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.........

The New House

Well I thought I would update our blog, Time sure does fly. We are closing on our new home in only 4 days, Life has gotten so exciting.

Tate is still feeling sick but has newly discovered the joys of sea sick bands. They look like wrist sweat bands but they push on a pressure point on the wrist and they really have seemed to help her to feel better. She is also reaching the magical end to her 1st trimester and is really hoping that the morning/noon/afternoon/evening/night sickness will be gone. She has recently discovered that tomato sandwiches are a new addition to her expanding diet of yogurt, and cheese sticks.

We have been slowly starting to pack our house up and get everything ready to move. I really cant believe how much stuff we have. It is amazing how much is collected in just a little time.

We plan on moving this Saturday so if anyone wants to get some service time in, you are more than welcome....... Hopefully I we will get better at our blogging consistency.

Wow where has June gone????

All of a sudden June is almost gone!! Well the house search goes on and on and on. I wish it was easier. We are really able to see the Real Estate transaction from another side.

Tatem had her 2nd doctors appointment last week, it is relly incredible to see how much changes in just a months time. The baby what ever he or she is, gave us a little show and moved around during the ultra sound. Tatem is really excited to have these next few weeks go by so that she can feel better and get over being sick.

Well I started writing this blog last week but never finished it, and in a weeks time we are really close to becoming home owners. We found a really nice little home in Maple Valley, WA. (it is about 25 minutes from where we are currently). It is so crazy to think that one week ago we were not really looking very hard and now we close on our home on the 20th of July. Now the real fun has begun. Hopefully Tatem will start feeling better so she can enjoy packing, moving, and decorating the new house.We will post more pictures in future posts.

Here we go again!!!

Once again a whole week has gone by, and life is still good. Well a little update on our house search, we heard back on our offer and we didn't like their counter. So to make a long story short we decided that we will continue our search for our next home. We will most likely be leaving our current neighborhood which we love because the home prices here are way more than we can afford. (Townhouses start at 400+) So for now the joy is in the search.....

Tatem's Brother Jeff and his family were here this past weekend. We had a ton of fun, doing all of the Seattle tourist stuff, We went down town to Pioneer square and Pikes place market ate at Ivars Seafood Bar etc. etc. etc. But the highlight of the trip was the underground city tour..... There is something like 30 blocks of city underground it was a tiny bit creepy but we all survived and didn't even see any ghosts. (there are many rumors that some of the underground city is haunted).

We made our summer vacation plans yesterday and found really cheap tickets to Maine. So we will be spending a week at the end of August there, with Tatem's parents and at least one of her brothers. It should be really fun and relaxing. It is going to be hard though to leave the business for that long. Hopefully it will be a slow week anyway and we wont miss out on much business.

Well for now this is all. Hope all is great, B&T

Life is a bit Nerve Racking......

We put an offer on a house on Saturday.......... and now Tatem and I are nervous as can be. It has been a real eye opener to be on this side of the real estate transaction, The emotions are completely different, exciting, scared, nervous and the list goes on and on and on and on. We are now waiting to hear from all parties involved to know what our next step should be.

As our business continues to grow we should be able to avoid any of the fears of not being able to pay for everything. But even that is a fear, we are really in the great unknown..... we can book 10 inspections in one day or we can book 0 in a week, all part of the joy of owning our own business.

To move on... we have had another good week full of fun and excitement........well not really. Our life seems to be pretty boring.

Well put an end to any suspense that is left out there, we are expecting......that we will be expecting a new addition to our family, some time in January 2008. Actually the future addition is due Jan 18 (Brendan's birthday). Crazy times ahead. Now all we have to do is get past all of the morning sickness. I really don't understand why it is considered morning sickness any way because Tatem is sicker (if that is a real word) in the evening than she is in the morning. She also has some crazy eating habits. I call it her 2 am feeding. And pregnancy brain is a real thing.

Dont forget we would love to hear your coments

Wow how time flies.

Well another week has already gone, and we have had a great one. I really cant believe that June is almost here, where does the time go? This week was a little slow for the business because of memorial day, ( it is so crazy how holidays change the course of the real estate industry) So I (brendan) had a lot of time to get office work done. It also gives me a chance to write this blog.

Tatem and I drove to Portland this weekend but didn't leave until late Saturday afternoon. (good news about leaving so late is traffic was awesome and we made really good time) We had a great weekend with Tatem's family. This trip was a little more exciting that most, because we told the fam about the new addition..............????? I hope this peaks some interest....... I will get back to this announcement in a bit. We went golfing and had a family bbq and just enjoyed our time.

We met with a real estate agent yesterday to start looking for a home, The Seattle area is such an expensive area to live, who would have thought that you would have a really hard time finding a home in the 350,000 price range. Prices are insane and you really don't get a ton of home for it either. Oh well I guess that it is just part of life and we choose it, so now we get to enjoy all of it. We have been looking at some new construction homes and are almost ready to make an offer. But are not really in a rush because we don't want to close until December.

So much more has happened this week, but I have to run so we will probably make and addendum to this message latter.

We hope all is well and would love to hear any comments......so leave us some......

Another Sunny day in Seattle

Well we have decided that we are going to try this blog thing.

Just to get all of you up to speed on our lives. Here is a quick recap. Tatem and I left Rexburg in December of 2005 and moved to Issaquah WA, (it is about 25 min east of Seattle) and opened our Home Inspection business. It has been really exciting, stressful, and not quite as easy as we hoped. Most of all it has been an awesome experience and we are really seeing the benefits of our hard work starting to pay off.

Tatem is still a wonderful Wells Fargo employee, and luckily only works about 10 min away from our house. She cant wait until the day she can quit, but they have awesome insurance coverage so it is hard to say good bye.

Well we hope to make this a weekly update, and will see if we can. We would love to hear from any and all of our friends.

-Brendan and Tatem