After another long day of house-hunting, Brad and I spent the evening putting together a short list of houses to see again on Saturday.  This is really hard.  In the past when we bought a house, we just looked at a few in our price range and picked the Least Gross House.  It was pretty simple.  

But this time, our price range is more generous, so we keep looking at great homes.  Instead of just choosing the Least Gross House, we are now looking for the Most Perfect House.  Is it snobby of me to say that?  Would it help if I said that I miss the Least Gross criteria?  It is way easier to identify Gross and try to avoid it than it is to identify Perfect and try to find it.

Today we looked at so many houses.  So very many, many houses.

This is a small taste of the many, many houses we looked at today. (Am I repeating myself?  Have I mentioned that we looked at many, many houses today?)  I'm pretty sure they all had kitchens, they probably all had bathrooms, and I'm guessing there were bedrooms.  At this point, it is all a big blur.

Adam and Jess spent some quality time at the pool today, and are both a little pinker for it, in spite of multiple applications of sun screen.  This is what happens when you emerge from nine months in The Land of Little Sun.

Today we drove and drove and drove around looking at possible areas to live.   I took this photo at lunch - isn't it all just so TEXAS?

(And thank you, Jess, for the Photo Bomb Face)

Well Menschen, we're not in Deutschland anymore.

After church, we drove around a bit so we could get a feel for the basic area.  Here is the view through the windshield - VERY different from lush, green, tree-filled Germany.  Jess wanted to know if Texas has been having a drought, and sadly we had to tell her that this is just how Texas is.  Plus, you just don't see pick-up trucks in Germany, so that is another big difference.  And the SPACE!  There is just so much SPACE everywhere.

Here is another sight we haven't seen in our 3 years in Germany - a country music radio station.  Brad Paisley, Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney, Lady Antebellem, and a bunch of new singers we don't even know yet...*sigh*...I'm home...

This morning, we flew to Texas to spend this next week house-hunting and checking out the area where we'll be moving this summer.  We arrived this afternoon, tired and jet-lagged, but otherwise excited to be back in the U.S.A.

Since Brad will be staying here to start his new job, we are staying in his temporary apartment.  It's quite a nice little place, and definitely more comfortable than a hotel.  After dropping off our luggage, we went to a nearby Walmart to stock up on a few things we'll need while we're here.

One of the things we "need" is American soda.  The kids are very excited to have root beer again.

Brad had a moment when he discovered the garbage disposal.  This is a modern convenience we have truly missed in Germany.  For some reason I can't fathom, there are no garbage disposals in Germany, which makes disposing of soggy cereal remnants an unnecessarily disgusting job (we usually try to flush it down the toilet, but it is all floaty, so it takes 3 or 4 flushes to get it down - plus if any bits of cereal slop onto the toilet rim, it grosses me out to try to redirect them into the bowl without touching the rim or getting soggy cereal mush all over my hands.  TMI?  Sorry).  It is so nice to dump the cereal mush in the sink, flip the switch, and watch it all disappear.  God Bless America.

This morning I went to Lukie's class production of "The Little Red Hen."  In case you can't tell, he was a chick.

In this version of "The Little Red Hen", a busy hen wants to protect herself and her friends from a pack of wily foxes, so she enlists everyone's help to build a strong brick house.  It sounded a little to me like they mixed up the story of the Red Hen and the Three Pigs, but what do I know?

One thing I DO know is that Lukie is so stinking cute.  This boy melts my heart on a daily basis.