The Great Bed Swap of 2013

All four of my children have used the same crib. Sam started sleeping in it when he was four months old, and continued until we moved to Philly when Lucy was born. She was the first to have an actual nursery with decor and paint colors to match, seen here. She stayed in there for a long while, until we moved her out to get ready for Maggie. Maggie slept in there until a few months after Fred was born, and there he's stayed. Until now.

On Friday morning I was getting the girls dressed for the day, when all of a sudden their doorway was filled with Freddie. 'I wake up!' he exclaimed. Then he said, 'I hurt my belly!' and sure enough, his little tummy was all red from where he had hoisted himself (headfirst, I might add) over the crib rail. First I made sure he was ok, and then I sent SOB a text to inform him that we would be bed shopping that very night. Interestingly enough, later in the day when it was nap time, he got up to his room a few steps ahead of me, and somehow managed to climb back into the crib as well. I was flummoxed, and so I removed him to the floor and asked him to show me how he had gotten into his bed. He could not/would not show me. I'm pretty convinced that a ghost lifted him in there.

So that evening we took them to Ikea, the bastion of cheap, impulsive furniture buying, and tried to pick out a new bed for him. But we couldn't really find one we liked. We had planned on buying the same bed we had for the girls, because all of the other furniture already matched it, but they don't sell it anymore. So then we started thinking, maybe we ought to get the girls new beds and let Freddie have one of theirs. I've been thinking that bunk beds might work well in their room, because of its dimensions. It's long and narrow, so to maximize space I thought bunk beds along the long wall would work well. SOB didn't like most of them because they were too high. You see, my girls have the habit of jumping around like monkeys, so we decided on this one where the bottom bunk is actually on the floor.

Now they have so much more room to play in there, and they seem to enjoy the sleeping, too. Twice now Lucy has pushed Maggie off of the ladder as she attempted to climb to the top bunk, but we're working on that.

So then there's this: 

The sleeping is only going so-so, but he loves it. Me? I get a little weepy every time I walk in there. We disassembled the crib, and I totally reorganized our tiny attic so that we could store it up there. I'm never getting rid of that crib until I have a grand baby who needs a place to lay their sleepy head. That's reasonable, right?

More On the Buying (and Selling) Houses

Oh, the drama that surrounds real estate transactions. Most of it created entirely by me and others very much like me, of course, but drama none the less! DRAMZ, even.

The process of selling our house has been long and drawn out, and isn't even close to being finished, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We've undergone the inspections, and have the TWO appraisals looming, but I'm feeling a lot better about things on the WV end of the transactions. Of course, now that I've typed that out loud both appraisals will come back short 100K or something ridonkulous. BUT! Our buyer/buyers are being fairly reasonable post-inspection, which we couldn't be happier about.

(Side note: I think that, by inserting realtors and inspectors and surveyors and and and into real estate transactions, we miss the fact that one person is selling a HOME to another person. The humanity gets completely lost. Both times we've sold our HOMES, we were made to feel like the people buying our HOME was rotten and evil to the core, but in reality they were probably just some other people looking for a HOME. Perhaps if there weren't so many fucking middle men, this process wouldn't be so fucking painful. End rant.)

On the flip side (see what I did there?) we're buying a house from a couple of octogenarians. Which is kind of nice, in a sentimental kind of way. They have lived in this house for almost forty years, raised a family there, and are now coming to realize that six bedrooms may be a bit too much for them to handle. On one side, this works well in our favor. If they've been in this house for such a long time, one can posit that they own the house outright and are just paying taxes. If there isn't any fixed number they need to get out of the house, financially speaking, then negotiations should be a cinch.

HOWEVER!

After living in a house for almost forty years, and raising a family there, one can't help but become sentimentally attached to said domicile. I've gotten unreasonably attached to our two previous houses, and we only lived in them for a few years a piece, for fuck's sake! So these lovely octogenarians have a visceral feeling about the worth of their home, which is entirely independent of facts and reality of the market and such.

So negotiations? Not such a cinch after all.

Then, at the eleventh hour, someone made an offer on the house we had as a back-up. The house that's been on the market for three mother effing years gets an offer ONE GOD DAMNED DAY before we were thinking we were going to be making an offer on it. You know, when the octogenarian sellers rejected our offer but then decided to re-consider at the advice of their children? In those 24 hours we really and truly thought we were going to end up homeless for at least a few months.

LUCKILY! In the end, cooler, younger heads prevailed. The children of the octogenarians properly convinced them that selling their home to a young(ish) family might be a nice way to extend the legacy of the house, and they accepted our offer. We still end up homeless for a month due to non-coinciding dates of closure, but it's for a finite time only. And then we get to move into a weird hybrid of our old house and our current house, with a dash of swimming pool on the side just to make things interesting.

Wish us luck!