Everything is New Again

In retrospect, we must have concluded that Brett's arrival in June was a yawner, and not enough to really get our blood pumping.  Because the day after we brought her home from the hospital, we started down a path that really took our stress index to a new level.

One morning during my week off (paternity leave, baby) I was holding Lady Brett when I heard Jaime say "Hey, you should check out this house I've been looking at."  She handed me the laptop, where I saw the MLS listing for a home not too far from where we were living.  But it was larger, had a pool and a larger yard, a dedicated office (we'd been using a converted bedroom) and a newer kitchen, all things that I saw as improvements over the current house.  While we hadn't been looking to move, we had been stuck on the question of how much more money we were willing to put into it to update the kitchen and a few other things.  We'd done quite a bit with that house, but a kitchen remodel was a much more major commitment, and I wasn't sure that I saw us in that house for the LONG term.

So I surprised Jaime by saying "OK, let's try to go see it this week."  I put a call in to a realtor friend, who had us in to see it the next day.  By the weekend we had written an offer, and within one more day we had bought the house!  We moved on it with a level of speed and decisiveness that I think is rather uncharacteristic of us.

After momentarily celebrating the fact that we got the house, we realized that meant that we now had to get ready to list and sell our house. We had made our offer contingent upon selling our house -- but in order to keep our offer competitive with the other offers they already had received, we had only asked for two weeks to sell ours before the seller of our new house could walk away.  That meant we needed to get our house on the market ASAP.  And we didn't tell the kids about the new house yet, because we knew that a lot of things had to fall into place to make this a reality.

While we had been through the home buying process before as a buyer we had never sold a home, and we quickly found out that its a lot more fun being the buyer than the seller.  Our realtor was great and had photos of our house taken with 48 hours, and we were able to put it on the market the day after that.  I spent about three nights doing a list of fix-up projects longer than my arm (and made too many trips to Home Depot to count), but at least the house was in pretty good condition already.  Once the house was listed, the real fun began -- during breakfast we'd get a text or a call from our realtor or her assistant saying something like "we have showings at 10 and 2:30 today" and Jaime would have to scramble to get the house cleaned up and the kids out the door.  Little Brett, at the ripe old age of 2 1/2 weeks, became a frequent user of the parks around our house.  And as much as we love our realtor and her assistant, when we received one of the first texts informing us of an upcoming showing and asking us to "have the house in fantastic condition," I thought Jaime was going to murder someone.  And every time the kids touched anything on the house I was convinced that they were going to break or permanently stain something.  The kids did NOT think that this stage was very much fun.

But we were blessed to receive a full price offer on only the third day or so it was on the market, and within the next week we had accepted that offer and were now under contract on both houses.  There were some wrinkles as we got nearer to closing, and at various points we thought the whole thing might fall apart, but ultimately by late August we had moved out of the old house and into the new one.  As stressful as everything was, things just seemed to fall together in a way that convinced us that this was just meant to be.

Kate started pre-Kindergarten three days after we moved into the new house, and she's loving her teacher and going to school every day.  Davis is enjoying the the twice-a-week pre-school where Jaime stays with him the whole time. (This gives us nearly two years to prepare him for the fact that we will be leaving him at school without a parent when he starts kindergarten, and I think we're going to need the entire two years to prepare him for that.)

The kids seem less impressed with the new house than we are, except for the pool . . . they LOVE it.  They are in it nearly every day (and sometimes they even change into bathing suits first).  Right after we moved in we had a pool fence installed, but Davis had that figured out almost immediately:

Both Kate and Davis made great progress in their swimming lessons this summer, and since moving into the new house their swimming has improved even more.  But even then, we still lock the gate whenever we're not using the pool.  And Davis (with his near zero body fat) apparently only likes to swim when we turn on the pool heater -- otherwise, he prefers to hang out in the hot tub.  He's a lot like his mom ;)

We're even OK with sharing the house and yard with some of the local residents, like this very young rattlesnake we found yesterday in the enclosure around our pool heater and filter:

Look away if you have a problem with man-on-snake violence

That's the second one we found in the yard in just over a week.  Something about the weather must be making them come down from the hills.  Our street is the first one below the foothills, and there is plenty of wildlife up there.  I hear the coyotes relatively frequently at night, and in the past several years a cougar and a black bear have come down into the neighborhoods right around where we live.

We love the house, and its great to just be able to stay at home on a Saturday and swim and play in the yard.  Davis and Kate and I play football out there quite a bit, now that football season is upon us.  The other night they were showing me their stuff:

Impressive, I know.

Life is good.