Tuesday, May 17, 2011

How Many Days 'Til Vacation?

 Six. Six days until we meet C in Wood's Hole and stay in a little cottage on the water for a week. I can't wait.

Uncle M comes the day after tomorrow which I'm also super-excited about. I am in day six of having Wiggle on my own, and we have been having a great time (except for the hour and a half it took to get him down tonight. ugh).

Oh yeah, and we're trying to buy a house before we leave for vacation. I mean we're trying to get everything settled for the house we're trying to buy. It's a tight schedule though because the seller is driving across the country and won't get in town until Thursday, we still haven't signed contracts, C will be out of town for the whole thing, and the goal is to have a home inspection on Saturday. It's the beginning of a stressful week, so I am looking forward to vacation even more.

Here are some pics of my fun weekend with the boy.
Taking a walk in the woods
A quiet moment of reflection
Having fun straddling logs
Riding the carousel
It's starting!
We're going to ride a train!
Are you coming Mommy?
We broke down and watched Cars finally - he had to take Lightning McQueen to bed that night.
Making me wood chip sandwiches at the park
Apparently, I needed a lot of sandwiches.


I'm not ready to show the new house in case things don't go through, but I do want to show off it's location. In the picture above, I am standing in the playground directly behind our current house. The white inside the blue circle? That's the roof of what will be our new house. How sweet is that?



Saturday, May 7, 2011

M.A.S.H. Game

Nothing much has been going on, except some major house hunting. Although we've been looking for a little bit, the thought of actually taking on a mortgage has been stop-me-dead-in-my-tracks scary. I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that people would see a house for a few minutes and then agree to buy it without ever getting to spend real time in it, talk to the previous owners, interrogate the neighbors, etc. It just seems like such a risk, and I don't really like risks. But then I fell in love with a house and the whole thing seems completely normal, the natural next step. In point of fact, the chances of us getting this house are pretty small for a number of reasons, but that's ok. I will learn to love again; the thing that changed was that I am now able to see myself in the houses I look at, whereas before I could only see the house itself, sometimes that was a good thing, but since no house is perfect, generally it was a hindrance to ever being able to decide on a particular house. I know it's a common first-time buyer mistake, but I kept thinking the perfect house would come along. Not perfect meaning without blemishes, but seeing every blemish as a beauty mark instead of a potential carcinoma. Now I think I'm ready to accept a house, warts and all. Of course, it'd be nice if I could find my warty house within the next few weeks, so we don't have to renew our lease at all, but if we don't, we don't. There's time.

Also, I've been having a little bit of an identity crisis lately. Not shockingly, being a housewife and full-time mother isn't always the most fulfilling job. Overall, it's still what I want to be doing now, but I need to remember how to be interesting.  I need to be more stimulated, but I've been feeling too frenetic lately to delve into anything. It's ok most of the time, but occasionally when I'm talking to people who don't have kids, I feel like we can't really have anything in common. I know that's not true, but so much of my day is kid-centered, and then even non-kid things are now colored by having kids. My priorities are always going to be different than someone without kids because my priorities are always going to involve Wiggle. He may not be number one all of the time, but he will always rank, and he can always trump anything else if needed. It's also hard to explain what you do during the day to someone else. Some days are actually busy, but most days a trip to the grocery store can either be a crowning achievement or the dismal dark nadir that colors the rest of the day. I need more balance, I guess.

All I can say is, I'm working on it.