Cadet Camp '94

We finally moved all of our stuff into the new house this past weekend and slept there for the first time. Not able to do any heavy lifting (other than the extra 30 pounds I can never put down), I stood by the U-Haul and told people where to put things. Just standing there made me incredibly tired, but I didn't want to say anything because everyone else was actually working and I technically was not.

Can you imagine? "Oh, guys, can we just take a break for a minute? I'm DYING here," says immobile chick from the sidelines as rest of family carts bulky, awkward items down truck ramp, up stairs and through two doorways...

Tyler, remember that walking stick you carved for me at Cadet camp in middle school? You wrote my name on it in block letters and carved out a place for my hand. When you gave it to me it felt like a peace offering during a time when we didn't like each other very much. You even decorated it with beads and feathers, which I'm sure was a tribute to my youthful obsession with Native American culture (which you've since mocked me for millions of times). Well, I still have it -- it was one of the first things to come out of the truck -- and I leaned gratefully upon it while shouting "living room", "sun room", " basement". So, thanks. I'll never throw that thing away.

We're about 25 boxes of junk away from feeling settled, but the good news is we are HOME.

Search and Destroy

Old houses are full of super-fun surprises. I won't bore you with the details.

My parents, my brother Tyler and Jono's dad and step-mom Jan helped us with some "demo" projects the first two weekends, and Jono's mom and Jeff came this week to help paint. (Sorry I didn't get any shots of you working Jan and Dad. People will just have to believe me when I say you helped :)

So far we've finished a lot of wallpaper-peeling, plastering, sanding and the like. The tasks ahead of us involve more painting and refinishing floors. Then more cleaning. And then we'll move in. We're shooting for October 25.

I need to stay away from paint fumes and I'm not supposed to be on ladders or on my hands and knees. This makes me practically useless for most home improvement projects. Poor Jono. We're very thankful for the help we've been getting from our parents. I guess certain "dependencies" never end no matter how old your kids get.

I'm trying to be useful by obsessively wiping down the counters, walking the dog, and making food for the troops. And feeling housewife-y while I'm doing it. Oh well.

Our New Place

We're finally moving in!

The last tenant moved out this past Tuesday, and the realtor handed us the keys.

Our new pad is a three-bedroom four-square on Orville Street, built in 1929. It has a big front porch and a fireplace that I can't wait to use this winter. It has a living room, dining room, kitchen, sun room and basement. All the makings of a good house :) Out back we have a circular stone patio and a long, narrow yard for Mona to run in. Behind the garage is a perfect spot for my garden next year.

The location is pretty good. We like not having to drive everywhere, so we're happy to be within walking distance of a city park and a corner store. The Fulton Street Farmer's Market and downtown GR are about 15-20 minutes away by bicycle. We also live within a few blocks of our friends Kristen and Ernie.

To start, we're moving our boxes from Joel and Jessie's basement into ours and waiting until mid-October to move our furniture and ourselves in. We need to do some messy ceiling replacements first and paint a few rooms. (I guess we can thank the 70's for textured ceilings that make a dark room look 50% darker.) Over time we'll make it ours. Jono has big plans to re-do the kitchen at some point, but for now I'm mainly concerned that the ceilings and paint are taken care of so we can start living there. I'll post more pictures as we finish each room.

I love the term "nesting" -- it's so cozy and cute. I can't wait to get to it. Less than two months to go before Fatty McFattersons arrives, and that's assuming he isn't early. We squeezed this move in just in time. Phew.

At my work we have devotions on Tuesdays. We tell everyone what's going on in our lives and pray for each other afterwards. One of my co-workers prayed for us, the baby, and the new house. In his words:

Bless this house
Bless the walls
Bless the floors
Bless the ceilings
Bless the roof
Bless everything that happens within it
Make it a welcoming place for all
Fill it with love and friendship
Anoint it for You.

Moving to Hope Street

This past weekend Jono, me and Mona moved to Hope Street to live with Joel, Jessie and Louie (their dog).

The move was surprisingly un-stressful. Three weeks ago Jono's dad and step-mom came to help us pack. Two weeks ago my parents came to help us fill the U-Haul and unload everything into a storage unit. This left us with a (mostly) empty house, but it still took us most of Saturday and Sunday to get every last little thing out of it. Towards the end we weren't even packing things into boxes any more -- we just tossed them into grocery sacks and laundry baskets, or threw things like brooms, driftwood and my rock collection into the back seat.

Now we're settled, and have arranged our little upstairs apartment. I made the nook up there into a pantry for our canned goods. My shoes are lined up along the wall in two sections: dress shoes and regular shoes (read: OCD). Our clothes are hung on a portable thingy next to the stairs. We're using those terracotta plant saucers as coasters so we don't put rings on Joel and Jessie's little table.

We've been watching the Olympics downstairs with Jessie every night. Jessie is knitting these fantastic booties for our little man, and I'm knitting a scarf because it's the only thing I know how to knit. It's all very cozy.

I feel like I'm on vacation somewhere. Mona does too. She was mopey on Sunday as we were getting the last of our things out of the house, but when she realized she was going with us she got over it. Now she gets to play with Louie every day and her morning walks are in a different neighborhood with new smells, so she's generally happy with the situation.

Throughout all of this, God's timing has been amazing. A couple of weeks ago we found a house we like on Orville Street near Boston Square in Grand Rapids. It's a short-sale, meaning it's in pre-foreclosure. Mainly we were impressed with the fact that it isn't trashed like all of the others we've been looking at in our price range. We made an offer with help from Jono's mom and her husband Jeff, who has a realtor's license. On Friday, the day before we moved out, we heard that our offer had been accepted. No counter-offer; just YES, IT'S YOURS.

Rundown of what could've been a bad situation, but then it turned good...

• We find out I'm pregnant and decide one of us needs to quit our job or work part-time. We realize quickly that our current mortgage payment is more than we are comfortable with under the new circumstances. We put our house up for sale in the worst housing market ever.
  
  
• We know it's likely we won't make very much on our house in this market, so after we sell we'll need to live very cheaply for a few months until we have the a down payment for our next place. Joel and Jessie live three blocks away and agree to let us live with them for awhile once we sell.
  
  
• We sell our house in a month and a half for a good price, when many homes in our city don't sell for nine months to one year (or more).
  
  
• Meanwhile we're looking at foreclosed homes in the city, but most of them are in terrible shape. We are anxious about having to completely re-do a house while I'm trying to get the baby to sleep, etc. Two weeks before we move out, we finally find a good house we can afford in a different area of the city. It needs very little work. We're shocked. We make an offer. We are told it could take three weeks for the bank to respond.
  
  
• One week before we expected a reply and one day before we move out of 135 Lowell, we hear they have verbally accepted our offer. We'll be able to move in 30 days after closing, which will be in two to three weeks. So we'll settle in on Hope Street for a month or two -- just enough time to save for a down payment.
  

There's more too, but I'll stop there. The point is, we are really thankful.

On the pregnancy front, I've had the song Another One Bites the Dust (QUEEN) in my head lately as each day I must put away another article of my clothing into a box destined for the basement. I am realizing I'm low on sweatpants and various items made of long, stretchy material. I am starting to feel the extra weight I'm carrying. One area where I thought I was safe was footwear, but even my shoes don't fit right any more. I tried to put on my favorite pair of sandals yesterday -- the kind with a toe loop -- and was confused when my toe was constricted by the loop. I innocently thought, "Now how were these packed? There must've been something heavy on top of them and it warped them." In the next moment I realized there was nothing wrong with the sandals. My feet are swelling. Yay.

Another new adventure I've been having lately are Braxton-Hicks contractions. What happens with these is the walls of the uterus contract for 10 to 20 seconds and you feel like you're walking around with a boulder in your stomach. They are not labor-inducing and are very normal -- I guess it's the uterus getting ready for the real thing.

Also, I've been packing for a camping trip and I'm realizing I'll need to wear my one pair of sweatpants or walk around in a sarong to stay comfortable. One thing I thought I'd never say: "Must have more sweatpants."

Freedom

We are no longer the proud owners of a home, but we are free!! Our house sold last week, and we're relieved. It was for sale for just over a month, but we were anxious most of the time because of how bad the market is. We cleaned like maniacs and had an open house every weekend. The offer we ended up taking was pretty good, and we're thankful for it. Last night we filled up a couple of glasses of sparkling grape juice and toasted to freedom, a break from paying a mortgage, and Mona (we just tossed that in because she was in the kitchen with us looking cute -- get over it Dad).

So now we're going to be homeless for awhile. We close on July 16 and the new owners are allowing us a month after that to move out, which is great. But after that we don't have anything lined up yet. The plan is to move in with family for awhile and save. The prospect of being mortgage-free for a few months makes me giddy. And the fact that our lives are suddenly not-so-planned-out is refreshing too.

The lucky recipients of our little fam (ha) will probably be Joel & Jessie Klooster, our brother and sister-in-law, and possibly my parents later on after J & J get sick of us.

Thanks to all of you who listened to our panicky monologues over the past few weeks about whether the place would sell or not. This is a fresh start for us, and we appreciate all of you who will be helping us during the transition.

For sale

Our little house on 135 Lowell is up for sale. It's really cute and we've made a lot of nice improvements to it. Thanks to Jono's puttering, the yard and landscaping are immaculate.

Understandably we've had a lot of people ask why we're moving. The truth is we'd rather not have to. Some assume that since we've got a bun in the oven we want more space, but this isn't the case - I hope our next place is the same size or smaller. We're moving because I won't be working as much after November and we want to keep our monthly bills as low as possible. We're making some pretty big changes to be able to do this. Because of how bad the economy is here in Michigan, there are a lot of foreclosed homes in Grand Rapids. Jono happens to be handy, so we'd like to get our hands on one of those, cut our mortgage payment in half, and fix it up.

So yes, I'm becoming what they call a housewife. It sounds like a joke, but it's true. It's no longer a "given" that people stay home with their kids, so here's why we've decided that one of us will. It's not just that we don't want to deal with daycare - I’ve heard working moms say they think daycare is good for their kids because of the social interaction, and that’s probably true in many cases. We want to enjoy being parents without feeling like both of us are stretched too thin. On top of that we want to save money, stay healthy, and be easy on the environment by having a garden, cooking from scratch and using cloth diapers. All of this will take time that we wouldn't have if we both worked full-time elsewhere. We want one or both of us to be with our children as often as possible when they’re small, because it isn’t going to last very long. I have the rest of my life to have a career but only a few years to have little kids.

Like many women, I plan on working full time up until my due date, or beyond if the baby is late. Sometimes I feel guilty about the fact that I'll be taking care of our baby at home while Jono goes out to work. I realize this used to be a completely normal thing for a woman to do. My grandma never had a job off of the farm. She raised her kids and her chickens; de-tassled the corn and walked the beans. She was happy as she could be, and nothing else was expected of her.

Since then women have been "liberated". We go to college, we vote, and we have jobs outside the home, often with benefits. But sometimes I wonder how liberated we and our families really are when the cost of living and cultural pressure to have more materially makes many families feel as if they need to send both parents off to work full-time, even when they have small children, and even if it isn't what they really want.

(It's also true that some families have no choice, especially in single-parent households. Others make a decision to work because they feel they'll go stir-crazy at home with kids all day, which is understandable.)

I'll still get my brain exercise in 15 hours a week at least -- I’ll be putting in some hours from home writing and doing design work for my current job. I know it's important to hang on to that other side of you so that you have something to go back to when your family is more independent. That's what's great about the time we live in. If you can somehow skirt the financial pressure to work full-time all the time, you can manage to raise your kids at home and have a career, before and after the kids.

So all of that said, I'm trying not to feel guilty about our changing roles. I'm not taking "time off work", because I have a feeling I'll be at least twice as busy as I am now doing a job that's twice as hard once I'm a mother. But as Jono pointed out to me the other day, "Em, just admit it - it will be nice." Okay, fine. It will then. I'm ready for it.

For those of you who are wondering, Jono would love to be a stay-at-home dad. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to worry about benefits packages and each parent could work part-time and stay home part-time? Maybe if we get universal health care soon :)

The United States is the only industrialized nation that doesn't guarantee paid maternity leave.
- The Project on Global Working Families

Dog does not come with house. (People have asked.)

P.S. Notice sly look.