The story of moving on…

Our house has been on the market for almost 4 months now. The good news? We’ve had a ton of showings. The bad? No offers. Some feedback has been weird and random, some positive, and some very irritating (I mean, seriously, we can’t do a THING about our neighbor’s yard). We changed realtors, which has helped, but the fact of the matter remains our house is up for sale in one of the worst markets in years. What drives me crazy is that buyers want everything for no money. If you want a cheap house, there are some nice mold-infested messes all over town. Our house is NOT one of them, and yes, it is priced accordingly. Granted, we are looking at houses to buy, too, but we know there’s a huge difference in quality between a foreclosure (or even short sale) and a normal, hey, I need to sell for life reasons house. And yes, there’s a difference in price, but you can’t expect to screw everyone over.
So here we are, Chris still commuting a total of 4 hours a day, and my tummy getting ever-bigger. I hit 34 weeks this week (Or 35 weeks, depending on what dates you line up on the wheel of fun). And even though I have complete confidence going into this birth, there’s still something very unsettling about being home alone with a 2 1/2 year old for almost 13 hours a day with my husband a good 2 hour commute away. The ideal world would have been to move by now, but we had to pull the trigger and move to Plan B. That would be the plan where we move in with Chris’s parents in less than 2 weeks and wait for the baby (and, ostensibly, wait for the house to sell) there. The advantages to this plan are NUMEROUS– Chris will have a shorter commute, someone can help me reach things when I drop them on the floor, the house will always be clean for showings, I won’t be alone for the majority of the day, and on and on…. Sometimes it makes more sense than anything else that could have happened.

We are now spending our days slowly filling boxes. Packing isn’t so bad when you only fill 8 or 9 boxes at a time. We are running out of storage space in our unit, which I take as a sign of immense progress. I have a group of items all organized for when the baby comes. We went through all of Lily’s things and took out the items that were gender-neutral. We have gathered the bassinet, the sheets, and we purchased some clothes for the little guy to wear when he comes home for the first few weeks. Everything that we need right away is in the “Baby Now” tub. It’s all good.

One of the things that you miss out on 2nd (and I’m sure 3rd and 4th) children is the wonderful process of picking out every single item you want for your baby…although it’s kind of nice knowing most of that crap you’ll never need anyway. Yes, we had to pick out some clothes for this kid, but it’s not the same. Some things, though, I have taken large amounts of joy in. Like what, you ask? Well,
1) We spent a portion of the stimulus check on BumGenius 3.0 cloth diapers and cloth wipes. A lot of them. But hey, they’re made in the US, so that’s more stimulation to go around! Once Baby grows out of newborn diapers, we will hopefully have to spend little, if any, money on additional diapers.
2) Last week, after receiving my second invitation to the “Strong Moms” club, I called up the “lovely” Similac corporation and told them to remove me from their mailing list. Hell, I made it 27 months with Lily, I’ll be just fine, thank you! (Yeah, I was a closet nurser, but not so much now….I am VERY proud of us for making it that long!!!!) Here’s to upholding the WHO Code of Ethics!!!!
3) I got to buy a new diaper bag! We just bought it last night. Lily’s bag gave out years ago. We researched, comparison shopped, discussed, but finally ended up buying the closeout version of the Sherpani Lena. I get it on Friday and I’m very excited.
4) I feel great for being this far along. As of last week, I have only gained 21 pounds this whole pregnancy. It’s been a lot of work staying within the guidelines. I watch what I eat, I’ve been going to yoga classes since January, and if all else fails, my midwife gives me a good talking to about the ills of stress eating. This is all good. With Lily, I was always swollen, always had a hard time moving around, and felt like crap for the last 3 months. Now I just feel really pregnant, which means that I have my days if I don’t pace myself.

All in all, things are OK. They could be better, but they could be worse. Right now, we are looking at them just the way they are. Well, trying. And maybe some day we’ll be able to look back and this will all make sense, but right now we’re just going to move on the best we can.

This entry was posted on July 28, 2008 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Soapbox anyone?, Life, Raising baby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.