Help! This kid needs a room...

Becoming pregnant leaves a couple with many more questions than answers. What is the sex? Do we find out the sex? Names? Preschool? Which college should he/she attend? Ok...maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself. (Although I have made the stipulation that the baby's name should sound good with "Dr." attached to it. Just planning for the future. Haha.)

Lately the big question on my mind (as well as the question I'm getting from others) is what is the nursery theme/colors going to be? Jack and I have made very few decisions so far in this process. What we do know is which room will be the baby's. Unfortunately it's the "throw it in there" room. Do you have one of those? Whenever company is coming over or you have some item that you need to put somewhere and there is no where it can go you "throw it in there." Currently, that room is a wreck for that exact reason. (If you are still following this blog, you'll remember that this is the one room not pictured in the House Remodel post.) Yeah. It was a mess then and it's still a mess now. With the door closed, it's out of sight and out of mind. So once we get it cleaned up and cleaned out, we need to choose a theme. Granted, we don't know the sex yet (although we do plan to find out) and that may have a impact on the theme. So here's my question...where do I go for inspiration or what are your favorite nursery themes/colors? I've seen a few things that I like and so has Jack. We probably won't make this decision completely until we know more and begin to get things cleaned up but I'm a little lost on this one right now. Any advice would be appreciated. [Be forewarned, posts asking for advice/help are likely to become more frequent.]

What is God Saying? - Your input is requested

For those that know us well, Francie & I try very hard to listen to what God is telling us. Without giving too much of us away, on every move/career change/etc we have striven to listen to what God was trying to tell us in the situation. And for the most part, we feel that He has guided us (or for this blog post - told us) through various incidents, "signs", etc as to what we needed -or what He felt was best for us - to do.

So we find ourselves again at this crossroad and we are trying to listen to what God is telling us to do in regards to buying a house where we now live. To try to help you understand what we mean, without giving too much away below is a timeline.

1. After accepting a job, we started looking for houses to potentially buy. Know that we have never owned a house before so we are virgins at this and trying to not make mistakes as we go along. In looking at houses, we got in touch with a real estate agent and a financial broker (both we know personally and consider friends).


2. We didn't initially buy but continued to look over the period of several months while we have been renting from a family member (a HUGE blessing that we feel so blessed to be able to use). NOTE: We have enjoyed where we are living but there are a few things that we miss that are kinda driving the desire to buy a home.


3. After several months of searching we just did not find anything that we loved. Because of our current housing situation we weren’t willing to "settle" for something. We really wanted to find something that we loved and would be happy in for several years. Doesn't have to be permanent but we’re looking at least 5+ years of living there.


4. While we were looking, both our real estate agent and our financial broker left the business because of the current economic times. We by no means fault them for making the career change, just a part of life and taking a while to buy a home.

So in all of this we started to think that maybe God was trying to tell us to wait on buying a house. After all we really didn't have 20% to put down on a house in the price range that we were looking in. Besides this we had several other family issues that we were having to deal with (some that have been documented on this blog and Jack's Prayer Requests).

So we were just waiting. That is until this past Thursday night.

Since we have started looking we have had family members occasionally tell us about houses that they have come across. This has been very handy in the housing search as both Francie and I have been swamped with other issues but it allows us to know about houses that we might have missed.

This past Thursday night my mom sent me a house that she found online that we were interested in and I was very interested in (and for those that know me best this is a rare event). So since our agent had resigned from the business we decided to just contact the person selling the house in order to at least look at it.

Well the house went under contract LAST NIGHT!!! WHAT LUCK! AUGH!!!

So my question to everyone out there is.......What do you think God is trying to tell us? We would like to finally get “settled” in the town that we live in, however we don’t want to make an unwise decision and would like to continue our history of listening to God in these life changing decisions. But we are just SOOOO confused. And if God is trying to tell us to wait, how long do we wait? Or is God trying to tell us that we need to move on this more quickly because we might miss out on what we need? The last three times we have been semi-interested in a house by the time we asked to see it, it was under contract. Are we too slow on the trigger? What is your perspective?