So back on the subject of the new house...
(After taking the weekend off from this, I think I can write about it now.)
See we kinda have some weird needs in a house. And the most obvious one, 5 kids=lots of bedrooms, isn't one of them.
Right now we have a boys' room and a girls' room. And it's probably going to stay that way for quite awhile. There's no fair way to split the kids into separate rooms. If Zach has his own room than Kyle gets his own by default, not fair to the 3 girls all in one room. The twins want to stay in the same room but we can't really give Kelly her own room without the boys being upset that they still have to share. So two rooms for them, one for Greg and I, and a guest room (we love guests!). 4 bedrooms, awesome, easy peasy.
Except...
The move to Indiana means Greg will be working from home when he's not traveling. So he needs an office. The kicker is he doesn't want an office in the main part of the house. So that goofy little office/library room (often with french doors, ha) right off the entry isn't going to work for him. He would like an extra bedroom upstairs. 5 bedrooms, okay doke...
Back to the goofy little office/library room on the main floor. Since Blue Kitty Designs is doing so well, I really need my own office/craft room. Yay!
Except...
I'm a bit messy. We'd rather not have people walking into the house and seeing my stuff all over the place like that (it's bad enough with the kids). It's not that I can't be neat (I can!), it's just that craft rooms in general aren't the best first impression. Unlike Greg though, I would like to still be on the main floor, not the basement or 2nd floor. But no worries, some of the houses we've looked at have a little den tucked back behind the kitchen by the garage and laundry room. (Yay, laundry room! We have a laundry closet now, I hate it.)
Also the van has to fit in the garage. We kinda scraped the top of the van on one door trying this. Oops. Remind me to tell you about my revelation about "side load" garages another day.
Plus we're not really formal living room/dining room type people. It's just such a waste of space for us. So we're trying to avoid those and go for a big eat in kitchen with large family room instead.
We would like a finished basement or the price for the basement to be finished worked into the final contact. Preferably one with "daylight windows" instead of looking out at stone/metal/wood/dirt window wells ("egress", I'm learning so much about houses, lol). The terrain in that part of Indiana (i.e. flatter than a pancake) doesn't really lend itself to walk out basements so I gave up on those.
And the little bonuses we'd like are a decent kitchen pantry, Greg wants a nice sized master bedroom closet, good school system, on a cul-de-sac, community pool, and a backyard that doesn't look directly into the neighbor's house.
See I told you we had weird needs.
Anyway the house has all of those except it isn't quite on a cul-de-sac (but in a quiet neighborhood). It even has a sun room and a full bathroom in the guest room (we love guests!). Course the house also has mold. Guess it was one of those "too good to be true" type things.
We haven't completely given up on the house yet, we've asked the seller for more thorough testing (the first was airborne only) and then if it isn't too major (as in "all over the entire house"), for the seller to pay for professional cleaning. To make a long story short, the sump pump had quit working a while back, the basement flooded, the owner replaced the sump pump, cut out the damaged walls, and "cleaned up" the mold. We were house hunting during the rainiest week ever and the basement was bone dry (and I didn't even see any visible mold or smell it) so it's not an issue of a damp basement that is going to be a constant mold problem in the future. I think the owner just didn't do a good job cleaning after the flood.
Pley asked when we have to move. Luckily our lease isn't up until the end of June here in Maryland. But with the mortgage companies currently going insanely crazy about giving out loans, some regulations that could affect us go into effect May 1st. So it would be really nice to close by April 30th on something. And if the house doesn't work out, it's extremely doubtful that I'll be able to go to Indiana again. Greg will have to go by himself between work trips and hope to find something. He did alright with the Maryland house (course we had like 3 reasonable choices in the first place) but it just bugs me that there's a chance I won't know what our new house (that we are buying, dealing with a so-so rental for awhile is a different story) looks like until the day we move in.
And feel free to slap me because I'm whining about a 5 bedroom, 4 bath, 3500+ square foot house in one of the nicest areas of Indiana. But dude, Greg and I started out in a trailer (granted it was a brand new double wide and no offense to trailer owners) so I think we've earned getting at least most of what we want in our price range. We just don't want mold. We're picky like that.
I survived my first ever craft show!
It involved buying 2 additonal GameBoy DS's ahead of time though. ($$$, Eek!)
But the kids were very, very good and I'm going to give in to whatever they want for while. At least until they start driving me insane again. Which will probably be tomorrow morning. I'm fickle like that.
Greg's currently in the Netherlands in case you needed an update. Iedereen golft hallo aan Greg!*
And as much as I'd like to ignore the sewing machine and all things fabric for awhile, success is a bitch and I need to go sew to keep up with the additonal orders I received today. I really should start a child labor sweat shop...
* Translation: Everyone wave hi to Greg!
ARGH! Just ARGH!
So the mold tests on the Indiana house came back unacceptable. I really liked the house (perfect floor plan, great neighborhood, excellent school) and I'm not looking forward to trying to find another. Greg's going to talk with the real estate agent
My babysitter called and can't be here on Sunday during my craft show. I *think* I can find another babysitter. The biggest issue is Kyle and Kelly as I can probably find Zach a play date and the twins could be a bit of help at the show. But there's no way Kyle and Kelly could handle 4 hours and space is going to be very cramped in the first place.
No one has stepped up to take over my Girl Scout troop for next year. I know this won't affect me after we move but it just bugs me. I hate to think all the work I've put into this was all for naught and the girls here won't be able to continue on in scouts.
Zach has had a headache/flu thing the last two days and has missed school. Although it freed up
Greg's safe and sound in Ireland with his brother. I'm not much of a worrier (I figure it's best to plan for every possibility but thinking too much about things I can't control isn't worth the stress) so it's hard to admit that this trip has me anxious. There's a whole ocean between us, it's not like he can just hop in a car and drive home. "He'll be fine, it'll all be okay." *repeat, repeat* It's going to be a long 10 days.
My bestest friend of 25 years is in pain and I can't do anything about it.
Maybe I'm going to turn into a worrier after all.
(And yes, I'm posting at 1am, I can't sleep. *sigh*)
How to know I'm back to full health:
The fact that the twin's and Kyle's soccer seasons have started, Zach has hockey practices twice a week again (I know, I thought it was over too...), Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, moving in two months, Greg's out of the country, and I have a craft fair on Sunday and I'm thinking to myself, "oh I'm a bit busy again."
If you need me, I'll be at the sewing machine, trying not to think too much.
Hello Spring! Hello Allergies!
We haven't even been home for 24 hours and the kids have already trashed the place. Plus it seems like an entire paper plant has exploded here. There are receipts from the trip, tax forms, house buying paperwork, kids' school papers, a week's worth of mail, and so on. It's a disaster. Paper clutter bugs me the most so I expect the recycling bin will be full by the end of the day.
Oh and my laptop is now working. It booted up and wanted to do some file restores (recommended) and now seems fine. Maybe it just wanted a vacation last week too?
Tonight we have 4 activities/meetings between 6 and 9. Thankfully Greg doesn't fly out until tomorrow so we've have a plan between the two of us to shuffle the kids around to everything.
If this doesn't win the "Most Boring Blog Post Ever" award, I don't what would. Tomorrow I'll try to remember to add a cute picture of the children or something...
I think we found a house...
I'm trying not to get my hopes up because there was mold in the house. The current owners cut out the drywall in the basement and "cleaned" the area. So we're waiting on the professional mold test results before we agree to close. If the results are good then I'll get excited and tell you all about it.
Oh and we're back in Maryland. So I'm also back to my million and two item To-Do list. First up, fixing my laptop. Only I wish that could be top priority, first I need to order pizza for dinner and go buy milk and cereal for breakfast tomorrow. Darn people and their need to eat...
We're still looking...
And the worst part so far has been that my laptop has seemed to have died. (*sheds ungodly amount of tears*) Oh and it's been raining buckets but back to the laptop... The lights are on but the monitor doesn't show anything. I'm waiting to get back home to hook it up to an external monitor and pray I can pull all my files off before diving into the warranty/repair issues with HP (purchased in late Sept, so it's only 6 months old and I know I have at least 1 year warranty). The house search here in Indiana is keeping my mind off the laptop issues so I'm not freaking out as much as I could be. (I'm blogging and checking email from Greg's work laptop right now.)
We're looking at 5-6 houses for a second time tomorrow. That's down from a web search of 50, narrowed to about 25 actually visited (in two days, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed), to these 5-6. We pretty much need to decide on something Friday or Saturday at the very latest. Which is good because I can't take much more of this "house hunting."
Driving to Indiana!
To buy a house!
See you on the flip side!
(Do you think anyone under 20 years old understands that phrase?)
Happy Friday!
I had something fantastic (ha!) to write about and my tired brain can't remember what it was now. I'm tired of being tired and I don't think I can blame this on the "real flu" bug anymore.
I also kinda gave up tea and Mountain Dew so I'm not getting anything in the way of caffeine either. The tea is probably temporary since I drank like 20 gazillion cups while I was sick and I guess I just OD'ed. I also kinda lost the taste for Mountain Dew over that time period too plus I've lost a few pounds so that encourages me to keep not drinking it. I really do think my slow and steady gain of a few pounds every year is due to the Mountain Dew habit. And the fact that I'm becoming less active as the kids need less "running after". (Yep, I just blamed my weight gain on the kids, I'm good like that.)
I don't plan to make Starbucks a habit either, I'm too cheap (I've actually been using gift cards the last few stops) and calorie wise for the drinks I like, I'm better off with Mountain Dew.
So I yawn a lot. And grab quick 20 minute naps when no one is looking. Anyone have a good caffeine drink that doesn't have a lot of calories? Or figure out why I can't be awake for more than a few hours before wanting to go back to sleep? *yawn*
The bus "sprung forward" this morning.
Or actually it didn't show up.
Or maybe it did but at least 20 minutes late.
And I had scheduled an appointment for a bunch of van maintenance at the auto shop for 20 minutes after the bus arrives.
In the end, I just took the kids to school and was 20 minutes late to the auto shop.
But now Kelly and I are sitting at Starbucks (which does not have free WiFi, why didn't someone warn me?) so life is pretty good.
And I have no idea what time to expect the bus tomorrow morning.
I'm going back to bed after I hit publish.
See after the night before's nightmares (I am a 2 year old really), I wasn't in a hurry to meet up with Mr. Sandman last night. I also did a spectacular job of getting almost nothing done yesterday on Greg's "Honey-Do" list for me. Which sucks in terms of crappy wife-dom and then I felt all grumpy because my list is pretty simple for him: "earn money so I can buy whatever groceries I feel like" and "don't die". I feel like I should add something else just to even things out but then he starts going on about working 2 jobs (because he took on the new one that we're moving to Indiana for but he's so wonderful that they haven't found anyone to take his old position) and then there's the MBA program he's in and blah, blah, blah... At that point I'm no longer listening and trying to figure out what I did that day so that I can distract him. I got the mail! But the tax papers didn't arrive. Or any dental refund checks. Oh and I really didn't personally get the mail, I sent one of the kids out...
But nooo, there are phone calls to be made (ick) and van tires to rotate (which requires a special appointment because only one place in town has a big bay for lifting the van) and some other stuff but I'm not looking at the list at the moment. I didn't do "anything" because Kelly is still sort of suffering from my 2 Week "Real Flu" bug and needed extra snuggles on the sofa. Actually she fell asleep on me for about 3 hours. And you know she's the baby and all so I just had to sit there.
(Note: when I'm tired, I'm really rambly.)
Basically I stayed up until 5:30 this morning.
Which means I only slept for 2 hours. I had some weird notion that since I couldn't sleep (see above nightmares), I'd do some of the things on the list so I'd be ahead for today. Except like I said, most of them involved phone calls and going out to places not open at 1:15am. No problem! I'll get my blog reading/miscellaneous internet surfing out of the way so I'm be ready first thing in the morning to work on the list (I usually spend an hour or two on the computer every morning before doing any "work").
And then I proceeded to stay up until 5:30am reading all of Confessions of a Pioneer Woman's archives. While I recommend her blog highly (just watch out for the occasional unexpected cut calf nut photo), maybe reading 2 years of posts and drooling over her cooking blog all in one sitting isn't a good idea. I'm a fast reader really and all the stories and pictures of cows (love!) and kids and butter and open fields and cowboys (love! There I said it.) were a delightful change from my boring suburban lifestyle. Especially while avoiding nightmares and feeling bad about a crappy not completed "Honey Do" list.
I did run a load of jeans through the washer and dryer. So of course the twins complained that they had no shirts this morning. I swear I'm going to start laying out their clothes again like I did when they were 3. I had a terribly logical discussion with Ally (note: 2 hours of sleep on my end) over short sleeve shirts. She hates those. So what are you going to wear this summer, I asked her. "Short sleeve shirts." Pretend it's summer and wear one now with your jacket. "But I hate short sleeve shirts!" So you're going to wear long sleeve shirts all summer? "Nooooo!" What are you going to wear? "Short sleeve shirts." (Insert me gritting my teeth and trying not to threaten bodily harm.)
Yep, going back to bed now. Only... All those stupid places on my to do list are open now. Crap.
We had one of those mornings again.
It was compounded by the fact I was kinda late getting up. I had a whole slew of nightmares, like short films, one right after another so when it was finally light out I could sleep easy because it's not all dark and scary. The only problem is when it's light out, I'm suppose to be out of bed. So our bad morning was condensed into 15 minutes. Except the bus was early so it was more like 10 minutes. It's arriving earlier than the scheduled time every few weeks which is a total PITA. Like a weird Bus Daylight Savings Time thing, in minutes instead of hours. And we never spring forward. Oh wait, it's taking my kids away from me sooner, why am I complaining? Anyway it was not a pleasant morning to say the least.
Oh you want details? Well...
Kyle wet the bed because I forgot to take him potty before I went to bed because I stayed up late (oh wait, really only 11:30pm, my normal bedtime when Greg's home only he's not home so that is late for me on my own) trying to figure out how I'm going to sew enough stuff for a craft show on March 30th that I insanely signed up for yesterday. Sure that's 19 days away except we're spending next week house hunting in Indiana which loses me 7 days. Or really 9 because I need a day at the beginning to pack and clean (who am I kidding?) and a day at the end to unpack (again who am I kidding?) So 10 days to sew and bake cookies. Cause I also volunteered to help with the bake sale there. Hi, my middle name is "Crazy." Back to the sewing, I keep practically nothing in stock and sew to order which sometimes bites me in the butt like when I was sick with the "real flu bug" the last two weeks. I'm finally caught up though. Just in time to do something
Ally and Emily couldn't find jeans which is a total reversal of last week when they couldn't find any shirts. Now I haven't changed my method of laundry and all the clothes that were in the laundry hampers were cleaned on Saturday. I know by the amount of laundry I do for them that they have more than 2 outfits. In fact they have at least 3 pairs of jeans each because that's how many they were gifted at Christmas. I'm pretty sure they didn't wear jeans for tops last week but that's about the only way I can account for the weird clothing physics happening here. By the way? I noticed Zach wearing Kyle's jeans out the door this morning but didn't have time to make him change because the bus was early. He's ready for a flood. And also to make Greg cringe in Utah, Kyle didn't match this morning. Kyle only wears track pants which is why it's no big deal when Zach wears his jeans. Other than they are 4 inches too short. But the problem is Kyle doesn't usually take the time to match his track pants to the shirt they go with (and all track pants come with matching shirts, it's the Track Pant Suit Law). He aims for nearly the same color, (today navy) and ignores that the secondary colors are all wrong. In this case, white striped shirt with yellow striped pants. The problem is that this is going to happen again in near future because the yellow striped shirt will be leftover to wear with the white striped pants.
So onto breakfast. Ha! Zach actually ate a bowl of cereal and Emily started to but then spilled the Cheerios everywhere and I made her clean them up but she had already poured the milk so when she finished
Somehow the girls found pants (or they are wearing shirts on their legs, who knows, it was all a blur), the kids grabbed their backpacks that I had shoved lunch money and random folders into (Kyle may have Emily's library book and I'm pretty sure Ally's spelling book is still on the floor) but not Zach's trombone after we had a 2.2 minute discussion of the weekly band schedule (which is a long time when you have
I'm going to blame this all on the time change and not because I can't get my lazy butt out of bed before 8am every morning.
Wow I'm so far behind here, I don't even know where to begin.
I *think* I'm finally over the flu bug. I've probably slept more in the last two weeks than I have in years. I'm not a nap person but I was easily taking 2 or 3 a day. Kinda reminded me of my first trimester pregnant with Zach or when I had mono in college (neither of which are my case right now, I swear).
One of the guinea pigs died over the week. The kids were understandably upset. I'm not sure if it caught the flu (like the gerbils did) or if its time was up (I'm guessing they were/are 3 years old).
Greg's in Utah
What? The time change is today? Is this beginning to seem really arbitrary to anyone else?
I'm behind on Girl/Boy Scout stuff again. We're suppose to do overnight camping trips with both of them, both of which I'm suppose to plan. We're tentatively planning to move the first week of June which means I only have so many weekends left here.
Also in Scout news, Zach's Pinewood Derby car won the "Most Colorful" trophy yesterday. And 6th place out of 8 in his division, upholding the Fleck tradition that we are really artistic but not so good with racing physics.
Um, I think that's it for now, am I missing anything?
I am better! Hallelujah!
However...
All the kids stayed home from school today. The twins were borderline yesterday and begged to go but today were in no shape to do anything other than whine and sleep. Kyle probably could have gone (he stayed home Monday actually) but he was still coughing a lot and he said his teacher told him to stay home then. Zach wasn't as bad as the twins but still sick enough to not go. Which other than me trying to find enough horizontal places with TV viewing access, it was alright having them all home. Especially since I didn't have to find lunch money or enough food in the house to pack lunches. (I swear I just went grocery shopping... Oh that was 7 days ago already.)
So mostly I'm trying to catch up on Blue Kitty Designs orders (OMG, single handidly running a business can suck!) while also making a half hearted attempt to straighten the house. I did pay the bills and the majority of the laundry is clean, just not folded. At the moment, I'm trying to decide if I'm still "sick enough" to skip the Girl Scout leader meeting tonight. Too bad it didn't snow.
I'm still sick. It's now just a stomach thing with a touch of vertigo. Which means if I'm laying down and not doing anything with food, I feel okay. Too bad that's not in my job description.
I managed to get myself to the doctor this morning. Where he said such helpful things like "you look awful and are dehydrated." I guess laying on the couch and not eating/drinking for days will do that to a person. And also it's probably just a really bad flu bug and I'm out of luck for a magic "feel better immediately" pill. I'm suppose to go in for some lab work but at that point (noon), I had been vertical for too long and hadn't eaten anything since 6 last night so Kelly and I bought some soup and went home.
Thanks for all the well wishes and for checking in on me. I'll make it. Probably.
I am sick of being sick. I don't remember the last time I felt this awful. I'm still getting the low grade fevers (although the chills seem to be gone) and I have all the head and chest congestion plus now my stomach isn't happy with me (mild nausea). I never go to the doctor for the "flu" but this bug has me thinking about changing my mind. I need to get better. Like yesterday.
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