Jazzy
Right now Henry is completely enthralled by a concert on PBS. It's a jazz ensemble led by Wynton Marsalis. At the age of three, Henry already has classier taste in music than his mom.
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Right now Henry is completely enthralled by a concert on PBS. It's a jazz ensemble led by Wynton Marsalis. At the age of three, Henry already has classier taste in music than his mom.
I went to Target today to find some new inexpensive luggage for an upcoming trip to Boston. Naturally I left with luggage and ten other random things. While I was raiding the $1.50 fruit snack sale on behalf of Henry, an elderly woman came up and asked me how exactly would a person go about getting the heck out of that store, and after I directed her towards the checkout lanes, I thought to myself "Why would anyone want to leave?"
A couple of weeks ago I went through Henry's shorts collection and cleaned a lot of things out. Most of his shorts were from the summer before last and were therefore very small. I managed to get a couple of pairs to fill out his wardrobe, plus a couple of shirts, one of which is a Ghostbusters t-shirt. I can't believe it didn't occur to me at the time to see if they had an adult sized version for Dave, since I got it mostly for him..."Back off man, I'm a scientist."
The real miracle is that I didn't walk out of there with any cute dresses or pink onesies or anything, especially since yesterday we found out we're having a girl.
...we loved the farmhouse. Our realtor thought that the current owners (who are now living out of state) are asking too much and that we could probably get them down to a more reasonable number. So we asked her to stop by our house to see what she thought we could get for ours. We had a number in our heads based on what she had told us last year, but this year the number came in lower. So low it pretty much put us out of the running for the farmhouse. She also said she wasn't actually sure what we could get because the prices for houses like ours are all over the place. There's a possibility we could get what we're after, she just wasn't 100% certain. My personal feeling is I don't want to put our house on the market and risk the possibility of getting a lower number than we need, which would put us in the position of having to find another, less expensive house in a market where there's really nothing else that wows us. Our realtor also told us that in the year the farmhouse has been on the market, we're the first people to walk in and not be completely turned off by the kitchen. In fact, we liked the kitchen. So, perhaps the price will drop even more and we'll maybe once again be in the running. We're going to wait a couple of weeks to see if anything happens to increase our odds of getting that house, and if nothing turns up, then we'll most likely take out a HELOC and start making some improvements around here. It was sort of a dramatic week. I'm also tired of thinking about it all.
So we're moving on to the next big excitement which would be next week we're finding out if we're having a boy or a girl. Any guesses?
We went and looked at two houses on Friday. They were not so great. In fact, they were so not even halfway decent that we renewed our vow to figure out a way to make our current house work better for us. We're happy in our house, but now that we're expecting Thing #2 and have more of an idea of what kind of home equity loan we can get, we're looking at having to reconvert our first floor office into a bedroom (it was the original "master bedroom") until we can better afford the addition of a third bedroom upstairs, although I have to admit I don't love the idea of being on a different floor from my kids. (Remember back when we hired an architect to reconfigure our upstairs to add a third bedroom? That was a less than stellar experience and after waiting five months to hear from them about their progress with "Phase 2"; ie. making the exterior not look like a giant box fell from space and landed on the back of our house, we terminated the contract.) Although moving downstairs reduces the amount of shared living space and also, unfortunately, relegates guests to the pull-out couch (again), we could definitely make it work. After coming to that decision, I slept very soundly. Then I happened across a listing for a farmhouse that had been seriously beautified and brought up to a standard that Dave and I could only dream of in a house for it's age and everything went out the window. Again. The problem is it's ever so slightly out of our price range. On the other hand, it's been on the market for a year or so. On the other hand, our area hasn't experienced the real estate bubble burst that other places have. In fact, it feels like it's just the opposite, things are getting more expensive. Darned universities and prisons and hospitals and all of the job security that goes along with them. (Not really. Never bite the hand that steadily feeds you.) We drove by the place a bunch of times over the weekend hoping the charm would wear off, but it hasn't. So we're going to look at it this evening in the hopes that there will be something we really don't like about it so we can move on. I have a bad feeling though...
I just got back home from helping out with our local library's annual fundraising auction. Since I didn't have too much dinner before heading out for the night, I'm a little peckish. Here's what I've eaten in the last fifteen minutes: one tiny square of cake, two small slices of pepperoni pizza, two glasses of milk, watermelon. And now I'm going to bed because it's 12:05AM. Who wants to bet I have absolutely funky dreams sleeping on that particular mix of food?
4.5 billion years later God said "...and let there be dust!" The clouds parted, the suns rays lit up the inside of Jenn's house, and as far as the eye could see, there was dust. Lots of it. So Jenn did what any man would do in that situation: she sat on the couch and drank a beer. Actually, she didn't drink a beer, she ate watermelon. She's not allowed to drink beer because she and Dave will be doing this all over again in August.
For the past two weeks I've been waking up around 3AM pretty much every night with the exception of last night, when I woke up at 4:30. Sometimes I know what's waking me up. One night a cat was shrieking right outside our bedroom. Coming out of a deep sleep, the cat sounded like Henry crying so I stumbled into his room to see if he was all right. He was snoring away. So I walked into a few walls getting back to my bedroom, climbed into bed, and tossed and turned for a while. Another night I woke up from a crazy dream and promptly decided our house was haunted. So I very gingerly tossed and turned for an hour or so, not wanting to open my eyes or look in the general direction of the bedroom door. The last few nights the big toe on my left foot has been throbbing with an infection. You'd be surprised how much pain a person's big toe can generate at 3 in the morning. Most of the time though, I wake up for no apparent reason.
One of the things I do to try to get back to sleep is compose posts for this blog. Let me tell you, they're all absolutely brilliant. They're also always a million miles away by the time I get up in the morning. Someone needs to invent some sort of gadget that can translate thoughts and transfer them to your computer so some of this stuff can make it online. Or maybe I need to keep Dave's laptop next to my side of the bed so I can write some of what goes on in my brain in the wee hours of the morning down. Maybe that will be the new theme of jennanddave.com: 3AM Musings.