Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Vday everyone! We hope you get a chance today to tell everyone in your life how much you LOVE them!

Here is Sam, Claire and Emma posing with our "LUV-BOT" which Claire is entering into a Valentine's day box contest at school today. It was fun to assemble and last minute like always, but we are proud of him!

Time Out

About the same time we were putting our house on the market we decided to plan a little January get-a-way! We generally are craving somewhere warm in January but also had the idea of wanting to do a destination 13.1!! This would be Scott's first so he got to choose. He chose based on one criteria...FLAT, zero elevation. Miami was the winner and so we booked it.

We began to waffle about the timing of this. Should we go or not go? We finally decided if the Mother-In-Law was willing to keep the kids then we should go. She was, and we did! It was really fun!

We raced, we finished, I beat Scott! only by 2 minutes :)

We stayed at Eden Roc resort on the beach for 2 nights. It was as they say, "Delightful"

Then we hit Coral Gables for one night and headed back home. It was just the perfect trip. We relaxed a lot, exercised some, enjoyed the sun and humidity, took in the culture of Miami (just a bit), ate fabulous food...We did not talk about where we will live or how our children were doing. It was truly a vacation from our real life!

I know that you won't believe me if I said that nothing new has happened since Christmas!

To say that nothing new has happened in the life of the Smouts since Christmas would be a big fat LIE! However if you are waiting for some big announcement...we don't exactly have that either. We do however have a story that we are living day by day that we can share about our housing situation. It is an ongoing story of how God is shaping our desires, defining needs vs. wants in our life, making us and our children more flexible, allowing us to be grateful for all God has blessed us with and deepening our trust in that he knows the end of this story.

Christmas was full of ups and downs. We had a contract on a property we really wanted, but we had to walk away. It was sad. We were angry. We started packing not sure of where we were headed. Our Gannon house looked perfect to us at that time. We were sad. I thought we were making a huge mistake. Here is our oh, so perfect Gannon house, that no longer belongs to us but it making a cute young couple with NO children very happy! Long live Gannon!

And while we do love the Gannon house, it had it's limitations for us. We had been there 6 years knowing that it would not be our forever house. Kids keep growing and the rooms did not. We knew it was time to let it go...

It went under contract quickly and SOLD on January 23rd!
Our goal was to find a rental without a 1 year lease by January 1 and God provided this adorable house in Glendale for us to rent. Only catch is it is under a contingent contract so we have to be out by May 15th IF the buyers sell their house in order to close on this one. Oh so complicated!! We are enjoying this house. It is great! The adjustment was a hard one but after being here a month the kids are happy and it feels homey :)
So where we will go from here, only God knows at this point. We have looked at so many houses it is enough to make my head spin or give me a good headache at least. It is stressful. We know we may end up moving again but are trying to see how God will work this all out in the end. So the big announcement is yet to come, but if you would join us on this journey, through prayer, we would be so grateful.