For years I have been trying to get Kiley involved in some sort of activity outside of school. Every time, she talks about it like she is excited, but when it comes time to enroll she changes her mind. Once again, we have been talking about Girl Scouts and gymnastics or dance. I got the name of a troop leader who has a small class of girls that meet at the school twice a month. There are 7 girls and Kiley knows 4 of them. When I called yesterday to see about attending the meeting tonight, Kiley began to cry and beg. I got all the info and then went up to talk to Kiley. When I asked her why she was crying and didn't want to do Girl Scouts anymore she gave me the answer of "I just don't want to". I do not allow answers like this. Anytime she tells me "because" or "I don't know" I make her go up to her room and think about it. When she has written down the real answer she can come down and we can discuss it. So, after some though, she came down and said that she had two reasons. 1) she would be shy because she doesn't really play much with those girls. I told her that her best friend Erin is in the class. 2) She told me she doesn't have any badges and she doesn't want to be in a "race" and lose. I told her that the leader said we could bring home the book and complete the tasks and earn the badges (there is only 3 she doesn't have) and I finally figured out that by "race" she meant selling cookies. She watched this show the other day where two girl scouts were competing to see who could sell the most cookies. I assured her that everyone gets the badge (if there even is a badge for that) and that it is not a competition like that. I told her that they sell cookies to raise money so that their troop can do more activities and even selling one box of cookies is an accomplishment. Plus, we would have no trouble selling cookies. We would buy some, our families would, Chad would take them to work, we have great neighbors to buy from her, and of course she could sell them at church if she wanted to. I did convince her to attend tonights meeting and I would stay with her. Fingers crossed that she likes it. She is also saying she doesn't want to do gymnastics anymore. I haven't tackled that issue yet, but will this weekend.
On a happier note, I found some pics of the house Chad designed for his cousin. He works right now in health care design, but he does like doing custom home design. It's not as profitable, I guess. The architect for a custom build usually gets 6% of the cost, so this would have earned him $36,000. He didn't charge anything for it though. He has done two other homes in Omaha and they are also beautiful homes. He likes this kind of work, but he said when he opens his own firm (someday) he will not do home design, it's just not worth the amount of work. He will do our home though!
We finally have some neighbors. They bought the house next to ours that was foreclosed on. We are still waiting for the foreclosure across the street from us to be bought. It's only $259K, but does need about 40K in work. It could be amazing though. We looked at it and wanted to buy it, but it didn't have 4 bedrooms upstairs and that was a must have for us. I hope that the people who do buy it will be fun and let us come over and swim in the awesome in ground, heated pool. The new neighbors next to us are really great. They bought the house for 180K (pennies in Denver) and have put about 30K into it. The man, Jeff, is a tradesman. He can do anything. I mean anything. He gutted the house and completely remodeled the main level. It's a ranch, so it's about 1000 sq. ft. smaller than ours, but it looks really nice inside. We are going over there for dinner on Sat. Jeff and his wife, Dell, are our age and they have an 11 year old daughter, Sabrina. We talk to them almost daily. Chad has helped him with some of the projects in his house and loaned him some of our architecture and design books. Jeff came over on Monday and cut down one of our trees and trimmed the tree in the backyard. He is going to help us do some work this summer with the landscaping in the front and backyard. It's pretty awesome having great neighbors that are so much fun. I foresee many, many BBQ's this summer. We have some plans for the front yard first. We are going to pull up some of the landscaping to make a full third car space in the driveway (currently it's only about 3/4 a space and not big enough for a larger vehicle, but there is a full space behind the fence.) We are also going to remove one tree and put in a smaller tree, maybe a sugar maple. Eventually, we want to rip out the rose bush in front of our living room window and extend the patio all the way across and put up a nice white railing. The backyard's plan is to rip out some fruit bushes and a tree and put in an area to install our play set. We also want to put in a hot tub in the back corner of the yard.
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