in Michigan in March, put on by the lovely Emily Schaller.
• December was full of ups and downs, and sadly ended on a very low note. We lost our great friend Jeremy on December 31. We celebrated his life in Ohio with Jessie and his family the first weekend in January, and I'm very glad we were able to attend to say our 'see you laters'.

I feel like things can only go up from here and I need to keep that positive attitude. Here's to a happy, healthy, productive and positive 2014!!!

Homeowners!!!

Tim and I have had a very exciting weekend! Yesterday morning, we closed on our first home (check that off the list of my goals!)!!! We're super excited to not be renting anymore and we're looking forward to calling something 'our own.' I'm looking forward to not having to move after another year again & that this is more permanent than a year-long lease. After we closed on the home yesterday (which only took about 45

minutes), we loaded up Tim's Mustang onto a trailer that he borrowed from his boss and brought it over to the house. Then we came back and filled the truck & trailer with another large load. Unfortunately, we had to stop there because it was raining...plus we were exhausted. After a short nap and shower, we treated ourselves to dinner at Red Lobster, yum!

This morning Tim's dad arrived bright and early to help us move a bunch more of our stuff. I'm so glad that he came because he was able to help Tim with all of the appliances and large, heavy things - he was a huge help!!! After two trailers and three truck-loads full, we called it quits for the evening. I'd say we have about 80% of our stuff moved over to the new house now. All that's left here in our rental is all of my treatment equipment, our bed, TV, whatever's left in the pantry and a few odds & ends. We'll be bringing the rest of the stuff over in the morning and spending the rest of the day organizing & unpacking - making it look like a home, not a random collection of furniture! :-) We plan on doing some renovations (hopefully just one room at a time) and adding a carport to the right side of the house this fall. It'll be a work in progress for a while, but it's just cosmetic and to our liking, the house really looks great on the inside right now. It's starting to set in a little more that that's our house now that most of our furniture is in there, but I think it'll set in even more after we spend our first night there, which should be tomorrow night. Yay!!! :-)

Positive Thoughts Thursday

I've been slacking on my positive thoughts over the past couple months, so I'm really going to try to get back into looking at all of the positives going on around me & in my life. What is at least one positive thing that's going on in your life right now?

• One week from tomorrow we're scheduled to close on our first home! I'm super excited to finally be able to move into a home and not feel like we are only living there temporarily. And I'm excited that it's one more thing to check off of my life goals! :)
• Later today I'll be making a 4 1/2 hour trek up to Wisconsin for Country Thunder! I'm a huge country music fan and so the next four days are going to be heaven for me. Country Thunder is four days of many different country artists performing back to back. Here's the line up! The main reason I'm going is because I've always wanted to see Keith Urban live, super pumped!
• I'm also looking forward to spending this long weekend with one of my awesome friends, Karissa! Her and I worked together as assistants for a couple years before we both got our first teaching jobs this past fall. I'm thankful that she's allowing me to stay with her family at their cottage all weekend while we go back and forth each evening to dance & sing (and people watch) at CT!

Clinic Day & Positive Thoughts Thursday

I had my CF clinic appointment today and number-wise it wasn't the best, but feeling-wise it went well. Everything's pretty much the same as my last appointment - my lung function is still hovering in the high 70s which I really don't like to see, but I've been feeling really great lately. My weight is about the same - today it was 108.5. Thankfully I have a wonderful relationship with my doctor and I was able to explain to her how I was feeling and she understands that sometimes the numbers don't reflect that. She just told me not to worry or focus on the numbers which made me feel better...as long as things don't keep going down, that's what matters. Of course I'm still trying to increase my weight and lung function (always!), but for some reason it's just sticking where it is right now, so I think I'm going to really have to take advantage of the next month and really kick my butt into gear. I need to make sure that I'm consistently exercising and consuming at least 2,500 calories per day, especially before I head back to work.

We did discuss the possibility of adding Kalydeco into my life if I can't seem to get out of this rut which really makes me excited. When Kalydeco first came out I was honestly a little hesitant about going on it. In a weird way, I felt like if I started taking Kalydeco, then I was "giving up" on fighting CF myself. After typing that out, it sounds totally strange, but that's the way I felt. I feel like I've been doing a really great job keeping myself healthy and I didn't want to....I don't even know how to word it... I was also concerned that 'What if I was taking it for several months, saw a great increase in lung function, and then for some reason I had to stop taking it and then my lung function would go back down (to the 80s which is still 'normal') and I would feel like complete crap.' I was nervous that once I started it, it would be something that I'd never be able to live without, something that I'd rely on forever.
But after a great discussion with my doctor today, she put it in perspective for me. Everything that I'm doing now -Vest twice a day, six-eight nebulizers a day, countless amounts of pills, etc -I'm going to rely on those forever to keep me healthy, so what's another pill? Especially if it's going to change things for the better, increase my quality of life, and possibly reduce the amount of medication/treatments I do now...duh! What was I thinking?! So the plan is to see how the next few months go and at my next clinic appointment in October we'll make the decision on whether to start the approval paperwork, or to keep it on the back burner.

And finally, I've totally been slacking on my positive thoughts Thursday posts over the past few months, honestly, because we've been completely stressed...which is probably when I should be doing it, but either way here's some recent positive thoughts:

• We are 15 days away from our scheduled closing date on our first home! As long as everything keeps going according to plan we should be moved in before August! Yay!
• The possibility of Kalydeco entering my life is starting to get me really excited it. Of course it may not be until the end of this year, it's something that I'm looking forward to. :)
• I love summer break! Not a huge fan of summer weather, but the time off is amazing! I've been able to do way more this summer than I even thought I was going to do and there are still several more fun things planned...next one on the list: Country Thunder! One week from today! Oh yeah!
• Our new little guy, Ozzie, is adjusting very well to life in our home. He has an enormous amount of energy and he's hilarious to watch when he's running around! Archie is also doing a wonderful job being patient with him and playing (usually) gently with him. 

Can you tell who's who?! Haha...Archie's (4 yrs old) a big hefalump, but
Tim thinks Ozzie (3 months) might get to be about his size...we'll see. :) 

Positive Thoughts Tuesday: Updates

 Switching it up a bit and doing my Positive Thoughts Thursday Tuesday, today. Thankfully, things are finally, slowly, starting to look up for us!

*A few weeks ago I posted about all of our house drama which is also starting to come together. We actually submitted an offer on a major fixer-upper a couple days after that last post, on a Wednesday, I believe. We offered low because it needed a ton of work and before the listing agent even presented it to her client, she told our realtor that she thought it was too low of an offer and was acting really rude. Then the sellers told us they needed to talk to their attorney about the offer and they'd get back to us by the following Tuesday - this just turned me off. I didn't want to deal with annoying listing agents, more attorneys and delays all over again. We ended up looking at a foreclosure in the mean time that we really liked, so we withdrew our offer on the fixer-upper to submit an offer on the foreclosure Monday or Tuesday. Before we could even get our offer in on the foreclosure, it had sold. :( This meant that we were back at square one with no house, again.
So we decided to just keep looking, and we ended up looking at four houses in one night on Wednesday of last week. The last house we looked at Tim and I both really liked! It wasn't an estate, it wasn't a foreclosure, and it's not even really that much of a fixer-upper! :) We ended up looking at it one more time Thursday night and submitting our offer on Friday! We negotiated a couple times with the seller over the weekend and accepted their counter-offer on Saturday!!! Yesterday I went in to initial the papers, so we're officially under contract with a house and we're both very excited about it! Right now I'm in the process of setting up our home inspection and getting our loan approval process underway, again. :-) Let's hope this one works out this time!!

*Last weekend Tim and I drove down to TN to celebrate our nephew, Cole's third birthday and also to see his new brother, Liam who was born in the beginning of May. It was so fun to be able to hang out with Tim's sisters and their husbands and their kids for the weekend. We had a great time, but I cannot wait until they are living in Illinois so we can do this more often!

Aunt Colleen & Liam

Uncle Tim & Cole

Aunt Colleen pulling Cole & Isaac in the wagon

Baby Liam :)

Aunt Colleen & Cole reading "The Pout-Pout Fish"

Cousin love! :)

*After we got back from Tennessee, we pulled our offer on the fixer-upper, saw those other houses and put in our offer on our current home. Then we left for the weekend again. Tim and I ran our first 5K together on Saturday, along with several of my old co-workers from DeKalb. We did Brett's Run, which was my very first 5K last year. It rained the entire morning while we were waiting for the race to begin so we were soaked before we even started running. Once the race started, the rain died down, but it picked back up again as soon as we were finished.
I had not been training for this run as well as I did last year, so I wasn't too pleased with myself when I had to stop and walk a couple times along the route. But, I am very happy that I was still able to finish in 35:29.7. Tim, on the other hand, blew right past me as soon as we started and finished his first 5K with an awesome time of 26:53.3, that's an 8:40 mile pace! It was really fun being able to do this with Tim and several of our friends this time! I hope that I can keep in shape and that this is something we can do annually together.

Tim & I post-race, drenched!

Our whole team pre-race, nice and dry!

Yay, we survived the rain! :) 

*The other big news of the summer so far is my job placement for next year. Long story short, the district messed up their numbers thinking there would be enough students for three kindergarten classes next year, allowing me to stay as a kindergarten teacher...well it turns out there are not enough students for three classes, so back to the original plan of me moving up to first grade in the fall. I will not have all of my same students from my kindergarten class because we mixed up all of the students at the end of the year, but I'll have a few of the same. I'm very happy that I'm staying in the same building because if you didn't know already, I love my coworkers & job! I will be moving rooms this summer (going from room 15 to room 9 - movin' on up!) which I wasn't planning, but that's okay. It'll give me something to do on those days when I'm bored out of my mind. So this fall will kind of feel like my first year all over again with a new room and new curriculum, but the first grade team is great (one of them is my mentor) and I'm looking forward to working with them. :-) Better start thinking of a clever name to go with their quotes this year, can't call them 'kinder quotes' anymore!

*Even with all of this craziness that's been going on, I've really had a lot of time to relax over the past few weeks, especially during the day while Tim's at work. I've been doing pretty good about getting in an extra treatment during the day - probably about 1/2 the time I do. I just finished up a few weeks of TOBI which really helped clean my lungs out and I've been feeling really good. I had a great workout today - did a 10 minute standing ab video and then a 20 minute medicine ball video that Tim and I did a lot over the winter. I've got about six more weeks until my next CF clinic appointment, so I'm really trying to get my lungs in great shape and really trying to gain some weight. My goal is to cut back on the running and to increase weight training exercises like these workout videos to gain muscle weight.

I've been watching a lot of HGTV & Dr. Phil, doing some cleaning and laundry, but I'm planning on adding more reading this summer. First on my list is The Walking Dead graphic novel! We've been watching the show since it started and I've really enjoyed it. Tim's aunt Linda read this already and said it was totally different from the TV show, so I'm excited to read it. This is the first graphic novel I've ever read, so I'm curious to see how I like it.

I'm also going to see "The Book of Mormon" with Tim's aunt Linda next week, too, which is supposed to be really funny. Then I've got a bachelorette party, bridal shower, Country Thunder, (hopefully moving into our new house), and my best friend's wedding all before the new school year starts! I love having summers off! :-)

Months of Stress

A couple months ago, I was hinting at some things that were going on that I couldn't talk about yet that had to do with my goals. One of them is still a 'no-no' for now (just wait about 6 more weeks! No, I'm not pregnant), but the other, I'm going to share with you today.

Tim and I are currently looking to buy a house! I'm very excited because it's always been a goal of mine to own my own home. We've been renting together for over five years and I hate that we're just throwing that money away. When we moved to our current city and got settled, I realized that I love my job and the proximity to all of our family, and Tim has a great job too. We originally told ourselves when we moved down here that we were going to stay in our rental for two years to build up our savings and not have to pack everything up and move again so soon (I hate moving!). Well, this winter, Tim and I started getting a little antsy. We started looking at homes online and we soon realized that we could be spending much less on a mortgage than what we are paying for rent! So in February, we went into the bank and talked to the mortgage lender and found out our pre-approval amount. Our mortgage guy, Dennis (he's awesome!), set us up with a realtor, Sandy, who's been wonderful!!

In February and March, we started to look at a few homes with Sandy. We assumed that we were just going to see what our price range could get us, not expecting to find anything yet, just because our lease isn't up on our rental until August 1st. We talked with Sandy about finding something and putting an offer in in May or June, which would be perfect timing to get out of our rental. Well of course, things never go according to plan, do they?!

We ended up finding a home that we really liked. It needed cosmetic updating on the inside, but it had a wonderful lot and was in the area we wanted. We put our offer in March 17th, and it was finally accepted on the 22nd. We soon realized, that the seller of the house moved at a very slow pace - he inherited the house as an Estate and lives in KY. The seller agreed to our low offer (because it needed lots of work), but he said he would not fix anything in the home. We agreed since Tim is such a handy man, plus we didn't see any major issues in the home that we couldn't do ourselves.

When we were looking at the home, we did notice that there was a 'too-green' patch of grass in the backyard and thought it might have to do with the septic tank. The home inspector didn't know much about septics, so he recommended that we have a separate inspection done on it. So we had a septic inspector come out and we learned that the septic was full and most likely backing up into the pipes and into the yard. They were going to have to do a soil test to determine what repairs needed to be done, ranging from $4,000-$8,000. We approached our realtor about all of this and she suggested writing a letter to the seller about covering the cost of the septic repair - since this was a major expense and something that had to be done whether we bought the house or not. After about two weeks (again, the seller moves VERY slowly! Returns phone calls on his time....ugh!) he finally agreed to pay for the soil test and whatever the repair costs were going to be. Yay! The soil test revealed that the more expensive repairs ($7,500) were going to have to be done. I was really glad that we caught that before closing and moving in!

As we approached our closing date (April 29th), the listing agent on the house sent the seller his closing documents to sign and return. Of course, he didn't. Did I mention this guy works on his own time?! On April 29th, both Tim and I took off of work to do our final walk-through of the home and go to the title company to sign papers and get the keys. While we were doing our final walk-through, the listing agent & attorney (of the estate) called to tell us that his paperwork was not in. We were pissed! We set a closing date for a reason! We were not allowed to fill out any of our paperwork or get the keys to the house until we had his paperwork in first. By the end of the week, his signed paperwork finally arrived and I was told we were closing that afternoon! I got all excited and was preparing to go there as soon as I got off of work. As soon as I was leaving, I noticed I had a voicemail from Dennis, mortgage guy, saying, "Don't go the the title company, we aren't closing today." It was like this for a week straight! Telling me we were going to close, then realizing we couldn't - it was so frustrating and stressful!

Turns out, the seller owed money at closing (the septic money + his closing costs = ~$8,000). When he found that out, he stopped answering and returning everyone's phone calls.....and here we are today, still without anyone hearing from him in weeks! It's like he just fell off the face of the Earth. No one knew what to do - the attorney, realtors, mortgage lender - no one had ever been in a situation like this before. We waited him out for a month past the closing date because we really wanted that house! We already started making plans for remodel, bought furniture and started looking at materials for remodeling the rooms. We signed an extension of our contract through June 1st, but that really didn't mean anything because the seller never signed it.

The week before Memorial Day, we finally decided that we should probably start looking at other homes, just in case this one fell through. I was determined to wait this guy out, but it's just getting to be way too stressful. We widened our search to include fixers that we can flip over a few years and hopefully make a profit when we go to sell. Last week, we decided enough is enough. We are currently in the process of voiding the contract and getting our Earnest money back. We lost out on the cost of both inspections, but there's really nothing we can do about that. Tim and I went to look at another house, for the second time, yesterday and as soon as we know that we are no longer tied to the first house, I think we're going to make an offer on this other one.

Tim's moved on already and ready for this next project, but it's been a lot harder on me. I was picturing us growing our family in that home and living there for a long time! I'll just have to deal with it though, there's nothing we can do about it. What's frustrating to me is how rude and disrespectful this seller was! Someone also messed up along the way...the seller found out that he owed money at closing a week after our scheduled closing date! He should have known that weeks before we closed!

Anyway, I can sit here and play the blame game, but that's not going to get me anywhere but more frustrated. We are moving on. We will find a home for us. Everyone says your first home buying experience is supposed to be so happy and fun. Ours has been a little more stressful than most, but I still think that everything happens for a reason. I have absolutely no idea why we're going through all of this right now, but I hope that down the road I can look back and see why it just wasn't meant to be. Congratulations on making it through this entire post, I hope I didn't confuse and bore you to death! I couldn't wait for the day to say on here the we were homeowners, that's why I was holding off on it all, but it didn't turn out the way I expected. Hopefully we'll get there before August 1st!