Blizzard!

So here we are stuck in Independence, IA... Thankfully the motel is fairly decent - there's room to move ;) For the moment all the kids are sleeping.

Of course, of all weekends for there to be a huge blizzard - it would be the one weekend we have to go look at houses to rent in Iowa. Once we heard of the impending storm, we decided to drive down early, look at the house we were set on renting and drive right back - or at least get as far north as we could to try to get out of the blizzard area. Nothing ever goes according to plan. The house we looked at was not great. The pictures online were awesome! It looked like a brand new house! It looked like it had just been resided and completely redone on the inside. Pictures can be so deceiving and I am so glad we decided to come down and look for ourselves. The siding had been repainted, probably several years ago. And the remodels on the inside were cheaply done. The worst part though was the fact that there was a huge crack in the foundation and the house appeared to be slanting... we were very disappointed.
We decided that since we were there we should at least look at a house in another town that we may have considered renting. It was beyond horrible. For an accurately hysterical description, visit Mike's blog! (there's a link for it on the sidebar). I can't top his description ;)
Needless to say, we spent much more time looking around small towns surrounding Tama than we had anticipated. It was almost 7pm when we started heading for home. By this time we'd been in the car for almost twelve hours - the kids were pretty close to being done. Beatrice was having horrendous screaming fits, so we pretty much had to just call it quits and stay over within the blizzard area... Our trip finally ended around 8:30pm. Luckily I had packed enough clothes, diapers and baby food - so we were prepared in that respect to get stuck in a hotel somewhere. Sadly, I hadn't quite prepared myself on the financial level, so had to make a desperate call to mom so we could stay in the motel for the second night... I assumed they would take a check... bad assumption on my part :( Thankfully mom could help us out there. We really need to pay off our one credit card for situations like this.
Anyway, baby is waking up, will post more later. Really, go check out Mike's blog for more about the houses we looked at! :)