The World of Wyatt, Jubilee & Addie: March 2007

Lost in Relocation

As many of you know, our little family is looking to move on up to the next level of home ownership...a HOUSE. We like our townhome with it's little yard and neighborhood park. And it can't be said enough that we love our neighbors. This neighborhood has blessed us with a great circle of friends. But with two kids (and hopefully more in the future) we find ourselves wanting more of a yard, garage, and just a tad bit more space. Ok, actually we want a LOT more space. In fact, when the house hunt began a month ago, we were really hoping to find a well priced 5 acre parcel of countryside to call our own. But after looking up to 45 minutes outside of Monroe (and that's 45 minutes on top of Caleb's 35 to 60 minute commute) in places that I am sure drugs are regularly manufactured up in the woods, we still could not find a good piece of property, that is, unless it contained a 30 year-old tear down mobile home. So instead we have found a 7 year-old nice, neat rambler in a safe neighborhood near Sultan. Sultan is the next town up Highway 2 heading towards Stevens Pass. Sultan consists of the following: two stoplights, a decent coffee house, several antique stores, a winery that produces mead (a meadery?), a library, a small no-name grocery store, a county dump, a few bars, and river that likes to overflow and wash out the town every so often. Fortuntely this house sits high above the river, and far far away from the dump and bars. There are in fact several brand new neighborhoods going in less than a mile away from our neighborhood. It seems that this is the next community for people to move to who can't afford 500K for their first house. I see it as Monroe of 10 years ago. We are quite excited to find a newer home, only 15 minutes further from Caleb's work, in a safe neighborhood. So, the offer in the house was put in about 2 weeks ago, accepted, and now contingent on the sale of our home. Until this happens, we are living in limbo. What have we learned thus far?

1. Literally throwing most of the contents of your home into your garage actually CAN make your home look much bigger. But you must accomplish this task in 48 hours while you have the stomach flu in order to fully appreciate this feat.
2. If you obsessively clean your house daily, your three year-old son will do the following in this order- act out to get your attention, start to run in circles in the livingroom, clean appliances with a costco-size pail of disinfectant wipes, tell you that "if you take out your scrapbooking stuff tonight Mommy, you BETTER put it all away before morning!"
3. If you cook a really smelly food for dinner (say with lots of garlic) and then you make a big mess (lets say by spilling split pea soup all over the stove), and then let two preschoolers play with water unattended in the bathroom after dinner, that will be the night that a realtor calls you from your driveway at 7pm asking to come in.
4. Nothing gives a bright, cheerful welcome in the middle of a drizzly northwestern day like planting flowers around the entrance to your home...lots and lots of flowers. Unless it were possible to hang a happy baby in one of those flower baskets above your front door. It could coo and squeal and smile at the poeple who come to visit. Sounds strange and maybe a bit abusive, but I think it would attract buyers. And Jubilee would do a good job and probably really enjoy it (seriously though folks, I'm not going to hang Jubilee up outside my door).

Here's a link to the page that features our townhouse. Don't recognize it as our home? That's because most of the junk it hiding in the garage!

And here's the link to the house we want to buy. It has a livingroom AND a little familyroom. Heaven!