One Year Later...Pt. 2: Baby Girl 2.0

Since we had moved to a new area and were hundreds of miles away from our home church in Irvine, we had to find a new one until Berean Mission Church started meeting.  We looked online at 9marks and found Christ Church at Park Presidio and a list of others in the area.  We planned on checking out all of the churches on the list but we loved Christ Church the first time we went and kept on going ever since.  It was amazing to go to church and have communion every week and be able to see people from different age groups, life stages, socioeconomic levels, and ethnicities worship and fellowship together. All the churches that Josh and I have been to are predominantly Asian so it was just awesome seeing the reality of what's to come in Heaven.

We were starting to get settled down with our lives when we decided to talk about kids.  This topic arose when we were having dinner with another couple around our age from Christ Church. Vanessa (yes, we have the same name), the wife, shared about how she wasn't searching for a career, but ultimately wanted to be a mother and take care of her kids at home. Jeremy, the husband, was still in school and he was open to having kids after he finished his schooling. They opened our eyes to a new thought. Prior to this conversation, Josh and I had never thought it was possible to have kids in our early 20s.

After that dinner with them, I kept on trying to convince Josh why we should have kids sooner rather than later. Josh was hesitant because he was still working as temp-to-hire so we weren't financially stable. Also, he wanted to spend more time alone with me before we had kids. We could not see eye to eye and argued about this almost every night over dinner and would have a difficult time talking to each other afterwards. I look back at what I did during that period of time and I am ashamed of the things that I did out of my pride and discontentment. I remind myself of Sarai from the Bible when God promised her and Abram an offspring. Sarai grew tired of waiting for God to fulfill His promise so she took things into her own hands.

I am thankful that during that period of disagreement, I did not get pregnant. It wasn't until Josh and I had both agreed upon having kids that I did get pregnant. I learned a very important lesson: God gives His approval of a husband and wife when they are united in their thoughts and actions. It was hard for me to submit to Josh when I was prideful and thought what I knew was best. It was difficult for Josh to lead me when I was constantly rebelling against him. Josh learned his lesson too.  He found himself distrusting God and despairing over things he was trying to control, like financial security. In the end, it wasn't until I was pregnant when he was officially hired as a full-time, permanent employee at his company.

We found out in January that I was pregnant and we were speechless. We basically spent the whole afternoon screaming, laughing, and crying tears of joy. We announced it to our families shortly afterwards. Josh's parents were surprised and brought up many issues. One of the issues was where were we planning on living. At that time, we were living at a studio and had planned on renting a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment through the below market rate program. Before we announced my pregnancy to his family, his parents had just sold a property in Taiwan. Josh and I had no idea that his parents even had a flat in Taiwan when we told them that we're going to have a baby. They told us to take the money that they had earned from the sale to buy ourselves a home so that our monthly payments would be cheaper.

So, Josh and I started looking for homes on our own, and then we started looking for a real estate agent. We found out that our friends Hannah and Derrick had just purchased their home in the East Bay and Hannah was the agent. Over some boba, we asked her to help us and she agreed. The first home that we were interested was one in Hayward that was newly remodeled. We went to the open house and saw so many people walking around. We decided to make an offer on the home and later found out that there was a total of about 40 offers, several all cash offers, and that ours wasn't accepted. This is pretty typical of the housing market in the bay area right now...pretty discouraging.  

The following week we went to an open house for a townhouse that was also in Hayward.  There weren't that many people looking at the townhouse because the open house wasn't advertised online at all. The people who came to the open house were the ones who were driving by and happened to see the For Sale sign. Josh and I absolutely loved the house and made an offer. We eventually found out that there were only 15 offers total (and no all-cash offers!). The seller asked the top 3 buyers to make a counter offer and we put it in and our offer got accepted! When we finally moved into our now home, we ran into the listing agent. The listing agent told us that our offer was neck and neck with another buyer's, but he liked our real estate agent's attitude better...Thanks Hannah!