catch-up

OK, here's a list of notables from the last few days:

Saturday was a house-cleaning extravaganza.  The boys and I did a pretty thorough job of the whole house.  I was so proud of them because there was almost no complaining or fighting the whole time.  Miracle.  Each boy had to pick up and vacuum their own room.  Then we had 6 other jobs, of which each boy picked two (we drew slips of paper to avoid arguments).  Those jobs were:
1.  Clean hall bathroom
2.  Help mom clean master bathroom
3.  Vacuum all of downstairs
4.  Clean the kitchen
5.  Help mom mop downstairs
6.  Odds and ends (vacuum upstairs hall, empty all trashcans, organize food in pantry, and other little things I had for them to do)

All in all, it went pretty well.  Although it still took about 4 hours for me, since I needed to help with several of the jobs.  I'm hoping as time goes on the boys will get more independent and I'll have to do less!  I was pretty wiped out afterward.

Friday morning we went to a friend's apartment complex to go swimming.  Well, the boys went swimming and I watched.  The boys had a great time-- that apartment has an awesome pool-- actually a couple of different pools with various features.  I was expecting the boys to swim for half an hour or so and then be asking to go home.  But they swam for more than an hour and a half, and I was the one who had to tell them it was time to go because it was getting too hot for me outside.

We put an offer on a house.  Don't get excited, it was rejected, as we expected it would be.  It is a great house.  It has everything on my checklist of what I am looking for in a house, plus some.  But the price reflected that.  The owners would have been silly to accept our offer.
Our house-addition project is pretty much killed.  The good appraisal our house got actually killed it, which surprised me a little bit.  I thought Ben would be more inclined to add on after he saw how much our house has gone up.  I was thinking in terms of actual monetary burden-- taking the increase in value of our house, and subtracting that from the cost of adding on, to get the actual amount extra that we'd have to sell our house for in order to be at the same place we are now, financially.  If that had been the equation, it would have been a no-brainer to add on.  But, and I understand his reasoning, Ben thinks it is more reasonable to look at how much our house is worth now, and then add on the cost of the remodel on top of that, plus another 6 percent (in realtor's fees), and that's how much we'd have to be able to sell our house for, with the addition, in order to have the same financial advantage we'd have now if we sold our house at the new higher price.  And he's not convinced we could do that.  Looking at what other houses are selling for, there are definitely houses with the same square footage and yard-size that ours would be that are selling for that much, and more, but there are also some that are not selling for that much, so it's not a slam-dunk.  And Ben is looking for a slam-dunk.  Which I understand.
That's also the reason for the really low offer on the dream house.  He wants a slam-dunk, so that if we had to, we could turn around and sell it again without losing any money.  Meaning he only wants the house for at least 6% off the reasonable asking price.  We offered 10% off the asking price, and they wouldn't even negotiate, so that's that.
I'm not sure where that leaves us.  I guess it leaves us here in this house doing nothing to it, unless at some point we find some other house that is a "slam-dunk."  I'm not holding my breath.  :-)  And honestly, I don't want to move.  I like a lot of things about this house, I absolutely and positively hate and despise showing and selling a house, and the thought of somehow packing and then unpacking a house seems completely impossible to me.  Physically, I just don't think I can do it.  I'm really particular about organization and how things need to be arranged and put away, and I know it would be really hard for me to have someone else do it.  And I'm pretty sentimentally attached to this house.  This is the house where my kids were little.  I have lots of memories in this house.  This is the last house I will have lived in where I could walk. To move out of this house would feel like closing a door permanently on my boys' early childhood, and my own "normal" life. 
Meanwhile, I'm looking at rearranging our downstairs somehow.  Maybe we can consolidate the playroom to give more room for some work-space for the boys?  Maybe we could move the playroom upstairs and 2 of the boys could share a room?  I don't love that idea, because one of the main reasons for having the playroom downstairs was so that the boys would be spending time downstairs together as a family, and not holed up in their rooms upstairs.  Also I would be able to monitor the playroom organization (which, from my experience is pretty important-- it turns into an unusable chaotic mess pretty quickly if I don't keep my eye on it :-)).  And none of the boys want to share a room.
So, I don't know.  Ben thinks it might be better for the boys to learn to work in a smaller space anyway-- to learn to be tolerant of other people's noises, and to learn to be courteous in  return.  Those are good skills to learn.  We'll be working on them this coming year, that's for sure!

OK, that ended up being a longer monologue on our house than I intended it to be.

What else from the last few days?

On Saturday night I went out to eat with 2 of the moms in our homeschool art group.  One of them is moving to Utah this next weekend, so it was a goodbye of sorts.  I hate goodbyes.  It was a nice evening-- conversation with these ladies is always therapeutic, but again, I hate goodbyes.  I will miss Cheri, and my boys (especially Joseph) will miss their boys (especially Jacob) a lot.

Well, that's all I can think of for now.