July Update

We’re moved.  Everyone seems to be adjusting well. Charlie the Cat had a few issues at the beginning, but even he seems to be doing pretty well now. The new neighborhood is really quiet. I loved the old one, but I think we landed pretty well here. The elementary school is in walking distance, there’s a lovely little park two blocks away.  Most of the boxes are unpacked.  I’ll never figure out where I put everything.

Sammie’s surgery was postponed until July 14.  They had a couple of emergency infants that were going to be born over the holiday weekend and since Sam’s surgery wasn’t a matter of immediate life-or-death, she was bumped back.  That’s kind of good, really, since it gave us a few minutes to catch our breath between the move and the surgery.

We moved on the 25th of June. It feels like it was years ago already.

And the Sammie…

Sam’s surgery is scheduled for July 5.  Pre-op is July 1.  Yeah, that July 1, right after the closing.  Decided to take the date when they offered it because I got the impression that passing on July 5 might mean we’d wait a long time, and I don’t think we could be that stressed out worrying about what could go wrong for that long of a time.

Although the short sale is looking likely to fall through, so….

…we’re still trying to work things out so that we can move prior to the surgery.  We’re playing it minute-by-minute these days.

And the house….

Got a letter from the bank today – they approved the short sale.  Yippee!

They want to close by June 30. That’s 3 weeks, 2 days.  Yikes!

We have nothing packed and so far, we have no place to go.

We’re waiting for the buyer to schedule an inspection of our current house. If that goes smoothly, we have a lead on a  place and we’ll start looking into that.  My guess is that we won’t have a firm address for moving to until about a week before the closing date.

In my next life, I’d like less drama. Please. Or at least spread it out so that it doesn’t bunch up all in one week.

Update on Sammie

They did a number of tests on Sam on June 2 – X-ray, ultrasound, and EKG.

June 3, they explained the results of the test.

The hole, which we (and the docs) had thought was 8mm was 14-15mm.

One of the veins which brings oxygenated blood back from the lungs and into the heart appeared to be connected to the wrong side of the heart.  Maybe. Or it was connected to another vein. Either way, it didn’t seem to be where they thought it should be.  So, they knocked our little baby out and send an ultrasound camera down into her esophagus to find out.

The results of that came back rather muddy.  It did show that the rims she needed around the hole were not as good as they thought they were and that the insertion of a patch through a vein in her leg was not very likely to succeed.  They still couldn’t tell where that vein was connected.

So, they cancelled the procedure.  We’re waiting for a call to schedule open heart surgery to fix the hole. Once they have her opened up, they can visually see where the vein is connected, and if it needs to be fixed, they can do that at the same time.

It’s been a long week.  I get the feeling the next weeks will be even longer.  They could schedule it soon if there’s a cancellation, or it could be later this summer – all depends on the schedule of the room(s) and the doctors.  Hopefully we’ll get a call soonish so we don’t have to sit and wait too long.

Still no approval from the bank for the short sale.

Sammie’s Ticker

The procedure to fix Sam’s heart is scheduled for June 3.  We go to the hospital for tests on June 2.

You know they do these sorts of things all the time.  The doctors talk about it like it’s fixing a flat tire.  No big deal.  They’re pretty sure they can fix it by a catheter going up a vein in her leg, but they won’t know until the 3rd, when they insert the catheter and look around.  But, hey, no big deal, they do these all the time.

But they don’t do them all the time to OUR kid.

We know in our minds that she’ll be fine, that the likelihood of something happening is slim.

But our minds are also difficult to control.

Any time there’s a free moment, Matt & I both find ourselves thinking about the worst, and how we just couldn’t do without our Sammie. Fortunately, for me, work is insanely busy. I don’t have a single chance to think about anything but people who REALLY want their projects reviewed yesterday, from the moment I get to work, until the moment I get home.  At home, I’ve been obsessing as much as possible about the house (and the fact that we still don’t have a clue where we’ll live after we sell the house), partly because it’s a big deal, but mostly to keep my mind from wandering down some very dark alleys. Once you start contemplating what could go wrong, you can’t think about anything else.

We just need to keep very busy for the next week.

Sammie and her new umbrella

Wait for it……

….and keep waiting…..

So, back on May 9th, we got verbal approval from the bank on the short sale.

Next, they’re supposed to send a letter.  Someone involved in the sale checked with the bank on the 18th.  The dog ate their homework.  The dude at the bank had some long excuse about how their computer program had “issues” and ate our whole file. But he was diligently inputting the data back in so he could generate the letter.

Tuesday, the 24th, our realtors received the approval letter.  Unfortunately, the bank dude had done the numbers wrong and it was messed up. So, he had to re-do the letter and then send it past someone else for approval again…..

So, here we are, 17 days after the bank verbally approved the short sale, with no approval letter. Waiting.  Endlessly.

The buyers had an inspection set up for last Friday, the 20th.  When the letter didn’t arrive by the 19th, they had to cancel the inspection.  They aren’t going to set a new date until we have a hard copy of that letter in hand.  Smart of them.

At this rate, we might just close sometime before the end of the summer.

Which will be shortly after I lose my mind.

House Update

The bank approved the short sale.

No closing date yet.  We’re waiting to hear from the buyers about when they’ll do the inspection.  If that goes well (and it should), we’ll have a closing date.

Yikes.

More news when we have any.

A Pocket Full of Posies

Sam loves to pick things up and carry then around in her pockets. If we wash her coats, we generally find a handful of pebbles in one of the pockets.  Now that it’s spring, we need to check them  for flowers.  AKA weeds.

Every day that the weather is good and they play outside at daycare, she picks a big handful of flowers to give to me when we pick her up.  Of course, after she gives them to me, she wants them back so she can hold them “for me.” A couple of weeks ago she picked big handfuls of a mint-like weed that grows in all the lawns out here. Pretty little pinkish-purple flowers.  She got home and wanted to carry them all over the house, so I suggested that she put them in a baggie. The next night, she added her new handful of “flowers” to the old baggie.

Over the weekend, I thew out the by now nasty baggie of dead weeds.  Monday she picked a beautiful bouquet of long-stemmed dandelions for me. We got home and I suggested she put them into a vase.

Sammie

After painstakingly arranging the flowers, she asked for a paper towel and a baggie. She was worried they would melt in the water and wanted to dry them off and keep them in a baggie. Into the baggie they went.

The next morning she woke up and immediately found her baggie of yellow flowers.  Then she wanted her “other baggie.”  You know, the one her idiot mother so unlovingly thew into the garbage.

I tried to cover. We looked all over for it.  Then I suggested Jack or Charlie might have eaten them.

She was crushed. She cried big tears.  I tried to explain that the flowers were dead by that time.  She wailed like someone had shot her dog. “I don’t want them be died!”

Finally, I had to confess that it was possible that maybe Mom had thrown them out.  I said “sorry!” a hundred times. She was down to just the snivels by the time we got to daycare.

When we picked her up at night, the daycare person said she had a rough morning. We drop them off in one room when we get there early, and when the workers in her room arrive, they go pick her up and bring her over to the preschool room.  Somewhere in moving from one room to another, she left her baggie of weeds behind.  The workers in that room, well, what did you expect them to do? They threw them out.  The worker from the preschool room ran back to get them, but they were already gone by that time.

She picked new flowers yesterday and the preschool teacher gave her a baggie.  Before she took them to with her today, I wrote on the baggie: Sam Tuinstra Please Do Not Throw Out.

We’ll see if she still has them tonight when we pick her up.

Test-Pattern Tuinstra

We let her dress herself.  Yes, we let her leave the house dressed this way.

Jessie

Stripes, plaid, polka dots. What more could a girl want?

Jessie

Some Pictures of the Girls

OK. Call it lazy. I haven’t posted in months. Work has been insanely busy and stressful, home is been busy and stressful.  Still haven’t heard if the bank will accept the offer or not.  Sam’s heart surgery is scheduled for June.

I’m going to take the easy way out on posting – here are a few pictures of the kids.

This photo was taken around 6:20am, when it was dark, because the kids wanted to wear their shades to daycare.

A few weeks ago. The kids got some skirts and short sleeve shirts since Jessie outgrew last year’s summer clothes (most still fit Sammie, but she should have something new, too.)  Now that the kids are 3 and starting to understand more, they’ve also forgotten a lot of stuff from last year because, well, I don’t know, kids don’t have great long-term memories at that age. So everything is new to them again this year. They are totally obsessed with wearing short sleeve shirts to daycare.  Jessie is also constantly begging to wear her “short sleeve pants” but it’s not nearly warm enough outside for that yet.

Sammie.

Jessie.

Yep. We’re not sure what they’re learning at daycare, but clearly they’re way cooler than Matt & I will ever be.

Snow.  Jessie is standing right behind Sammie. The snow was almost as high as Sam is tall.  Happily, today the sun is shining, the snow is gone, the flowers are blooming, and the trees are getting their leaves.

Sammie.

Jessie.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

They kids lately have fallen in love with Star Wars.  Somehow they heard about it at daycare and one night Jessie insisted that we had to go out and buy the movie.  Little did she know, her Daddy had a few copies of both Star Wars trilogies.

I should mention that the kids have a thing about “Bad Guys.”  They’re terrified of them, yet drawn to them.  They’ll refuse to go through the dining room alone if the light is off (There are Bad Guys in there!) and they’ll ask a million times at night after they go to bed if there are any Bad Guys.  The answer is always, no, we have no Bad Guys here. Jack and Charlie (the cats) keep them out.  We explain that when Charlie sits and looks out the windows, he’s keeping an eye out for Bad Guys.  We’re clear that Bad Guys are just on TV, that they’re not real, and in any case, Jack and Charlie wouldn’t let them in the house.  We try to get them to watch Curious George, which has no Bad Guys at all, but they’d much rather watch Star Wars. Go figure.

The kids are still processing that Busia and Nan are Matt’s mom and my mom.  Every so often they’ll bring it up and ask questions.  One day it occurred to Sam that she has a dad, but that Matt and I don’t have Dads, even though we each have a mom. (Our Dads both died within about 6 months of our wedding)  Sam was sitting on my lap one day and turned around to me and asked, “Where is your Daddy?” I told her that my Daddy was dead, not looking forward to really having to explain what that meant to a three-year-old.  She took it in stride.  ”Oh, Bad Guy kill him?”  Yep, someone’s been watching a little too much Darth Vader.

At some point, the kids asked Matt about his Daddy.  Matt explained that he had also died.  When they inquired as to how that had happened, Matt just explained that he had gotten old and had died.

Then last weekend Matt was  lying down on the couch with Jessie sitting on him.  After a while he started to get sore and he had to move.  Moving only made it more clear how much he hurt.  ”Jessie,” he said, “Your Dad’s getting old!”

Without missing a beat, she asked, “Oh. You almos’ dyin’?”

Drumroll, please.

We accepted an offer on the house!!!!

Now we just have to wait another 6-8 weeks (or maybe more) to see if the bank will accept the offer.  It’s about $55k short of what we owe them.  Cross your fingers, please.

I was reading back over the last couple of blog posts (I’m ashamed of how long it has been between posts, really!), and it’s amazing how much the kids have grown over the last couple of months.

Sam went to pre-school full time right around Thanksgiving. Both kids are doing a great job of learning their letters. Sam now counts everything starting with the number “one.”  Jess still starts somewhere between 1 and 10 and works her way up, then arrives at the number “9″ for just about anything she’s counting.  But boy, can she dangle from her knees at the top of the jungle gym. And just for good measure, she’s always willing to show someone how she can fall off and drop to the ground with a big “thud!!”

The kids had a birthday party to attend at a McDonald’s back in December. We’d avoided that place for the last three plus years.  No more.  Once the kids realized that “G’Danno’s” had the great-big playgrounds inside, we were done for.  They’ve talked us into going back a few times.  It’s not without its advantages – they really wear themselves out running through the kid-sized Habitrail.  This is a welcome thing, especially since the kids get up at 5:30, even on weekends.  If we wear them out completely on a Friday night, we might manage to sleep in until a very late 6:30 or 7:00 on Saturday morning. For those of us who need their beauty sleep, this is a wonderful thing.

Sam’s been dry and wearing underwear to bed since right after Christmas.  We threw out the upstairs diaper pail sometime in January.  It’s like living in a whole new world.

At the beginning of January the house price dropped low enough that we started having regular showings. Doing full-out spring cleanings every week was not something that any of us looked forward to, but it was a relief to have more interest in the house.  The rollercoaster of “will they come back for a second showing?” and “why haven’t we heard back anything from that showing??” was a bit much.  By the beginning of February, I was just tired of the cleaning and wanted it to go.  Last Saturday we had an afternoon showing, so I gave Sammie her own dustrag and set her loose in the living room, and Matt took Jessie out to run errands/keep her from destroying the house before naptime.  I don’t think we got the house as sparkling clean as it had been at previous showings, and we forgot to bake cookies, but the people loved the house and we got an offer yesterday morning.  Whew.  We’re still hoping that goes through before the foreclosure process, but I’m hopeful.  At least we have an offer.

There’s a lot I’ll miss about the house. We LOVE the neighborhood.  That’s probably what we’ll miss the most. And we’re really close to both daycare and work.  The living room has fabulous air flow in the summer and great light year-round. I stayed home sick today (woke up last night at 12:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep, finally took a sleeping pill around 6:30 am) and even though it’s really cold outside, I have this odd urge to open the living room windows and wish for Spring.  The good news is that if we move sometime in May, I won’t have to worry about the yard work this year.  Someone else can figure out what to plant where and deal with all the weeds coming up faster than the flowers.  Although I’ll probably do a good job of fertilizing the front yard rose garden so that they are in full glory soon after the new people move in.  Maybe they won’t notice right away that there’s a monster climbing rose in the backyard growing out of control and taking over the area behind the garage. Maybe.

Good Riddance!

Yahoo!  A goal achieved!

Tuesdays are garbage collection day in our neighborhood for those who use the City’s garbage collection service.

With great big smiles, the kids threw their diaper pails into the garbage can this morning before climbing into the van for daycare!!

So, Whoooooo-Hoooooooooo! Both girls potty trained before Christmas!!!!!!!!!!!!

Of course, we probably should have recycled them.  However, I suspect anyone familiar with plastic’s ability to absorb every odor that comes near it may understand why we were opposed to putting those particular items back into the world of usable items.

Two kids in diapers for almost 3 years.  That’s a honkin’ lot of diapers.  I think they started out using about 10-12 a day..EACH!  Given the volume, we came up with a two pail system.  One pail for Number One and one pail for Number Two.  The Number 2 pail involved an expensive system of bags and seals in an attempt to contain the odor.  Since they only usually pooped once a day, it didn’t make sense to keep spending $$ on the bags to dispose of 20 diapers a day.  On the other hand, a regular diaper pail was inadequate to conceal the fact that we had two little poopers.  We’ve been tripping over those two pails in the living room for three years, three months, and seven days, not that anyone was counting.

I’m sure that the fact that our house hasn’t sold in the year its been on the market is in no way related to the diaper pails.  And we still have one in the upstairs bathroom since Sam’s still in a pull-up at night.  Jessie’s been completely dry at night for a few months, bless her little heart.  Sam finally decided over Thanksgiving, with a little prodding from us, Nan, Santa, and anyone else we could drag into it, that she might be a big enough girl to be potty trained now.  After months of trying to convince her she could go on the big girl potty, it just took a few days of threatening, bribing, moving the chair in the living room that she liked to hide behind while she was pooping, and Matt dragging her by the arm off to the bathroom every time she looked like she was heeding nature’s call in her diaper.

I’ve gotta say, the Christmas tree looks a whole lot more festive tonight, not sheltering the two diaper pails in its soft glow.

Later that same year…

I know. It’s been almost three months since I posted anything.

It’s been a crazy three months.

First, the kids.  We’re in full-blown potty training mode.  Jessie, bless her little heart, is in Big Girl Undies not just during the day, but at night, too.  Sam, we’re still working on her.  Partly I haven’t posted because I think it’s a little bit rude to the girls to put their potty training experience online for the entire world to read.  And most of our little lives at home have revolved around that porcelain throne.  So, I’ve resisted the urge to write about the cute potty training stuff. At this point in their lives, the kids are completely unaware of modesty and will drop their pants for anyone to show off their underwear, but I expect that won’t last long and there really doesn’t need to be a permanent record to embarrass them when they’re a little more shy about such things.

Jessie’s in pre-school.  The crazy nut just decided one day that she wanted to go to pre-school.  We told her she couldn’t go until she was potty trained and she decided that she was ready for underwear, and that was that. Put her in underwear and she just flat out told her daycare person that she wanted to go to preschool. So they moved her up after she was dry for about a week.

Sammie, well, she’s always moved along at her own pace. She does things when she’s ready, not when we’re ready. She’ll get there.  She’d really like to go to preschool, but she’s really not that excited about the big girl potty.  They’ve been putting her in preschool in the mornings and then back in the younger kids’ room in the afternoon. The past week she’s been in underwear.  We keep telling her she has to be potty trained to go to preschool, hoping that’s a good carrot.  Yesterday she was with the preschool class but then had a meltdown in the gym when one of the other kids kicked sand in her face.  (Preschool teacher said it was the biggest fit she’d seen a kid throw to date. Swell, way to go, kid.)  They told Sammie that she’d have to go back to the little kids’ room if she kept throwing a fit.  Sam’s response? “But I’m wearing underwear!!!!”

So we had a discussion last night about preschool being about more than just underpants.

In other news, we still haven’t sold the house.  We had someone come look at it last week – that was the first viewing since last May.  We’ve been filling out paperwork, trying for a short sale.  Sometime around August it became pretty clear to us that it wasn’t going to sell for anything near what we had it listed at (which would have been just short of covering what we owed on the mortgage + the realtors’ fees), and it also became clear that we just couldn’t keep affording the mortgage payments indefinitely and draining our pitiful savings account to pay the bills.  We bought the house at the peak of the market, assuming that in a year we could get it reappraised for a lot more (prices in the neighborhood were going up around $30k a year) and get the mortgage insurance removed.  Nope. Didn’t happen.  So, we’ve got a honkin’ big mortgage payment, enormous student loan payments (warning – don’t make graduate school your first career path!), and two kids in daycare.  We could just barely pay the bills each month, and then the State of Michigan has been finding every way imaginable to reduce my take-home pay in an effort to balance it’s budget.  That unbalanced our home budget, and now we’re short every month.  So, we’re hoping for a short sale to happen sometime before foreclosure does.  We’ve been more than just a little stressed out and while it’s been tempting to blog as stress relief, I’m not all that keen about putting the mess we’ve made of our lives online.

Yeah, I realize half the country seems to be facing foreclosure these days – and since a big part of my job is reviewing projects that involve foreclosed homes, some days it seems like the entire country is in foreclosure – it’s still pretty distressing.  Even if the short sale goes through, we could still be on the hook for the tens of thousands of dollars’ difference between what we sell the house for and what we owe on the mortgage.  With two kids who will need to go to college in the near future, that prospect scares the crap out of me. On the other hand, at some point you’d think someone would realize that we don’t have that money and they won’t be able to squeeze it out of us. However, from everything I’ve been reading, common sense is not abundant in the current mortgage/foreclosure/short sale world.  In the meantime, we’re just hanging in there, hoping for the best.  I’m expecting we’ll get an offer sometime in January when the house reaches a certain price point.  Every  two weeks the price drops another $5k. Hopefully soon someone will fall in love with the house.

It’s an odd catch-22.  Everyone keeps advising us to not pay our mortgage.  The thought is that the bank won’t want to do a short sale unless you’re behind on your mortgage.  Also, once you do sell, you’ll have trashed your credit and no one will want to rent to you with a low credit rating, unless you stop paying the mortgage and save enough $$ in the bank that a landlord will be willing to take a chance because you have enough money in the bank that you don’t look like  a deadbeat.  However, once you stop paying the mortgage, there’s a really good chance that you’ll end up in foreclosure before a short sale happens.  And honestly, if we can avoid the foreclosure on our record, we’d prefer that.  Right now it’s just  a waiting game. If the bank won’t agree to allow a short sale, then I guess we listen to everyone’s advice and stop paying the mortgage. But, really, it is hard to not pay a bill like that. Everything inside you tells you to pay the bill. It’s what you’re supposed to do – meet your obligations.  Financially we might be smarter not to pay it, but emotionally it just feels wrong not to send a check to the bank every month.  Although, at some point, when there isn’t money in the checking account to cover that, it just won’t get paid. I try hard not to think about that.  Right.  Sometimes it’s the only thing you can think about.  I expect by the time we do sell the house, I’ll be completely gray.

And that’s before we even think about moving somewhere.  Right now, everything is close by and we can get by with only one car – we can walk to work and if absolutely necessary, we can pick the kids up from daycare by bike.  When we move, we’ll be dependent on the bus system for most of our transportation. We can’t afford a second car.  ’One car’ works much better when you aren’t trying to figure out how to pick up a sick kid from daycare. Right now we bike to work and if a kid is sick, we can bike home, pick up the car, and then go get the kid. How well will that work when home is on the other side of town?  And can we even afford to rent somewhere with good schools?  The affordable rents are in areas where the schools aren’t all that great. As long as we’re trashing our credit rating to make sure the kids have a good education, we’re likely to try to rent in an area that has better schools. However, those areas aren’t always on a good bus line (one that runs more than once an hour – if you miss it, you’re screwed!) and we can’t afford a high monthly rent – that’s why we’re selling the house in the first place.  Grrrrrrrr. The whole thing is making me nuts.  I’d really just like to sell the house so we can stop worrying about what all the possible worst case scenarios are, and just get it over with and move on.

 

All Grown Up

We have a handful of combs around the house.  My hair is short enough that I haven’t used one in ages, but the kids, with their long hair, have gone through a lot of combs as we tried to find something that worked well for both the combee and the comber.

We’ve settled on a gray rat-tail comb with fine teeth.  First runner-up was a short, stubby gray comb with fat teeth. It’s the same color gray as the rat-tail comb.  Occasionally, I’ll leave the fat, stubby comb out on the table for the kids to comb their own hair with to distract them while I’m putting the other kids’ hair into pigtails.

Since we came back from Wisconsin, we’ve had two of the rat-tail combs in gray.  Sorry Mom, but I think we might have packed yours into our bags.

This morning as Jessie climbed into a dining room chair to get her hair combed, she spied both rat-tail combs sitting side by side.  She pointed to one and excitedly asked, “All grown up?  This comb growed up?  Not little any more?”

God bless her.