Um, I've been kind of busy?

I did not mean to take so much time off from the blog but things have been busy. We had apartment guests, both family and friends. Our daughter turned one year old and I became obsessed with searching for cake and party ideas on Pinterest. We had a small, mostly family,party for her. Although, a friend and her babysitter did stop in to see Em open presents and smash her cake. The cake. Well, Em had her own little healthy cake to tear apart and I made a decadently sweet ombré effect layer cake for the adults.

Em had a fun day soaking up all of the attention from her grandparents. She had recently taken her first steps but then reverted back to crawling for a few weeks. On her birthday she decided she was done with that and really started walking. At the time of writing this she is climbing on everything, and I mean everything.

We had been looking at houses all Summer and Fall. We had pretty much exhausted all possibilities in any area within a reasonable distance from town. We needed enough space for three bedrooms and workspaces for Mike and me. So, a fairly good sized house was needed. What we have discovered in the New Haven area is that the houses are smaller than the Buffalo houses we have lived in. We'd found a cute, but not very special, Colonial in a neighborhood that was family friendly and close to town. We had looked at it several times and made an offer which was rejected. We kept looking and didn't see anything else. The seller was holding out for one last open house before the season closed down. She got no offers and came back to us. We knew we could have the house if we came up slightly from our original offer. We were so close to just making the offer but our realtor suggested that we go back one more time to be sure of how we felt about it. That day another house came on the market. Mike had been texting and calling me but I didn't notice. Finally, I picked up the phone and he told me to check out a listing online. It was a mid century ranch house with a South facing wall of windows and a great yard. From the photos it was perfect. Mike and I have been collecting mid century furniture for years. We could not see this house fast enough. Mike insisted that we see this house before we made an offer on the other one. I'm so glad that we did. We had an immediate attraction to the house.

We were first to view it and our offer was accepted within 48 hours. There seems to have been a lot of interest in it.To seal the deal our realtor asked Mike to write a letter to the sellers telling them how much we loved it and how we valued its uniqueness. She had no idea that Mike is a talented writer! I'm positive that it helped our offer.

Our house is on a quiet cul-de-sac of mostly mid century houses, just minutes from downtown. It has an unusual history of having been an experimental planned neighborhood. The houses were designed and built by a Yale architect for a group of professionals who were friends and wanted to live in the same neighborhood. It would appear that many of the friends stayed in the neighborhood. Some of the current neighbors that we have met bought their homes from the original owners. The communal aspect of the neighborhood still exists. In the middle of the cul-de-sac is a large, treed, grassy park-like area. Best of all, there is a footpath leading from the neighborhood to the elementary school. It's a good school district and parents are enthusiastic about the school.

We said goodbye to the apartment that had been our home for 7 months and landing pad in New Haven. It was a good landing pad and we were fairly comfortable there. But it is nice to own an architecturally unique house and we are enjoying it and the gorgeous property.

I suspect that this blog is going to have many more home improvement posts than cooking from now on. But, we still have to eat, right?