Last Friday

Caitie had her three year well-check on Friday morning. Her doc said she's in the 5 percentile for weight and in the 50 percentile for height. He always laughs when I bring up my worry about her weight; he knows Michael is thin and says I am too, but he can't really say that with a straight face anymore, I'm a bit on the chunky side now. ha He said not to worry about her weight and her bad eating habits, which is pretty much not eating at all; she loves vanilla pediasure shakes and chocolate milk, and that's about it. She does eat solid food occasionally, which consists mostly of chocolate chip cookies and bananas. Hey, I said bananas, so it's not all bad. ha She got her flu mist on the visit as well. He suggested the mist instead of the shot. Caitie didn't care much for the mist, but that was better than the alternative. She got a chocolate lollipop for bein' such a good girl.

We went to the park after her appointment. She loves that place. We then drove out to the neighborhood in Surprise where we had purchased a lot and house this time last year. I wanted to see what had been built on the lot we gave up. I was surprised to see that there was nothing on that lot, or on any of the lots around it. I drove around the neighborhood to see if it had changed much; there is still construction going on on a few houses, but that's about it, it looks the same otherwise. Not much goin' on in a year's time, but then, the housing market hasn't been doing so good, so it's not surprising, really. While driving through the neighborhood, I spotted the little play area Caitie liked to play on when we visited the area last year, so I decided to stop and let her play on the slides and climb for a bit. After leaving the play area, I called Michael to tell him about the lot still being available and he decided to look up the Richmond American website to see what was going on in the area; he saw some spec homes available. He noticed that the base price of the houses had gone down considerably since last year. I was then glad we had decided to get out of buying the house/lot we had picked out; I would have been upset had we gone through with it and then found out they had reduced the price. Anyway, he described the two spec homes that were available, and one of them was identical to the house we had chosen, in elevation, color, etc., all except for the roof tiles, which were flat, ours were curved. It's on a smaller lot than the one we had picked out, but it's still a pretty good size lot. Caitie and I stopped to look at it, and I took a few pics to show Michael. We also looked at another house that's the same model, but it's a different elevation and on a smaller lot. We considered looking at them(doing a walk-through), and gave the realtor a call, but after I talked with her, we changed our minds. While on the phone with the realtor, I asked her about the lot we had purchased last year, to see why it was still available, she said they didn't own it anymore, she said an investment company had purchased that strip of land, which is about a street and half worth of lots, and will hold on to them until the housing market is in better shape. After hanging up with her, I got to thinking about what she said and then wondered what it would have been like had we bought the house on that lot. Would it have been the only house on the block, and what would future houses built next to the house look like since they wouldn't be from the same builder. The house probably would have looked out of place. I think the house hunting project is on hold for now, and will be on hold until the housing market is in better shape and the economy starts to recover.

Here are a couple of other pics I wanted to share.

This one was taken near the model homes; I like the lighting on the flag.



I took this one while stopped at a stop sign in our neighborhood. I like the side-view mirror effect.