Does this officially make us grown ups?

Something crazy is happening. We’re buying a house. I know we’ve been looking, so not really that crazy, but the way it happened took us totally by surprise.

A few weeks ago we saw a house we really liked, and for the first time I could picture our lives there. People told me I’d get the “this is the one” feeling, and with this house I did. It was a HUD home, so the bidding process is pretty different than a privately owned home, or even a bank-owned foreclosure. Last Thursday at midnight was the bid deadline, and by the afternoon of the next day they announce who won the bid. The simply take the highest bid, no negotiations.

Unfortunately our bid did not win. We were extremely disappointed because it felt like our home, and now someone else was going to be living in our home. But it is what it is, and we wrote it off, and started looking again immediately, assuming it just wasn’t meant to be. We’d find something else.

Then yesterday our realtor called. We got the house.

We have no idea how or why it happened, but the original buyer fell through, and we were the backup bid. We were completely shocked — we had no idea that could even happen. And we’re thrilled, so thrilled. Of course there is much to happen before we close and move in, but as long as all goes well, we’ll be in our new house this summer.

Let me tell you a little about it. First, it’s not in the city, which is where I wanted to be. Technically it actually is, but it’s far enough out that it feels like the suburbs to me. That was not my ideal situation, but I loved the house so much, it didn’t matter. It’s two stories: living room, family room, large kitchen, half bath and a three-season porch on the first; four bedrooms and a full bath on the second. The basement is large, and half of it is finished, while the rest is laundry and storage space. It has a big back yard and, wait for it, an in-ground pool. A pool was definitely not on our wish list, but our dream home happens to come with a pool and we’ll take it. I actually think my family is more excited about that than we are — I’m pretty sure we’ll have company everyday in the summertime.

We are so excited and feel so lucky. When things get more official, we’ll share pictures. Yay!

 

Never too soon

For awhile I was one of those superstitious types who believed if you start planning for a baby, it’ll never happen. You have to pretend like it’s not gonna happen, then the world will surprise you. But after a few sessions of counseling and some other efforts to change my attitude toward the whole want-to-be-parents struggle, I decided it was ok to start operating like it was going to happen. Because it is. One way or another I’ll be a mother and Mike will be a father, and why not start doing some fun things to plan for it.

My first big move in that direction was to start thinking about a baby’s room. We’re not into a big Nursery Makeover thing, but we would like to provide a nice space for a future child. I wasn’t really going for a theme (I hate the question, “what’s the theme?” in regards to nurseries. Theme? The theme is sleep/cry/poop I guess.), but we do sort of have a thing with elephants and giraffes. My favorite animal has always been the elephant, and Mike has been called “my giraffe” since I met him. So that has unofficially moved it’s way into baby world. For instance, after discovering my first pregnancy (the ectopic, if you’re just joining us), Mike bought a set of bibs with giraffes on them and I bought a pair of baby pjs with elephants.

So anyway, recently my great grandmother moved into a new home and had to downsize her belongings. Among the knick knacks, I snagged an old clothes hamper covered in roses.

Everyone else passed it over, and I nearly did too. But then I had an inspiration. Recover it in cool fabric for a baby’s room! And my first nursery project was born. I looked around online and selected this fabric:

I decided if we were going to do elephants and giraffes, they had to be kind of classy. I call it classic whimsy. And this fabric fit the bill. It’s whimsical with the flowers and mushrooms and elephants helping them to grow with their trunks. But it’s classic in that it doesn’t look too childish nor too mature. Plus it had dark colors that would show the old pattern through.

First I removed the hamper lid with a screw driver, making sure to keep all the hardware nearby.

Then I wrapped the new fabric around the front of the hamper to the back. It wasn’t long enough to wrap all the way around, but luckily there was a board in the back I could easily staple into.

I didn’t bother making it look pretty in the back since it’ll be against a wall. But I just pulled the fabric taut and stapled all the way down on both sides. Then I flipped it on its head so the part that is normally on the floor was in the air. And I pulled the fabric taut and stapled all the way around, making sure to staple over creases and folds at the corners.

Once it was all stapled, I cut off the excess fabric. Then I laid it back down and got ready to staple the fabric at the top. I had a little help from Lennie on that one.

I also had to recruit Mike at this point. Because of the awkward angles, I couldn’t hold the fabric in place and also use the staple gun. So I held and he stapled. We just stapled to the inner rim of the top of the hamper. It was plastic instead of wood, which made it more difficult, but we figured it out.

Next I tackled the hamper lid. This part was tres easy. I just measured the fabric, place the lid in the center and pulled up from the middle on each side. I placed a staple on each side, then worked my way around, being careful to pull taut and staple down any pleats at the corners.

Once I finished the whole thing, I had to reattach the lip to the hamper with hardware I had kept handy.

And here is the finished product, open for business.

And for comparison:

  

I absolutely LOVE how it turned out. I love the fabric and the colors. It’s the perfect start to a future baby’s room. Right now it just sits in our spare bedroom, which will be the baby’s room if we have/get one while we’re still living here.

In the meantime, I’ve been scoping out and pinning other classic whimsy fabrics for when I get inspired to do my next someday-we’ll-have-a-baby project. Curtains? A pillow? Maybe even a blanket?

Dipping our toes in the real estate market

On top of everything we’re doing to become parents, and on top of Mike’s two jobs, my one job and my freelance work, we decided to also look into buying a house. Because there was definitely not enough stress going around already, we thought now was the perfect time to take on more.

I know some people enjoy house hunting. My sister and her husband said they loved it – hopping in the car every weekend, driving around neighborhoods, scoping out For Sale signs. And another brother-in-law loves real estate. He and my sister bought a HUD home, turned it into something lovely, and are looking to repeat the whole process a second time. But us? We are just not that into it. We’d rather spend our weekends on other things, and we are absolutely NOT handy people. Like, at all.

But we decided we want to be in Grand Rapids for awhile. A long while. And with the market the way it is, if we know we want to buy someday, we’re kind of silly to not buy now. That’s why we’ve both been earning extra money – to save for a down payment and for a potential adoption.

So we contacted a realtor, a friend of a family member, and we’re working on a pre-approval from our credit union. So far it’s all a bit daunting, but fortunately we’re not in any hurry, so we don’t have to settle. And if we get worn out, we can just take a break for awhile. We’ve seen a few houses already. Unfortunately the homes in our price range aren’t quite large enough for us. I don’t mean they don’t have enough square feet, I mean they’re mostly one and a half story houses, and Mike is well over six feet tall. In that style home, the bedrooms and main bathroom are always upstairs with slanted ceilings, and he doesn’t want to spend his life hunched over. We did see one house we liked a lot, but it was above our price range and didn’t have any appliances.

Any tips on home buying you can share with a couple of novices?

Sensitivity and infertility

While we’ve been dealing with this arduous process of trying to become parents, I’ve become incredibly sensitive to other people’s good fortune in the kid department. I’ve had a really hard time expressing why that is, and I think a lot of people misunderstand where I’m coming from. I tried to write about this elsewhere once, and I don’t think I did a very good job.

But a friend just pointed me to this infertility forum called Clomid and Cabernet (how apt), and the first thing I read was very appropriate for how I was feeling. It’s called Sensitivity Matters, and if you know anyone who is or may be struggling with infertility, or even if you don’t (because you probably do know someone, you just don’t know it), you should check it out.

I admit, I was pretty oblivious to all of this before I had my own struggles, so there’s no judgment or reprimanding here. Just education.

“While I don’t want to make unequal comparisons, there are some things in life that you just don’t joke about.  There are some topics that can only be taken seriously.  We all know what those are. I think that it’s time to increase our collective awareness about infertility, and take note of the fact that people around us are struggling.

While some of you will argue that those struggling with infertility should simply avoid things like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I believe that that mentality leaves these infertility warriors feeling even more isolated than they already are. ”

(It should be noted that Mike and I are simultaneously pursuing conception, adoption and foster-to-adopt options. We are very open to how we become parents. But there seems to be more frequent disappointments with conception, and there seems to be more misunderstanding and insensitivity around that struggle than the others. Hence my sharing this.)

Happy belated Easter

Want to see how adorable my nieces and nephews are?

In bunny ears! They kill me. I want to cuddle every single one of them all day long. For Easter, we all gathered at my Grandma’s house. After an easter egg hunt for the little ones and an oh so delicious meal, we headed outside for a family photo. Minus a step-niece and step-nephew, this is the whole gang on my mom’s side of the family:

It looks like a nice day, but in reality it was windy and bit chilly. In fact, a split second before this was taken, several of us were holding our hair out of our faces. Couldn’t even tell could you?

If you celebrated, I hope you had a happy Easter! (Yes I realize I’m a week and a half late. I’ve been a little slow on the photo uploads lately.)

Waiting and working

Quick update. We’re not intentionally being silent, we’ve just been busy and stressed and therefore haven’t gotten around to writing here. I’m still not pregnant. Last month was a tough blow to the psyche because it was the first attempt after the ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage. But we’re rallying and trying again, this month with the help of Clomid* which we used in December, the month I got pregnant. We are hopeful but cautious. Nothing seems to work out easily for us, so for Clomid to work twice in a row would be asking a lot of the universe. We’re doing everything we can to make this happen, but mostly we can only wait.

We finally heard something from the adoption agency we applied through. After a month of hearing nothing, I reached out again and got word that they are going to “check it out.” So, we wait.

We also were invited to participate in a training to become certified foster care providers. We are working with an agency that generally doesn’t place many young children through foster care, but has a specialized program that places young children whose parents have lost their rights. There is a waiting list to join this program and to be on the list of people they call when these types of situations arise. We got on that waiting list in October, and because we hadn’t heard anything, I recently followed up to just to remind them of our interest. Turns out they sent us an invitation letter for the training back in January. Which we never received. So we’re instead invited to participate in May. Until then, we wait.

In addition to the many attempts to become parents, we are also looking into buying a house. It started as a half-hearted idea to maybe purchase the home we’re currently renting, and it has quickly spiraled into a full-on house hunt. We’re only at the very beginning of this process, but if you’ve ever bought a house, you know the loads of fun we’re having.**

On top of all of that — Yes there’s more! — we’re also trying to make some extra money. Mike is currently working a second job as a line cook three nights a week. And I’m doing a hodge podge of random things (proofreading, transcription, home listings for a realtor, etc).

We’re busy and stressed and tired. I hope someday we can look back at this time and be thankful we’re past it. I hope someday we have a child (or two or three or whatever), we own a home, and we don’t have to work four jobs. But for now we’re just trucking along, waiting for that to working our asses off to make that happen.

*Clomid helps stimulate ovulation, an essential part of conception. A thing my body doesn’t seem to want to do on its own.

**That’s sarcasm, but apparently some people actually do think it’s fun…

The unfortunate reason we haven’t been around much

We’ve been a little quiet around here. That’s because big things were happening that we weren’t sure how to write about in this venue, so we just didn’t write anything. I think there is enough distance now that I can at least share what’s going on.

Most of you probably know that Mike and I have been looking into adoption for quite some time. We’ve been researching and learning and saving our pennies, and earlier this month we finally applied!

But along with adoption, we decided to open our hearts and minds to the possibility of conception. I get frustrated when couples practically kill themselves to get pregnant and won’t even consider adoption as an option, but a little over a year ago I realized we were doing the same thing in reverse. We were so focused on adoption that we failed to even consider other options. So last February (2011) I went off birth control. We spent nearly a year not getting pregnant and also making very little progress with adoption, and it was incredibly frustrating.

Then, finally, in January, this happened:

A positive pregnancy test! We were very excited, but very cautious. Too many people close to me had experienced miscarriages and other misfortunes recently to not be nervous. And sure enough, a mere three days after that test I started spotting. A week after that test my doctor confirmed it was a miscarriage.

We were devastated. After so many months of negative tests, it was such a relief to see a positive, and it was all gone in a flash. We had hardly processed the idea of being pregnant before it was over.

But it gets worse.

I went in for regular blood tests to make sure my hcg levels were decreasing as they should, but turns out they weren’t. They were also nowhere near the levels they should be for a normal, healthy pregnancy. Which means a pregnancy had taken hold somewhere in my body, just not where it was supposed to. It’s called an ectopic pregnancy.

I endured many blood tests, many uncomfortable ultrasounds, and finally a couple shots of methotrexate to dissolve whatever was left. From start to finish, from positive pregnancy test to hcg levels back to normal, it took nearly two months.

It has been exhausting, and while we try to remain positive about the future, we are sad and frustrated by how difficult it has been for us to become parents when so many others have no trouble at all. We like to think we are wide open to the possibilities — we don’t care how our child comes to us, we just want to be a mom and a dad. But the universe is really making us work for it.

As I said, we have officially applied for adoption. And we are officially trying again to get pregnant. I hope we have some good news really soon.