Our New House :)

508 Royal Palm Court

Madisonville, LA 70447

Edd has spent his first week in Louisiana! His official start date for his new position was May 1st, but they wanted him to come for the whole week. So he started on Monday, April 27th. It was a very busy week! Besides getting used to a new job, Edd was busy finishing up things for his Houston job and trying tie up loose ends by Thursday, April 30th~Closing Day for the new house. Everything finally fell into place and we now are a 2 house family!

Edd moved into our new house Thursday night! :) He spent all of his free time trying to clean thenew house and get it ready for us to move in! Although it will take him a good hour to get to andfrom work each day, he's excited for us to have a great house in a great neighborhood. :)

The kids and I were anxious to go visit Edd and the new house! Saturday morning we started our journey! We left Kingwood at about 6:15am and drove straight through. We arrived at the new house a little after 11.

The kids were so excited to finally get to see our new house in person! As soon as they were out of the van, they were off exploring! Once the kids had a chance to check things out, we ate lunch, then went to Target to get a few things Edd needed like a can opener, and silverware. I was supposed to bring the camping boxes, which had those items, but forgot. Oh well! :)

A close up of the front of the house! :)

Later in the afternoon, we tried to go fishing on the Tchefuncte River, but there were a bunch of boats, it was some boating thing on the river. We got out and watched the boats for a few minutes, then we got to see the bridge open to let the bigger boats through! That was pretty neat!

Once the bridge closed, we drove around Madisonville looking for live bait...live shrimp bait...finally had to settle for frozen shrimp, but not until after we'd caught some shrimp for our own tummies! Fried shrimp and fried catfish were the hits for the kids. Even Bethany liked them!!!

After dinner, we ended up going to Lake Ponchatrain to fish. Mattie caught a crab 4 times! Andrew caught a big snarl in his line...he didn't have it threaded right, but we fixed it. Edd, Aimee and Thomas went off to take some pictures. Bethany took my camera and got some cool pictures too!

Yesterday, Sunday, we went to church. Our new ward is a lot smaller than we are used to, but the people are really nice! The bishop and his family live in the neighborhood across the road from ours!

When we got home from church, we ate lunch, packed up, then hit the road. This time it took nearly 7 hours to get home. We had some pretty bad rain storms we drove through...at a snail's pace, then for some crazy reason we sat on the I-12 for about a half hour going nowhere!!! Once traffic got moving again, we didn't ever see any reason why we had to stop...hmmm...anyway, we ended up taking the scenic route through Beaumont, TX, where I got off on the wrong exit, I think. I was supposed to get off of I-10 and get onto HWY 90. I saw an exit sign for downtown Hwy 90 and took that, I didn't want to miss the exit and have to take I-10 all the way to Houston. So we drove around downtown Beaumont, ended up in the slum part of town, where I stopped to get directions, kinda scarry! All the signs were in Spanish, but the guy at the gas station spoke English. A nice black lady told me which way to go. So back on the road...it was about 7pm. We'd been on the road since 2:45 and finally got home at 8:35.

Even though our drive home was hard with the rain and traffic problems, it was much better than the trip down! On our way down, we took Bella, who decided to stink up her carrier right after we left!!! We drove all the way with that awful smell!!! We rolled the windows down a few times trying to get fresh air, but I thought it made it even worse!!! We survived though!!! :) Bella stayed with Edd at the new house so she can get aquainted with it before Missy comes! Edd reported to me that Bella slept with him last night, so I guess she's right at home! :)

Now, the rush begins! We've got a month to get things cleaned out, thrown out, given away, and packed! Busy, busy, busy! It will give us time to forget, at least a little bit, how painful the drive was this weekend, so hopefully it won't seem so bad when we have to do it again in a few weeks! :)