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.