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Should We Stay Or Should We Go Now…

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Not that we have a choice at the moment.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that we listed our house for sale back in October. We had a whole list of reasons for wanted to sell:

#1 Our Life Plan had changed. We had a child sooner than we originally planned and switched to a single income. I originally planned to go back to work part time, but I just couldn’t when the time came. A very affordable house became a nearly unaffordable house as quick as you can say “baby!”

#2 Our city raised its taxes to over ten percent, which is really extreme in our area. Most surrounding cities have rates between 6 and 8 percent. (Property taxes are based on 33.3% of the property value.) The increase in taxes made our house even more unaffordable. 46% of our income, to be exact.

#3 Having a baby made living an hour away from my parents so much harder. I got the itch to move farther north so visits with Grandma and Grandpa could be more frequent and not cost $12-15 in gas every time.

We signed a six month contract with the Realtor but we ended up allowing the listing to expire last month due to the fact that the fair market value for our house had dropped to around $98,000 according to Zillow.

What is most painful about this is the fact that we paid $147,900 for it in 2007. OUCH! We had quite a few showings and not one offer. We had to list it for more than we bought it for to cover Realtor, closing and moving costs, so it’s not like I can blame people for not wanting to spend so much on it when there were homes listed for the low 120s across the street. I guess I was just hoping for a miracle. I was hoping some person with plenty of money to burn would come along and realize that our house was the only one they could possibly buy, whatever the cost. Yeah right…

Plan B

Our new plan is to sit on the house a little longer and hope for the best in terms of the housing market around here. We are working really hard to make things work financially in the mean time. It’s hard spending half of your income on your house, though. We’ve been drastically cutting expenses, but the main thing that needs to change is our income.  Eric has been looking around, but you know how the market is right now.  He has started to look in different cities. If Eric does end up getting a new job farther north, he’ll just have to commute until things turn around.

Our Realtor is not so optimistic. He thinks we should attempt a short sale because he does not expect housing prices to rise much in our neighborhood any time soon, if ever. He blames the location. Okay, even if we were to sell it for less than we bought it, I’d rather wait and hammer down the principle. Short sales are terrible for your credit! Furthermore, I really have a hard time believing the housing prices won’t get back up to the 150s in the next five years. I’m no genius when it comes to real estate, but I do know how much things have fluctuated in the last decade. We didn’t buy our house at its peak value, which was in the 190s. Is there really no chance of making a teenie profit or at least breaking even?

Which brings me to…

Plan C

What if we didn’t move? Ever? I mean, what if we just decided to stay indefinitely? I know our income will increase over the years as Eric gains experience and moves up in his career. Our taxes will go down for the simple fact that our home value has decreased. For those reasons, I know the money part will get better. I can adjust to life a little farther from my family than I’d like. Lots of people live much farther from their grandparents.

I have a love/hate relationship with my house. I love the way it looks and feels – it’s home. I do wish it was a little bit bigger. I wish it had more bedrooms for future children, but then again we could always finish the basement in the future and add a bedroom. I could really use more cabinets and I would love to remodel the dining room to make it feel more separate from the kitchen. I would love to upgrade materials someday: carpet, countertops, etc. I would die for crown molding and a real railing on the stair case instead of the drywall banister. There are tons of little projects I would love to do over the next few decades, but I’ll only entertain those dreams if I can envision us staying put. Why put all that work into a house you’re going to leave anyway?

I wish I knew where we were going to be in ten years. Can I let myself get comfortable in this house and enjoy making little improvements, or should I live as though we may put it back on the market in a few years (no redecorating)? *Sigh* Everything feels so up in the air right now. Not knowing makes this house feel less homey. I don’t know if I can relax or not. I don’t know if we’ll stay so I feel a little unsettled. I really don’t want to go with Plan C because I really want to live closer to my parents, but I also love the idea of never having to move again and just making this house everything I always wanted.

Plan D

D is for “dream.” My dream is that someone would buy our house from us right now – an investment risk of sorts (they’d be banking that the value would increase to the point where they could sell it for profit when the market it ripe) – allowing us to move into a more economical, temporary place, most likely a rental, while we work on Our Total Money Makeover. We would pay off all our debt, build our emergency fund, and then save up enough cash to buy our next house with no mortgage! We’d build – make it fit our family like a glove.  We would be closer to our families and life would center on our family and our faith, not the stress of stretching $1 to cover $5 in expenses. Ick!  Do you think that could ever happen? Probably not. Maybe Barack Obama will buy my house. Hehe.

Mr. Mischief

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M-I-C-A-H spells MISCHIEF.

This morning, as I lay half awake in Micah’s bed while he ran around his room and played, it suddenly occurred to me that I was hearing a strange sound in the next room. I lifted my head and listened closer. It was water splashing. What in the world? Suddenly the sound registered. The Toilet! I swore the bathroom door was closed, but as I ran to the bathroom (just next door to his room) I quickly realized I was wrong. There he was, holding a toothbrush and using it to violently stir and splash the water in the bowl.  Ewwwwwwww….. I washed his ARM really well and then plopped him back in his room. This is why I am always asking guests as they leave the bathroom in our house, “did you close the bathroom door?” Bathrooms and toddlers don’t mix. If he’s not swimming in the toilet, he’s unraveling the roll of toilet paper. Then he starts pulling stuff out of the trash. I can’t wait until he learns the word “gross” so I can explain to him how nasty these tendencies are.

(Pic: Someone really enjoyed his mini chocolate cupcake yesterday…)

Just in Time

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Yesterday was one of those days that provide you with tons of opportunities to either exercise your patience or start chucking random objects out your car window. Fortunately, I chose the former, but I’m still giving myself an “F” for failure to:

  1. Closely examine the corresponding map before jotting down directions to the wedding onto the back of the wedding invitation.
  2. Find the correct road to turn onto to get to the wedding.
  3. Realize I was not going the right way before there was enough time to correct my course.

As you can probably guess, I did not make it to the wedding on time. I had left in time and I would have been there 15 minutes before it started if I hadn’t gotten lost.  Instead, I was 15 minutes late, just in time to see them pour the sand, kiss, and be pronounced husband and wife. I caught the last 4 minutes. Fortunately 4 minutes was all I needed to capture my favorite picture from any wedding….

I was able to run to Walmart between the ceremony and the reception to quickly print out this pic and frame it for their wedding gift. When Eric and I got married, a friend of my mom’s did this for us and it was one of my favorite gifts. Ever since then it has been one of my signature gifts to give as well, if I have the opportunity anyway. Sometimes I get a terrible seat for taking pictures and I have to go with Plan B. Plan B is a gift card. Hehe.

The wedding took place at one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, the Rotary Gardens. I can’t believe I have never been there before. I would love to go back and take more photos because it’s just incredible how scenic this park is. What a perfect place for a wedding…

After the ceremony, Andy, Arisa and the rest of the bridal party stayed for a while to take plenty of photos. I took the opportunity to stand to the side (out of the photographer’s way, of course) and snap away. I also got the chance to talk with some friends that I haven’t seen in a long time. Eric has such a wonderful group of friends. They are so funny and loyal to one another, as well.  We love them and wish we could see them more often!

I didn’t stay at the reception for terribly long because I started to miss my little man too much, but I did stay long enough to enjoy some of the scrumptious cheesecake and brownies that they had laid out for dessert. I would have taken a picture, but I was too busy eating it. Mmm….

I’m so glad I did not miss the wedding altogether, even though it was a close call. Next time I am going to really study the map, so even if I do miss my turn, I’ll have an idea of how to get there anyway.

Be Nice To Me Or I’ll Cancel Your Favorite Show

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Just kidding. But I do feel like I have a certain degree of power over TV lately. You see, a few weeks ago we received a packet in the mail for Nielsen Ratings; I signed up and we were picked to fill out their survey this week. They even sent us $30 cash for doing it. How awesome is that…

Getting picked to fill out the Nielsen survey is like winning the survey lottery. You don’t sign up – they pick you. They use the results from these surveys to rate the TV shows, and that determines whether shows continue or get the boot. So I am feeling very lucky this week. I am putting the $30 towards my cloth diaper purchase next month when I make the switch.

I find myself paying more attention to how much the TV is on. I still watch all my normal shows, but I turn the TV off when I’m not really watching it (like during meals or housework) because I don’t want to write all those hours of TV down. I will have to tally up all the hours of TV over the next week and see how much we really watch it. I’m really curious. I don’t think we watch a lot of TV, but maybe we will discover otherwise once it’s all on paper!

First Real Shoes

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On Saturday, my mom and I picked out Micah’s first “real” pair of shoes. We put them on in the shoe department and enjoyed the little stomp stomp stomp noise he made as he explored the rest of Kohl’s. He loves wearing them. I love seeing them lined up with our much larger shoes.

What a Difference a Year Makes

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I was just looking at a picture of Micah that I had taken when the nurses first brought him back to my room after he was born. It’s the one where his lips are all squished in.

They brought him in, asked if I needed anything and left. I found myself alone with a tiny, sleeping newborn, in a very quiet hospital room. All I could hear were his little pants and grunts. I couldn’t believe they would just give him to me and leave. Didn’t they know that I had no idea what I was doing? They trusted me with this precious little life? No one was going to supervise me? That felt weird. That was then.

This is now. Tonight I laid down next to him on his twin mattress parked on the floor while he tried to get comfortable.  We looked at the glowing stars on his ceiling and we “talked.” He reminds me of a puppy the way he sits up and plops back down repeatedly until he finds his sweet spot, then he goes to sleep. Sometimes he thinks my face is a good place to rest his head, and the whole routine starts over when I plop him back on his pillow. I know him so well, I can detect the subtle changes in his breath that signal he is asleep. I know the exact moment, without even seeing his eyes, that he is dreaming. His hand twitches ever so slightly and I carefully slip away.

I can barely remember him as a newborn sometimes because I am so captivated by the little boy that he has become. It’s hard to remember life before he started playing peekaboo or pulling on my pant legs. When I look at this picture  from the first night, I’m taken back to that memory of my first time alone with him. But it’s weird… because I didn’t know him yet then, and I didn’t know myself the way I do now. So that memory feels like it is about a different Kim and a different Micah. He was a cute little stranger to me the day he was born, and I felt like such an amateur. But now he is an extension of me and I don’t know what my life would look like without him. Taking care of him comes more naturally than taking care of myself sometimes.

What is hard to grasp is that a year from now, I’ll look back with similar understanding, because I’ll have found a new window into his soul as he begins to string words together and share a part of himself that has been hidden. Every day, we see more and more of his personality as he begins to communicate what he likes with finger points and grunts and smiles. I have this sneaking suspicion that we don’t even know half of what is going on in that little head of his. What a difference a year makes…

Crochet Project: DSLR Camera Strap Cover

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I like to crochet, but I tend to go in spurts. I’ll whip out several projects and then I won’t touch yarn for months. I am currently in one of those spurts. It started with a baby hat for an upcoming shower, and then I started staring at my basket of yarn, dreaming of all the other things I could make.

Last week, I went to my friend Lindsay’s house down the street and we made covers for our DSLR camera straps from scraps of fabric we had laying around. I like how mine turned out, but a few days later my dad offered me his old camera strap, which is plush (the neck part is high grade foam, oh yeah…) Of course I wanted to make this strap as pretty as the first one, but I wasn’t ready to wrestle with my sewing machine again. Then I had an idea – I’ll crochet a slip cover!

For this particular strap I used the standard 8 hook and regular weight, variegated yarn. I started a chain of 12, slip stitched into the 12th chain from the hook and began to work in single crochets around the circle until the piece was long enough to fit over the plush part of the strap. Then I tied off and sewed a long piece of yarn through each end, leaving tails.  After I slipped the cover over the strap, I pulled the tails tight, knotted them, and used the hook to pull them back underneath the cover, hidden from view. Simple and pretty!

Cubby Fan(atic)

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A long time ago, when Eric and I were first together, he realized something about me and has teased me about it ever since. I’m not talking about my inability to jump. (That’s another story.) And some like-minded women might even related to my obsession. Men will most likely understand why Eric thinks it’s so funny (or cute, right?). Ahem…. I have a fascination with cubbies.

If money were no object, my house would be full of cubbies. The closets would be cubbied. The pantry would be cubbied. The laundry room would be seriously cubbied. In my mind, there is no greater or higher form of organization than cute, square cubby holes. Money is an object, so I have settled for the 9 cube block in the living room and its matching set in Micah’s playroom, both of which are used to store toys and books. Both have adorable canvas totes in assorted colors.

Where am I going with this? Oh yeah… I picked a new theme for my blog a while ago when I switched to self-hosting. It was pretty bland for my tastes, but there was something about it that struck a chord with me. Yesterday and today I spent some time redesigning the theme’s colors and details, and slowly but surely it is beginning to reflect my personality and design tastes. It’s not quite there yet, but I’m no Michelangelo when it comes to web design, so it will take some time. I love the cartoon of my family, though. I should really start drawing more – it is a nice little stress reliever.

I was staring at the screen this afternoon, trying to brainstorm about things I could change or add, when all of a sudden, it occurred to me what it is that I like so much about this theme.

It has cubbies.

And then I went back in my mind and visualized all of the favorite blogs I’ve ever owned or designed, and I realized they all have one thing in common. They are very modular. They are very organized. They have lots and lots of cubbies.

I like my posts organized in neat little boxes, I like square pictures in my sidebars, I like everything having its own border and section and title. I’m a cubby fanatic and it has manifested itself in my blog design.

I’m sure I’m not the only one. I have a theory that we are a certain breed of women: we like cubbies, we shop at Target, we have a blog, we like design projects. It’s also highly unlikely that our walls are left white. What do you think?

Softball Season

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This past Thursday was Eric’s second softball game of the season. The games rotate between three or four time slots, so sometimes he’ll play at 6:30 and sometimes he doesn’t start until after 9pm. Since this last game was an early one, I decided to come along and bring the little guy so he could see his first softball game! We hung out with Grandpa behind the dugout.

It didn’t take long before Mr. Micah started wiping out in the dirt. Not that he cared; he was too busy exploring all the grass, spare bats, fences, picnic tables, softballs and little kids running around. I was proud of his dusty badge of honor on his rear. He’s my little tough guy!

Every time Eric was in view on the other side of the fence, Micah would shriek and point. He just loves his daddy! Eric was playing catcher, which according to him is a very boring position, but he did a good job.

He was a little rusty with the bat, but it’s the beginning of the season and he didn’t play last year. I’ll give him some slack. Plus, if I were to step up to that plate, we’d all be laughing for a very long time.

Softball didn’t really hold Micah’s attention. He was more interested in running all over the park. He was really intense. For a child that usually never lets his mama out of sight, he sure goes wild outside. He just kept going full speed ahead. I’m not even sure if he knew what he was headed for, but he was on a mission.  He probably would have run clear to the other side of the park had I not picked him up and brought him back, much to his disappointment. I think he loves the outdoors because there are no walls or boundaries. He perceives ultimate freedom and decides he’s gonna make a break for it.

The game got cut short because the other team was so far ahead. We got creamed. I was rooting for Eric, but I was also really cold and very relieved to get out of there early. We went to Culver’s afterward with Eric’s dad and a few of our friends. Everyone was amazed by Micah’s appetite; he ate an entire kid’s meal by himself.  The only part of the kid’s meal he didn’t eat was the dessert, but that’s because I ate it. Babies don’t need cookies, and I couldn’t let it go to waste, right? hehe… I know I’m terrible! I’ll let him have the cookies when he’s a little bigger, I promise!