Sunny Days....

This fall has been incredible! It has been much more sunny than I remember last year being. Well the lives of Brendan and Tatem get more an more exciting each day as this new kid approaches.

Quick poll. Did any of you take a trip before your children were born? Like a last "freedom" trip? We want to do something special but don't know what to do.

Well we have finally bitten the bullet and started to get some stuff for the baby. We got our crib. It is really nice and much better than we anticipated. Because, we are probably going to be here in our townhouse for at least a few months after the baby comes we got a mini crib. It is about the same size as a portable crib but much nicer and it fits really well in our bedroom.

We have also started to research strollers, car seats, etc...... (any good tips or brands would be great). Time is really flying only 2 and 1/2 months and we will be parents.

The business is doing well and we are continuing to become better bloggers. As you can see we haven't done the best.

Fall Colors, Winter Rains........

It is amazing how fast time go's. Well our summer is gone and the fall/winter rains are returning. As crazy as this sounds I am kind of looking forward to some gray skys. Next month though I am sure I will be over it and will go into my winter depression, Just kidding (that was only my first winter here). Although the winter blues are a real thing here. The local news always has a story around this time giving advice for how to be happy during the winter. For everyones information. The cure for the winter blues is at least 20 min of daily exercise, as well as getting outside (even in cloudy weather) for a 1/2 hour.

Well I am now a Real Estate blogger. My first post was published last week on a national real estate blogging site. It didn't get as much attention as I was hoping for and it only stayed on the site for a few days. Ido feel good that I made it to the "big stage" and hope for other opportunities. Overall the business of Pillar To Post SE King County is doing well. I am really looking forward to the market rebounding. We have been really blessed to be in the #1 market in the country and have been blessed to stay busy. I would love to do more, so now I market, market, market!!!

Baby News.....................we (Brendan and the currently unnamed child) have a morning ritual where I tap on Tate's tummy and he kicks me back. Who knows if he really feels the tapping or if the noise just makes him mad. At least we are getting some quality bonding time. Tatem is also entering her 7th month. Only a few more to go. For the most part she is feeling really good. I cant tell you how nice it's been. We have decided that we are going to stay in our town house probably for another 6 months or so. It is going to be to much to look for and move into a new home, also winter is traditionally a slow time for us, so we need to leave our savings where it is for now.

Seattle is full of fun.

Well we have had a lot of fun this past weekend. On Friday Tatem and I spent the day attempting to play tour guide for Brian and Ashley VanCamp. They went on a cruise that returned to Seattle so they had most of Friday to spend site seeing before their plane left. We went to the Locks, saw the fish ladder, had lunch at the crab pot. While we were eating Tatem and Ashley turned into star struck fans when Ty Pennington happened to come into the restaurant . (They are filming an extreme home makeover house in Kirkland). They say that he is better looking in person than on T.V. We then went to Pikes place and walked and walked and walked around checking out the vendors and watching the monk fish (if you have been to Pikes place you know what I am talking about. If you haven't, well come visit us and we will take you there)



On Saturday we went to the Red Bull SoapBox Races. It was so much fun and there were a ton of people there. (the announcer was saying somthing like 50,000) The weather wasn't great it rained but what should we expect we live in Seattle........ Tatem saw her dream guy, Sir Mix Alot (he was one of the judges) so now her live is becoming more fulfilled and we took a picture by a tree.



On a baby note.... he is getting bigger and starting to kick. We still don't have a clue what to name him but that time is going to be here faster than we know it.

So here is my first attempt at putting together a movie, It is not the best and when I uploaded it the quality of the picture is horrible, I will try to save it differently but, I wanted to show off all of the fun times we had in Maine. So here it is......

-Brendan

Where has the summer gone??

Well a new month and now no more summer. It seemed like we were finally starting to see some warm sunny weather here in the great North West and soon we will be in our winter gray. I can feel the depression coming back already. (Just kidding)

We have had a full week, learning about the boy, trying to figure out names. Which with Tatem is not a fun task. She doesnt like any of the name's I suggest. Like Pedro, Nike, I Love Lamp, (are you just saying anything that you see?) Well if you have not seen anchor man than this will seem pretty stupid. Sorry I digressed I am just trying to keep our options open to something that is not usual. We have considered Evan and Tate. But only time will tell.



We went to a Mariners game last night with our good friend Scott. It was alot of fun and the seats were great but the Mariners are in a really bad slump.... So the play was horrible. They got spanked by the A's, a team that should have been and easy Victory!!! So of course we left early.

I have discovered a very interesting fact....... When ever we go out to eat what ever I choose is what Tatem wants. For example last night at the ball game I decide that the Grande nachos looked like a great choice. And as we can see from the picture above I did not end up with them. But what would be an even better picture would be to see all of the nacho stains on Tatem's shorts from her reaching across and stealing them while I was eating. It was pretty funny to see that every chip she snagged, the toppings ended up on either her shorts or sandals.

And the Baby's Gender is a.................

Well, it was an exciting morning for Brendan and I. After 21 weeks of waiting we finally found out what this little Marchant is going to be. Of all the picture's that were taken Brendan was only able to make out one distinct feature......... the face. Maybe he was sitting to far away from the monitor to really get a good look at what the tech was showing us. To get a good ultrasound your suppose to come with a full bladder. By the end of the ultrasound, which took about an hour, I thought that I was going to burst.

We had taken an online test when I was about 12 weeks along that said I had a 50% chance of it being a boy. The test results were right!!! Can you believe that? We had a girl name all picked out and have no boy names. This was the only picture we got today, I was a little bummed they didn't give a picture of the "boy parts". But it sure is a cute picture of the little guy.

Both of our parents are really excited. Especially Brendan's, this will be their first grandchild. His mom probably has already boughten plane tickets for when the baby is born. My mom called me to find out if I knew before I even had the ultrasound. Maybe she thought I could predict the future.

It will be fun because this little guy will have two boy cousins his age to cause terror with. What's even better is I will most likely get all of these cousins clothes. It's nice having older brothers to give me their hand me downs.

Life comes at you fast....

Well it has been a long time since we have posted anything.

To help get everyone caught up on Brendan and Tatem here is what we have been up to. Well we didn't close on our new house and boy was it an emotional roller coaster.
We knew that because we are self employed it was going to be more difficult to get a loan but our mortgage broker continued to say everything is fine........until the day of closing, when he called to say "we have a problem" well to make a long story short, we hit the mortgage market at the wrong time. I am sure that everyone has heard that the sub prime mortgage market has gone down the tube and now the finance companies are setting very strict guidelines. One of of the big ones is that a self employed person needed to have owned a business for 2 years. Right now we have owned our business for 19 months. So we are going to wait until December to resume our search.

(Casey, Ashton, Tatem, & Brendan at Fort Knox)

On a brighter note we just got home from a week in Maine on Tuesday. It was such an awesome time, Tatem's family is blessed to have a "Camp" (a few cabins) to go and stay at each year on a Lake Onawa in the geographical center of Maine. Some generation or another has been going there each year since the civil war. So it is full of history. It was really interesting to see all that has been collected and saved over the years.

(My family-Mom, Dad, Casey, Caden, Angela, Ashton, Brendan, & Tatem, walking the train
tresell at "Camp")

(View of one the cabins "Lazy Beaver" from the lake)

Brendan was finally officially inducted into the Livingston family after going to Maine. It is lucky he liked it so much or else we might have had to split. My family holds Maine as a sacred place. My family has gone on vacation there every summer since before I was born. My dad went up there since he was a baby and his mom and her dad, ect.

We went to Fort Knox (seen above) in Bangor, Maine and then spent the rest of the day in Bar Harbor. It was really cool seeing the architectural differences on the East coast versus the West.

I am super sore from all of the activities, we spent alot of time on the boat, tubing, skiing, and surfing (yes i said surfing). Scott and I decided to pull the wind surf board behind the boat it was great fun. We learned a new language "AYUH" (which is like "Eh" in Canada) and ate Maine lobster. Tatem spent a lot of time reading and being a general woos. (She only got in the water an hour the whole week.) But, in my defense I am pregnant and really couldn't join in all the water activities with Brendan and Scott.

If anyone has a chance to go the the Vacation Land (Maine) you sure should. It was great.





Well here is the Baby update. Tatem is now 20 weeks along so we will be finding out any day what it is. I am still thinking girl but I guess I will just have to wait and see. She finally is feeling good and I can't explain how great it is. She actually will come into our kitchen again without gagging. It's funny, one day she wasn't showing and the next day she had the baby bump. This picture was taken three days ago and it has already gotten bigger.

(The Baby Bump)

Our goal is to become better at writing on this but as before we will see.........