Have you checked out Stella & Dot?  Do you love all of the jewelry as much as I do?!!  Well, now you can get it for a steal! 

Through July 9th all of the sale items at Stella & Dot are an additional 20% off!  You could get these pieces (plus many more!) at a great sale price, PLUS get an extra 20% off:

You can shop online at www.stelladot.com/courtneyengle (the extra 20% promotion is applied automatically), or if you have any questions, need help with your order, or want me to place the order for you, you can always email me at englecourtney@gmail.com.

Happy shopping!

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The other night, before heading to bed, I was in the kitchen when Matt came in and asked me to do something.  I said, “I’ll be right there.  I just made myself a snack.  And by ’snack’ I mean ‘a bowl of cereal and two pieces of toast’.”  “Well,” he said, “the 8th meal of the day is the most important.”

Why, yes it is, and I am so happy he has finally realized this!

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The other day, because I’m pregnant and like to blame everything on the baby, Riblet decided he wanted breakfast for lunch, so Nate and I went to IHOP.  He was surprisingly well-behaved (he tends to get very antsy and restless in restaurants), so while he was coloring on his kids menu, I looked around and saw a family of four sitting near us.  It was a mom, dad, and two boys who looked to be about 15 and 12 years old. 

I found myself watching this family, and those boys in particular, just knowing that that was going to be my life very, very soon.  The boys were cute and happy, they were teasing each other, and they seemed like good kids.  I don’t think they ever noticed me watching them, which is good because it’s admittedly kind of creepy, but all I could think about was how one day Nate is going to be 15 and Riblet is going to be 12.  These babies of mine are just going to keep growing and growing, and seeing those two boys at IHOP today was eye-opening. 

I felt like God was giving me a little glimpse of my future, and it was really nice.  It made me happy to think about how my life is going to be when my boys are older, what Nate and Riblet might look like, what kind of people they might be.

I left IHOP feeling happy and peaceful, not only about what my unknown future will hold, but also about the time I have right now with little 2 year old Nate and with Riblet who still has three more months in my belly.  

My life is very good right now, and while I can only hope and pray it’s still this good years from now, I have no guarantees.  God has given me this day, this husband, and these boys, all of this right now.  I am thankful and grateful and happy.  

Maybe having pancakes for lunch is the way to go every day.

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While at Whole Foods tonight doing some grocery shopping I spent roughly three minutes in the refrigerated section staring at the butter trying to remember if I buy salted or unsalted butter.  The same butter I always buy, every time, I completely blanked on.  I got the brand right, but that whole salt thing really threw me for a loop.

Thank goodness I still had one stick left when I got home so that I was able to verify that I had in fact bought the right kind (salted). 

(Matt just came over here and saw my blog title.  “Started?”, he asked with raised eyebrows.  “More like ‘Pregnancy brain has now been recognized by pregnancy brain’.”  So apparently I’ve had pregnancy brain for a while and just haven’t noticed.  My sweet husband, however, has apparently definitely noticed!)

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We are coming up on almost one year in our new house, and I got to thinking about our old house in Austin and how lucky we were that we sold it so quickly.  We put it on the market on June 13th (just over one year ago), and six days later we had an offer that we accepted.

I consider us very lucky that we sold so quickly, especially considering the state of the real estate market a year ago, but I do think there were two big things we did that really helped make our home selling such a success:

1. We were realistic with our pricing.  I am the type of person that once I get an idea in my head I want to do it NOW!  This is rarely a good thing, but maybe in this case it came in handy.  I did not want our house sitting on the market for months and months (because I wanted to move, but also, realistically, because I didn’t want to have to keep the house show-ready with a baby and a dog running around….I’m really lazy!), so we made sure to really listen to the comps the realtor showed us, and we stayed right in line with what other comparable homes in our neighborhood were selling for.  Yes, we thought our house was worth more, and yes, we were hoping that we could sell it at a higher price, but we were realistic.  We had three people look at the house, and the third person made an offer.  After negotiating with her, our final price ended up being just a few thousand dollars less than our asking price.
2. We majorly decluttered the house.  We packed lots of boxes of things that we wouldn’t be needing for a while, then Matt and his brother moved all those boxes, along with some furniture pieces that we had culled in order to make our house look more spacious, and moved them into a storage unit.  I think our storage unit was something like 10′x10′ and we literally packed that thing from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.  Our house looked so much better with all that stuff out of there, and I think it showed really well.  I cleaned out all the closets completely, and in our master closet I just left the few hanging clothes that we wore regularly.  I depersonalized by taking all the pictures off the wall.  We also rearranged furniture at the suggestion of a home stager.  The house looked so good after we were finished, and I think it made a nice impression in the photos and then when people came to view it.

Matt and I both worked really hard to get the house ready, and we were so relieved and thankful when it sold so quickly.  I soon found out that while you want your house to sell quickly, you don’t want it to sell too quickly.  Especially since our buyer wanted to close in 30 days, and we hadn’t yet found our new house in Dallas.  We were, again, so thankful and lucky that we found a perfect house here in Dallas and had a wonderful seller who worked with us on the closing date. 

So, while I’ve only sold one house, I definitely learned a lot.  I learned that you have to be realistic, and you have to view your house through the eyes of strangers and potential buyers.    Once you decide to place your house on the market you really do have to become emotionally detached from it. 

I really loved our house in Austin.  It was so good to us and held so many wonderful memories.  It makes me so happy that someone else saw what a great house it was, too.  I only hope the new owner and her family have loved that house as much as we did.

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Dear Riblet,

I like break dancing as much as the next person, but not so much when it’s happening in my uterus, and definitely not at 2:30 am.

Thank you for your cooperation regarding this matter.

Love,

Mommy

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