Rescission, Vacation, Transmission

I don't even know where to begin. I'll start by saying that Justin and I pulled our offer on the house. I am seriously bummed out. The lender we had kept changing the financial numbers on us. One day it'd be this set of numbers, the next day he'd give us a higher set of numbers. I know the market keeps going up (so did our interest rate), but our lender kept giving us estimates (he failed to tell us this), not actual set in stone numbers. He'd sent over the good faith estimate paperwork, and it's a good thing I went through everything like a fine toothed comb. The numbers he had down set off about a million red flags for Justin and I. We had a big decision to make moving forward. Continue with the buying process with our new icky feelings and red flags, or pull out and wait for a house and lender that feels 100% right. As sad as I am about this (I'v been crying on and off for the past three days), I know that our forever home is still out there. This process taught us a lot about the game of home purchasing, and we are more knowledgable because of it.

On a happier note, our vacation was pretty excellent. I normally don't post photos of our Howland family getaways (honestly, I was pretty embarrassed of my *then* poor camera quality), but with the camera update, I thought I'd share a couple. We had a complete blast without technology guys! All three of us played miniature golf, we stuck our toes in the Pacific Ocean, and we had our first dinner at an authentic Irish pub. We ended up switching hotels (long story), but our second room was breathtaking. We had a balcony with a full ocean view, and the hotel had a lighthouse on top of it. Ava stayed up later than normal on Saturday night, but watching her get excited over the sunset was totally worth it. She also conquered her skepticism of the ocean during our trip! Ava bug flew her first kite, she played with seaweed, and she had fun running around the arcade. I failed to mention that she was a complete gem while riding in the car for over two hours (both ways). I am so thankful that she still sleeps so well in her carseat.

All in all our weekend was very relaxing... until Sunday afternoon. Aside from the Broncos losing their game in overtime, my Mazda decided that it was going to alert me with an "AT' symbol on my dashboard. Apparently this is a symbol referring to the transmission. Ironically, this horrible potential disaster couldn't have occurred at a better time for us (financially). We had planned on getting a family SUV soon.. but this soon wasn't what we had in mind. This is just worst case scenario thinking of course. Hopefully when I take the car in tomorrow, we hear some semi decent news. This is the first car Justin and I had as a married couple and I'm really not ready to let it go. I'm pretty stressed out about the car situation, but other than that, things are pretty good over here.

We've also decided to randomly plan trips throughout the year like we did this past weekend. It was so fun to be random and spontaneous. We connected in such a different way during this trip, and I'm grateful for all the "under the hood work" and fine tuning our marriage receives. I was crushing on the mister hard core this weekend. On that note, here are some of the photos from our trip:

Happy Monday all! 

♥- Leilani