Moving On

So after waiting nearly 24 hours, we found out our offer wasn't accepted on the house. We were disappointed, but Landon and I both believe that things happen for a reason. Our offer wasn't accepted because that house wasn't meant to be our house.

I'm grateful for the experience. Now I know what to expect when we make another offer on a house. We aren't going to know for a while whether our offer is accepted. And I'm also grateful to know that I don't have the stomach for waiting on a short sale. I can't even imagine how we'd feel right now if our offer had been accepted. We'd still be waiting to hear back from the bank, and who knows how long that would take!

We're looking at more houses this weekend with Gary. There are a couple of promising prospects, so I am excited. Maybe we'll find our house. Who knows?

Tom Petty

The theme song for today has been, "The Waiting is the Hardest Part." We've been waiting for news all day, and it has been gut-wrenching. Literally. My guts have been seriously mad at me and the anxiety I am feeling. But let me back up a bit to explain why...

We got pre-approved for a mortgage as expected on Friday. We started looking at houses on Saturday. On Monday, we contacted an agent who had been referred to us by Landon's boss. While I was on the phone with her explaining what we are looking for in a house, she suddenly yelled, "AH! Your house just came on the market!" We talked about the house that had just been listed, and it sounded exactly perfect except the part where it is a short sale. Since we're operating on a limited time frame (we need to be in the house within 4 months to have time to register Mason at his new school before it starts in August), we had pretty much ruled out short sales. Our agent and I decided that it couldn't hurt to check it out. After talking to the listing agent and seeing the house, our agent decided she wanted us to see it and soon.

After trying hard to not get too worked up over the house, we went and saw it this morning. We saw it and loved it. While we were out in the back yard checking things out, I told our agent I wanted to put an offer on it. She agreed it would be good to move fast, so we finished the tour and went to her office. After calling the listing agent again, we discovered there was already a full price offer on the table. We decided to go in significantly over list price with a very limited set of demands. We really like this house.

Landon and I have spent the afternoon waiting to hear back. The first deadline our agent had set came and went. We waited four hours after that, getting very little done other than agonizing. Then a call from our agent -- EXCITEMENT! Only to be followed with more waiting. The meeting had been pushed back five hours. Wait some more. We're two and a half hours past the second meeting time. Our agent emailed to reassure us she is trying to get through to the listing agent, but she hasn't heard anything. "Don't worry!" Ugh. Too late for that.

We could have afforded more than we offered. We would have willingly paid more. It's killing me not knowing. It will kill me even more if our offer isn't accepted and the house sells within the range we could have paid.

This post totally isn't about gratitude, but I have literally been waiting all day and I need to do something with myself. Time to practice the art of letting go - what will be, will be. Breathe in, breathe out. If it doesn't work out, it wasn't meant to be.

But the waaaaaiiiiiitin' is the hardest part!

Cha-cha-cha-changes

I am the kind of person who wants roots and stability and everything to always stay the same forever. Change is hard for me. Like, it totally freaks me out and renders me spastic. It always has. For example, when I was two, we were moving from Las Vegas to Shingle Springs. I broke out in a cold sore. When they loaded up our refrigerator, I apparently totally lost it. "THEY TOOK THE REFRIGERATOR! THEY TOOK IT! IT'S GONE!" And that generally sums up my coping skills for change.

In the 12 (twelve?!?) years since I graduated from high school, I have moved at least 15 times. The longest I have lived in any one place is about 18 months. Obviously, many of the stays have been much shorter than that. Also, right after I graduated college, my parents sold my childhood home and moved to a place that will never be MY home. In short, I haven't had a proper "home" for a very, very long time.

Since Landon became a lawyer and we started a family, I have had a basically pathological need to have our own home. I have been totally incapable of thinking about it in any sort of rational way. I just want to buy a house and live there forever and ever and have a home again. Fortunately for me, Landon is much less crazy than I. He is the epitome of rational and sane and good at making decisions, so we have not bought a house. There have been at least 10 houses I would have bought had the decision been left to me, and every single one of them would have been a very poor choice.

Last year, Landon sat down and explained to me why I needed to chill the eff out on the whole buying a house front. He guided me through the process of saving for a down payment, creating a feasible 3-5 year plan for buying our first home, and helped me calm down a bit. I started saving my money via automatic withdrawals twice a month, and at the end of the year, Landon matched everything I had saved. It felt good to see us progressing along our long term plan and being all financially responsible.

Then suddenly, as we started to look at our finances, we decided putting both kids into private school was really just a terrible idea. The money we had been saving was going to get a lot tighter with having Marissa in school too. It was going to make the timeline for buying a house a lot longer than we wanted. So Landon and I sat down again to rethink our 5 year plan and decided that maybe we should be buying a house sooner rather than later. It just made more sense to get our family into an area that would cost more money to live, but that had public schools to which we could send our children.

Today we are meeting with a mortgage broker to start the process of buying a home. Landon has contacted a real estate agent his boss recommended, and I am scouring the internet to see what is available at our price point in the neighborhood(s) where we want to live. All of those desires to plant myself and grow roots will soon be fulfilled, and it scares the crap out of me. Suddenly, we're facing the biggest financial decision of our lives thus far and it means a whole lot of changes.

I choose to embrace the changes, even though it is a little scary, and be grateful that our plan is coming to fruition much sooner than expected. I'm so excited to be looking for a home in the area I know is right for our family. I'm excited to be taking this step with Landon and giving our family some stability. I'm grateful that our finances have sufficiently come together at this time to allow us to be taking the step of buying a house. And I'm grateful that soon I will again have a HOME!

My Hysteria

When I became a mother, in the sleepless, painful days immediately following the birth of Mason, I had the greatest revelation of my life thus far: I am loved beyond anything I could have previously comprehended. All the overwhelming emotion that was now focused on the tiny human being sleeping in the clear, plastic box beside me -- all the blind love and admiration and protectiveness -- someone else felt that way about me. Somehow, I finally understood so much about my own parents, the choices they have made and the way they treat me as I watched my tiny new son snuggled into my bosom. And I changed forever . . .

About a month after Mason's birth, I was watching The Incredibles at my parents' house. Now, I do cry often when watching movies, and being all post-partum certainly didn't improve that. So at the point in the movie when Elastigirl and Violet and Dash are about to get blown up by Syndrome's missiles, and Elastigirl shouts, "Abort! Abort! Abort! THERE ARE CHILDREN ABOARD THIS PLANE!" and Mr. Incredible shouts, "I'll do anything!", I was balling like crazy. Then Elastigirl goes and wraps herself around her children to save them from the blast, and I was really gone. I cried and cried. And every single time I have watched that movie, which is at like 500 viewings at this point, I cry. I laugh at myself while I cry, but it's like every parent's worst fear being played out in a Disney movie . . .

Last week, there was a huge earthquake in Japan. Soon after, there was a huge tsunami triggered from the earthquake. There were tsunami warnings for Hawaii, where I have friends who live right on the beach, as well as the entire west coast of North and South America. I worried about my friends -- had they heard? Did they know what was heading their way? A facebook post, "Tsunami warning" brought tremendous relief, and I cried a little knowing that even though the people I know and love were safe, there were many more who weren't.

I've spent the last several days trying to read as little as possible about the devastation in Japan because the media is so, so good at telling the most heart-wrenching of the stories. One of the first articles I read told of a woman whose small daughter was swept away right in front of her eyes by the tsunami -- she just wasn't able to hold on tight enough -- and I just lost it. A couple of days later, a friend posted a photo of two parents mourning over the body of their daughter who was taking a driving lesson when her car was overtaken by the tsunami. The mother stroked the daughter's hair in the wreckage of the vehicle, surrounded by mud and debris.

These are the stories that haunt me. Being powerless to save your own child. Knowing they are about to die and not being able to do a damn thing about it. Desperately trying to hang on only to lose your grip. And I wonder, how do you get past that? How do you pick up the pieces and move on with your life? There is nothing more frightening to me in this world than losing my child(ren) -- nothing worse I can imagine than that. It scares me in a way that I just can't think about it or else I will be consumed with worry and fear.

Today I am overwhelmed with gratitude for my children, that they are safe and whole and running around like maniacs. I am so grateful to be able to smell their morning breath as they nuzzle into my armpit much earlier than I would like to be awake. I rejoice in their noises and their needs and their sweet, sweet kisses. I am grateful.