Weston's Birthday Trip To Sedona

On Westons birthday we took a day trip up to Sedona, since his birthday fell on a Wed. we wanted something to do during the middle of week since his party wasn't until Fri. My mom was in town and she had never been up to Sedona and Drew and I couldn't wait to take her up there. It's so pretty.

Here's Weston and my mom:

Here is Drew and his "Little Buddy". Weston slept the whole time we had our picnic and woke up right before we were planning on heading up the canyon.

Autumn taking a break from running around:

Autumn played in this tree for about an hour.

We drove through this awesome canyon towards Flagstaff to come home and they still had plenty of snow on the ground. (This was on Jan. 13th, before the "Winter Blast" hit AZ) So we stopped. I was very curious as to how Autumn would like it, and she loved it. She cried for the snow the whole way home.

Weston didn't care for it much. (Don't worry about the lack of socks. He was only on the snow for about a half second, then he was in someones arms wrapped up.)

It was a great trip and a perfect way to celebrate Weston's birthday a couple of days before his party.

Drew's Student Loans

We recently found out the status of Drew's student loans. We have been anticipating this letter for 2 years, to know if we were forgiven of all his loan, part of it, or if we still owed all. Thankfully- all the state attorney generals came together and fought for the students, not just those with legal representation but ALL students who were enrolled at Silver State Helicopters at the time of the bankruptcy. We were grateful to find out that we were forgiven 75% of our loan and our interest rate has been greatly reduced. What a huge relief off our shoulders. There were conditions, like if you recieved 1 certification you were forgiven 60%, 2 certifications- 50% and so on...at the time Drew was trying to get his private pilot license we couldn't understand why he failed it (twice) and just 2 days after failing it (the second time) his school closed their doors. At the time we felt like we had gotten nothing out of his time and money spent at this school. (At least with a private license we figured he'd have something to show for all his work.) What a miracle to have had Drew not pass those, because now we owe less on his loans.

While the bankruptcy case was still going on, and the courts were undecided on a final decision, we decided to buy a house, taking our chances with what we would qualify for. (This is also the time I decided to start couponing, so we could cut back on all of our expenses.) We qualified for much more than we paid for our house but we knew in case we got hit with Drews loan, and owing all of it back we would need our payments to be at, or less than our rent was just to survive. We decided to look at homes outside of the city, in a much smaller city (considered rural) where we could get a bigger house for less money than the area where we were previously living. What a great blessing that has been as well. I truly feel like someone above is watching out for us, and because we bought a home (where our mortgage payments are less than our rent was) to prepare for the worst, we were given the best news. Ok- the best news would've been to be completely forgiven of his loan (like the students who took out loans through Citibank, but they only represented 100 students, Student Loan Express represented 1,000's) but we are completely satisfied with the end results.

I wanted everyone to know about this because people still ask us questions about it, and while you may still see it as not fair Drew did get about $30,000 worth of education (even though his loan was for $70,000) and we owe less than that now. So we are counting our blessings!