Selling Houses and Selling Tickets...

It's been a week since our last blog and the title of this post says it all. We put our house on the market this past weekend and have been working very hard to get everything in order. Moving furniture around, painting walls, and general clean-up. As we posted about last week, there is a beautiful foreclosure just down the street that would be perfect for our growing family. It seems unrealistic that we would sell our house quick enough to buy the foreclosure in this tough market, but we're trusting that God has something in store for us. The bottom line is that we need more space and adding onto the house just didn't seem feasible anymore.

We've also been working hard to sell tickets to our fundraiser on May 16. We have a lot of verbal commitments, but not a lot of actual sales. If we have 100 people at the event it will be a blessing. If we have 200 or so, it will be a miracle. Again, begin the poor salespeople that we are, we're really trusting in God to help bring the people. We've printed out flyers and sent e-mails and recruited some good friends to help sell tickets for us. We're down to the final stretch and trusting that the people will show.

As all of this is going on, we received a phone call from Laura's (our French exchange student) dad on Sunday morning. Due to the scare of the swine flu in North America, he wanted Laura on the next flight back to France. He thought that the French borders may be closed soon and wanted his daughter home as soon as possible. So Laura flew out yesterday morning and arrived in France earlier today. It was so hard for all of us to see her go with such short notice. She had become part of our family..... like one of our kids. We spend all Sunday night hanging out together and playing Rock Band (her favorite). But we were all crying as she walked through the security gates at the airport. Her dad says that he will send her back in a few weeks IF this swine flu stuff dies down.

It doesn't look good so far though. They just closed all of the schools in our school district for the next 2 weeks. I know that some states have been unaffected by the flu, but we're definitely feeling the impact here in Texas. The silver lining for this kids is that they have a free 2 week vacation. Sounds like we have a full workforce to keep the house clean as we try to sell. So we will keep selling tickets while we keep trying to sell our house. Thanks to all of you for your thoughts and prayers!