Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson
This morning I was awakened by Laylee. She crept down the hall to my room and slowly opened the door. Hoping she’d go back to bed, I pretended to be asleep. With much effort, she hoisted herself up to stand on the box spring so her little face was level with mine.
Then she did what I do every night after she falls asleep. She kissed me on the forehead and whispered in my ear very softly, “Mommy, I love you. Have a nice dream.”
She then climbed down, crept down the hall and flooded the bathroom.
We recently celebrated Magoo’s birthday in the classic style by allowing him to saturate his nostrils with soft water-insoluble man-made chocolate “product”. For a gift, we gave him some age-appropriate furniture and commended him for his many one-ish talents and skills, none more heartily applauded than his ability to walk 5 steps out into the middle of the room and then fall in slow-motion, stunt-man style.
Magoo’s main problem now is that he’s supposed to get his nutrition from actual food. I’m still breast feeding a bit (just the hat and the nose) but he mostly eats man-food now. Today I’d love suggestions for soft, nutritionally dense foods for the dentally-impaired.
My favorites are hyper-blanched baby carrot sticks (boiled to death and then refrigerated for future consumption), noodles and cheese worms (melted cheese on toast, sliced into strips sounds so unappealing, but “cheese worms”? That’s a meal you really wanna sink your teeth/tooth into).
Hit me with the soft stuff. What are your ideas?
Move over Donny T cause there are new real estate moguls in town and we don’t need no steenkeen apprentice. We’ve already got two of our own. We just need a robo-realtor (played by “Nadine”), a disco-dancing family of marshmallow-eating bird wranglers to stay with for the weekend (played by “Lynn” and “Steffon”), a brilliant inspirational mastermind (played by Heavenly Father) and an opera-professor-turned-mortgage-broker in a pear tree (played by “Henry”).
So it’s hard to blog about things like home buying and selling homes without giving away too much personal information. I will say this, we are blessed!
Just over two weeks ago we decided to start seriously looking for a new home. By Sunday we were really discouraged and felt that there was no way we could find something in our price range that was worth buying.
The next morning, the first property we went to was priced well below the others we had looked at and it instantly felt like the right one. It had been sitting on the market for a “while” (take that with a grain of salt in this crazy market) and so we were able to get it for below their asking price. Within minutes of their counter-offer, another full price offer was made which they were unable to take because they had already signed with us.
The inspection turned out very clean. The house has a lot of “potential” (meaning we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us) but is in really good condition and move-in ready. It has a big back yard, 4 bedrooms, a tiled eating area (No more scraping macaroni off the dining room rug? Be still my heart!), and a family/play room on the main floor besides the formal living room (To become the music room/office. Who needs a formal living room, I ask you?). It is exactly what we were looking for.
Then this rainy weekend we put our house on the market and left to stay with Lynn and Steffon, with whom we had a great vacation. They are so fun and great to take us in when we didn’t want to be anywhere near the realtors and potential buyers milling around our home. And “milling” they were, I’m told. Our realtor did a fabulous job.
Within two days we had multiple offers on the table with the price escalating well above our asking price. Not only did the winning bidder pay more for our condo than we did for our new place, but they had no “out clauses” attached, no neighborhood review, no inspection required, no financial contingency. A completely clean deal, with a large amount of earnest money down.
We moved back into our home to pack with no showings to do, no realtors to talk to, done, done duh done done done. They are willing to close whenever we want to so we will be able to use the proceeds from the sale to buy the new home.
I’m kind of in shock and so grateful. Things could not have worked out more perfectly. We will be moving in a few weeks and then I’ll be more able to tell you how much “potential” the new home really has and how much slave labor it requires.
What it means to me is that we now have a home big enough to raise a fairly large family (no, still not an announcement) and even if the prices continue to skyrocket to insanity, we will be able to stay in an area we love and with a job Dan really enjoys and not be forced out for financial reasons. Yippee! Now to work with us all. I plan to pay Laylee one penny for every rock she picks out of the grass in the back yard.
I’m not posting pictures because it would be too easy to identify it on the MLS but I will say, it has a red front door and a face that looks like an owl with massive slanting eyebrows.
When I see a sign like this, I don’t think of great furniture deals. Instead, I reach frantically for the wipes and pray that I’ve got a spare change of clothes in the car.
STOREWIDE? Are you kidding me? How many wipes do you think that would take?
Much has been said about the Idaho Bloggirls get-together last weekend. The other attendees’ narrations of the evening are a lot of fun but a bit exaggerated to make it sound like THE BEST NIGHT EVER!!!!
I’m worried people are getting jealous so I think it’s time I share my version of the events. Basically all we did was sit around, eat potatoes and surf the web. A few people talked via instant messenger across the table on their laptops.
The truth is, we’re all so socially inept, it’s become increasingly hard to speak with our voices or look at someone without a computer screen as a shield. Thank goodness Karen was able to find a restaurant with wireless internet AND killer french fries. Sadly, most of the girls forgot their webcams so I didn’t actually get to see them speak or move.
Man, those mashed potatoes were creamy.
I was able to pass my camera around the table and have everyone take pictures of themselves, which I then photoshopped together to make it look like we actually interacted.
Karli, Stephanie and “Elizabeth”, the girl Stephanie brought to trick us into thinking she has friends in real life
Emily, Alicia, Moi (yes, I do have a body to go with the floating head), and Brooke
It’s been said by many people that we were all afraid someone would turn out to be an old hairy man. No one was old, I was the only one that sounded like a man (it was a cold, I swear) and none but Alicia was plagued with facial hair.
Karen and Heather are both lovely girls, AND no one ever said they don’t have freakishly long tongues. They made us proud.
Erin, my longtime “real” friend and new blogging friend looks exactly like Natalie Portman. Feel free to check out her site and encourage her.
Honestly, to quote Mr. Bingley, “Upon my honour I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life, as I [did that] evening; and there [were] several of them, you see, uncommonly pretty.” We had a blast and I hope to meet many more of you, my internet girlfriends.
A girl in every “port”, ya know?
Also – Did anyone else see David Hasselhoff crying at the end of American Idol? Yeah… me too.
Um… buying a house while selling a house is WAY more complicated than just buying a house.
That is all.
P.S. Thanks for all the great tips. If I live through this week, I may get the chance to use them.
So we’re a-movin’. I’m not an experienced mover or a shaker. Okay, that’s a lie. I can shake a little boo-tay when called upon. I’ve also moved a lot but this is my first experience moving with kids or into a single-family home. I am stinkin’ excited but also scared and I have an insane amount of stuff to get done… and here I blog.
It does help that we’ve hired Robo-Realtor. This woman has been cleaning my kitchen, putting in laundry loads, rearranging things and bringing in all kinds of furniture and home décor items that she thinks I’ll give back to her after she sells my house. Mwa-ha-ha-ha!
The house is starting to look so great, I may not want to leave it after all. I’ll just live here with Robo-Realtor’s belongings and maybe she’ll use her laser eye beams to demolish the unit next-door and then plant us a lovely lawn. She is working so hard for us and is so sweet with the kids. She is an amazing advisor.
Please give me moving and packing advice today. How do I stay sane while showing the house? What do I do? How do I organize? Help please.
The three wonderful ladies at MommyBloggers have gotten together to send a fellow breeding cyber pontificator to BlogHer this summer.
I’m shocked and more than way excited to be the one they chose to send. I’m guessing in the end they picked the applicant who could benefit most from meeting all the amazing women there and basking in their wise bloggishness. I am seriously so grateful and so nervous. Chris has graciously offered to take me in off the street so we can be hotel roomies. Now all I have left to take care of is airfare…
Any takers? If you have airmiles or Benjamins you’d like to donate to send me from Seattle to San Jose, you can expect to receive your very own Daring-Young-Hand-Crafted Disney princess dress or other costume of your choice in time for Halloween this year. Here are some samples of my work:
What? You don’t usually spend $250 on Halloween costumes for your kids? I weep for them.
I also weep for Alicia who will be paying dearly for the unflattering pictures she posted of me on her blog today. I have PhotoShop and I’m not afraid to use it. As I repeatedly tell Laylee, there will be consequences… and they will happen on approximately Wednesday. Tomorrow I’m gonna be asking for moving tips.
Magoo took his first unassisted steps while I was out of town and Laylee greeted me this morning by telling me that she had goobies in her eyes last night. It’s okay because she took them out of her eyes and fed them to the monsters. Hmm…okay. Welcome home to me. The trip was great (details to follow) but I sure missed these crazy kids… and Dan, don’t get me started. That man is sweetness personified.
Karli and I are off on our crazy adventure to meet the ladies.
She wore a cheese hat following our cheese tour in Washington.
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We were checked out by teenaged boys in low-rise jeans and “wife-beaters”* who apparently thought knew we were hot.
A woman in Albertsons called Karli and I “girls,” setting us up for a weekend of giddy glee.
We ate lunch in a dark restaurant when the power went out in Oregon.
Our gas was pumped by others.
We sang the entire Les Miserables soundrack at the top of our lungs.
We met up with the coolest girls around!
Dinner was raucous in a corner booth in DOWN TOWN BOISE. WOOT!
Wild dancing has occurred.
Our hotel rooms are in the middle of a massive group of prom celebrators.
The talking, the gabbing, the hugging, the interrupting, the LOVE! More to come.
The big group gets together tomorrow. Yippee.
P.S. WE GOT THE HOUSE. Cross your fingers that the inspector finds anything wrong if it is wrong. And cross your fingers that there’s nothing wrong.
Today has been like a mini parenting seminar unfolding of its own volition in my very home. We started the day out by going to look one more time at “the property.” We wanna-be land-holders like to call it that. After a thorough inspection by Dan (don’t worry, we’ll be using a professional inspector too), we decided to make an offer.
Now the waiting… which turns into gabbing on the phone and then magically into lots and lots and lots of work. We’re waiting right now to hear back from the seller who we’re told will be giving a counter-offer.
I feel far less stressed than I should be. Perhaps I’m channeling all of my nervous energy onto Laylee because she has gone absolutely nutso freakazoid insane today. She started by scattering the little blue shoe covers throughout the aforementioned “property,” spilling water all over the floor and then traipsing around the “property,” using the velvet beaded throw as a cape.
Honestly, I could not fault her for that one. It was a cape just waiting to be worn. Throughout the day she repeatedly abused Magoo, scraping his head with her toothbrush, writing on his head with a pointy piece of sidewalk chalk, hitting him over the head with a baby stroller…I could go on and on. She is not normally like this and I do not normally use the word “head” that many times in one sentence.
Whenever I’d stop her from what she was doing, she’d defend herself by saying, “He’s not crying yet.” Ooooohhh….he’s not crying yet? Is that the new criteria for acceptable behavior in our family?
It’s okay to wipe boogers on Mommy’s clean pants, flood the bathroom, scratch the new paint off the walls and scatter every piece of clean silverware we own throughout the house because Mommy’s not crying yet? I see. If Laylee were queen…
Actually, Laylee has become enamored with the wicked queen on Snow White. She loves her laugh, her apples, her magic powers and her fancy box with the heart in it. Laylee promises that if I give her magic powers and a fancy box, she will never use the box to kill people. I feel comforted by that. Maybe I will let her become queen someday.
When Dan got home, I pulled him aside and discretely told him all the crazy things she’d been up to, asking him to take over because I was DONE. He simply asked me, “So, what did you do about all that?”
Um…some time in her room…disapproving glances…said “no” weakly…kept talking on the phone. Yeah, I pretty much did nothing.
Dan calmly went to Laylee, sternly talked to her about her behavior and walked her around giving her instructions on how to clean things up… and it worked and they ended up cuddling on the couch reading stories with her happier than she’d been all day in my house of chaos.
Moral: Children need limits and are happier with them in place. I was freaking her out because I was letting her rule the roost and she didn’t know what had happened to her mommy. I normally don’t let her poke me with pointy red chopsticks. But sometimes on the day you’re trying to buy a house, it’s easy to turn into a slacker mom. And then they make you pay, and I ain’t talkin’ about the realtors. Luckily I have a husband who reminds me that you don’t have to be an evil villain to keep your kids in line and happy.