Julia's Security Blanket - Gus

I realize I didn't get Gus' little face in the following picture, but I had to capture his American Girl back-pack. I really laughed when I first walked into the little girl's room; they were dressing dolls and Gus was calmly sitting between them wearing the back pack. Julia told me that the dolls were going to school. I asked about Gus; she said, "oh, he's going too." This kitty has been so, so patient with Julia who literally carries him around about six hours a day. Today is the first time I saw him running away from the girls, but they were trying to put doll clothes on him. He doesn't mind a back-pack, but dresses are taking it too far!

Gus has actually been really good therapy for Julia. She has been far less clingy and whiny since her days have been consumed with caring for him! Poor Moriah is rarely given a chance to hold him without protest.

If our lives ever get boring with the nine kids, (yeah, right!) we have animals to keep us entertained. This is Lucy enjoying her new counter-top drinking bowl that the kids won at the Harvest Festival. So far one of the three fish have passed away, but it was from natural causes and didn't have anything to do with a cat.



We had a new house appraisal today to try and finally close our house construction loan. If you are behind on our house drama, the short story is that housing in this area dropped so severely that the value dropped significantly in the time between taking out our building loan and needing to close on our final loan. Since the bank that holds our building loan doesn't do permanent 30-year loans, and no bank wants to loan us for more than the house is currently worth, we have been stuck with an ARM building loan. We are now hoping that the value has increased enough to just close! Our last appraisal gave us NO credit for the expensive, green Geo-thermal system that we installed, so if we can just get compensation for that we should be able to wrap this project up! Praying!