Category Archives: Moving

Moving Weekend

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Note to all prospective parents: It is all well and good to go house-hunting while trying to conceive. The excitement of making an offer, reaching acceptance, and the prospect of a new home is excellent distraction from the stress of baby-making, especially if it gives you something else to think about during your two week wait. Be forewarned, however, that if you go under contract while trying to conceive, you run a significant risk of being pregnant when you move.Trust me, that part is not so much fun.

I am relatively lucky. Morning sickness has not been so bad. I find I get a little bit queasy if I don’t eat regularly, and some foods taste and smell really wrong (I seem to be off pork products and coffee for the duration, but maybe that’s a good thing), but I haven’t been vomiting. Fatigue is kicking my ass, though. I am ready for bed by 6:00 pm, most nights. If work and life with a nap-resistant toddler did not interfere, I could easily nap twice a day. (I did, yesterday: it was glorious.)

Moving has been really rough, because I haven’t felt useful or helpful. Heavy-lifting is out, so I couldn’t pull my weight toting boxes and hefting furniture. I tried to contribute by packing (and now that we’re in the new place, unpacking), but there’s not much that can be done during Hank’s waking hours and by the time he goes down, I am done for the day.

People (including Penelope) keep telling me that my job right now is to grow this tiny human, and while I get that — of course I get that – I am not the type to delegate responsibility (read: “cede control”) gracefully. I like to be In Charge. It has been so difficult for me to sit back and stay out of the way while everyone else boxes up and carries away everything I own.

As of this weekend, we are out of the old house and into the new one. We will be unpacking boxes until the end of days, I’m sure, but at least the hard part — the actual move — is behind us.

Our living room is the only room not buried in boxes, and it’s looking pretty good, in my humble opinion. Check it out below.

-C.

Epic Failure at the Most Basic Tasks

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I blew up a pot of hardboiled eggs tonight. I’m mortified. I’ve been boiling eggs since childhood, utterly without incident, but tonight?

For those of you who have never blown up hardboiled eggs (and despite my generally low opinion of humanity, I bet most of you are not that stupid), let me assure you, it is definitely an Incident. They explode suddenly, with loud popping sounds, and they cover the kitchen in fragments of yolk and shell, making a terrible mess.

How did I do such a thing? Boiling eggs is so simple: it requires nothing but attention and a pot of water. I fouled up on the “attention” front. As I was boiling the eggs, I was also making dinner, washing dishes, cleaning the kitchen, rotating laundry, listening to Penelope read to the boy, and thinking about all I have to do to get ready for our closing on the new house tomorrow afternoon and our move next weekend, and then, in an instant, I was ducking for cover trying not to get scalded by flying egg debris. (Luckily, I am unhurt, though I’m pretty sure I have eggs in my hair.)

Penelope came running, of course, and after having a hearty laugh at my foolishness, she very sweetly cleaned up the egg mess while I tried not to cry. (I am sure this was just the first of many hearty laughs she will have at my expense, whenever she remembers this incident.) I was still verklempt as we sat down to dinner, and I asked her, “What’s wrong with me? Is this the pregnancy?”

She tried to bite back another bout of laughter, and said, “Epic failure at the most basic tasks? Pretty much.”

It’s going to be a long, long nine months.

-C.

 

Wicked Busy

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I apologize for not posting in awhile. We’ve had an insanely busy few weeks, and the next few are bound to be just as crazy. We’re packing like mad to move, and still hoping to close on the new house by the end of the month (though the bank has not yet set a date). I will try to summarize, with pictures.

Hank likes to help pack. This is an appropriate box for him to choose, because no one ever kisses his face. Ever.

Hank’s big accomplishment of the last few weeks is that he’s had a potty-training breakthrough. After months and months of practice and hit-or-miss, he’s finally consistently telling us when he needs the potty — even when his pants are still dry. He’s now been in training pants during the day and diapers only at night for about a week, with very few minor mishaps, and we’re so proud of him. Now we’re working on advanced potty technique: standing up.

Wednesday afternoon, we met up with my Aunt and Uncle as they passed through on a cross-country road trip, at their friend Lori’s house at not-too-far-away Lake Morey. Hank loved splashing in the lake and studying the fish (minnows) that Uncle Rob caught and put in a bucket for him. (We released them unharmed.)

This past weekend we had a visit from my dad (Papa Chuck, to Hank), and we packed a ton of activity into a few short hours.

We went blueberry picking, which is insane for this time of year in Vermont: blueberry season usually doesn’t happen until August. The corn’s almost ready, too, also a month ahead of schedule. You can’t tell me there’s no such thing as global warming.

It’s been really, really hot and dry for weeks now. Hank’s been beating the heat by spending much of his time in the paddling pool in our front yard, eating pole beans and cherry tomatoes and sugar snap peas right out of the garden. However, the paddling pool is too small to share, so after blueberry picking, we gathered our suits and towels and headed for the local swimming pond. Pictured above: Papa Chuck and Hank compare their hands after a refreshing dip.

Finally, yesterday afternoon we went down to Massachusetts to meet up with one of Hank’s donor siblings and his mama. They usually live down in Georgia, but were visiting family in MA, so we met up at the Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory. I won’t share any pictures from that introduction because it wouldn’t be kosher to post photos of other people’s kids without permission, so you’ll just have to take my word for the fact that the resemblance is a little spooky, especially around the eyes. There was one point when the boys were running side-by-side, and though they don’t share the same build at all (Hank’s sturdy, while the other child is lean and lanky), they had exactly the same gait, the same funny wiggle to their run. The mamas didn’t get too much time to talk (what with all the toddler chasing, and the fact that both boys were overtired having had sub-par naps), but it was great to make that connection in person.

-C.

Musings on Paula Deen While Eating Ice Cream

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Saturday was a really, really hot day, and Penelope and Hank and I spent much of it packing and toting boxes between our house and our storage unit in preparation for our upcoming move. At the end of the day, to reward ourselves for all our hard work, we stopped at a local market for ice cream cones. While waiting at the counter to pay, I encountered this latest issue of People magazine:

I immediately called Penelope over and pointed it out to her. At this point, my indignation had rendered me momentarily inarticulate, so I couldn’t explain exactly what I wanted her to notice.

“You know she only did that because she caught so much heat for the diabetes thing,” Penelope said nonchalantly, accepting her ENORMOUS “small” ice cream as the cashier passed it across the counter.

I don’t care why she did it. I know from grim experience that losing weight is hard, whether you’re trying to lose five pounds or one hundred. When you are battling a lifetime of deeply ingrained habits, even your own livelihood, as Paula Deen is, it’s even harder. I give her props for her progress so far, and I wish her all the luck in the world in keeping the weight off, because that’s the hardest part.

No, here’s what annoyed me about the People cover: the “Wow! Once a size 18, now a 10!” that hangs in the air beside Paula’s newly-svelte thigh. I have also lost thirty pounds this year, and I also started at a size 18, and I am now… a size 16. Several years ago, I lost 60 pounds and went from a size 20 to a size 16.

Because I am part of a huge online community of people losing weight (livestrong.com — if you need to change your lifestyle, eat better, and drop the pounds, I totally recommend their Daily Plate calorie tracker: better and more accurate than Weight Watchers, and totally free), I know that my 30 lbs = 1 size is a lot more typical than Paula’s 30 lbs = 4 sizes.

Sure, Paula probably has one or two items in her wardrobe that are a size ten. My wardrobe ranges from size 12 to size 18. Penelope’s ranges from size 4 to size 12. That’s the problem with the way women’s clothes are sized: unlike menswear, which is sized by measurement, women’s clothes are arbitrarily sized by a number that has absolutely no standard meaning. (Women’s sizes start at 0, for Chrissake! That’s not a size!) Women’s sizes are not at all standard between brands, and they change over time: “A woman with a 32-inch bust would have worn a Size 14 in Sears’s 1937 catalog. By 1967, she would have worn an 8…Today, she would wear a zero,” notes Alaina Zulli, a costume historian in this excellent NY Times article on the subject.

Sure, people carry their weight differently, and lose their weight differently. Maybe Paula dropped all of her thirty pounds at her waist, thus dropping sizes quickly, while I tend to slim first around the face and feet. (I’m not kidding: for me, 30 lbs = 1 clothing size, but 20 lbs = 1/2 a shoe size.) Still, I think People’s cover is misleading at best and at worst, potentially discouraging to those who drop pounds without dropping sizes.That’s not what we should be focusing on, anyway. Since clothing sizes are completely arbitrary, who cares what size Paula’s wearing? We need to give her credit for making a huge lifestyle change, and celebrate the fact that she looks great and is (probably) much healthier. We need to make her success accessible to all of the rest of us who need to make the same changes: if she can do it, so can you, and so can I (if I stop going out for ice cream!)

-C.

Swimming in the Sea of Uncertainty

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Last month, when Penelope and I put an offer on a new house in the middle of the two week wait after my IUI, we had in the back of our minds the idea that buying a house might prove a good and necessary distraction from the interminable wait to see if I’d get pregnant. And yes, when my period arrived several days early (indicating it probably had been a bum cycle from the get go), the fact that we had a new house under contract softened the blow a bit. I wasn’t pregnant, but we had good things happening in our lives. I didn’t have much time to dwell on my disappointment: I had to schedule the home inspection and gather the mountains of documents required by the bank for financing.

The yard that may soon be ours: +/- one acre, level lot, with fruit trees and plenty of room and sun for a garden.

This month, though, all the uncertainty is dragging on me. I am drawing near the end of another two week wait. Gut instinct tells me I have had no better luck this month, but then again, Penelope was dead certain she’d just gotten her period when the nurse called with the news that her second IVF transfer had worked. (She’d had some bleeding that morning — in retrospect, it was probably implantation spotting.) UPDATE 6/18/12 – My gut instinct was not wrong. No luck this month — harrumph!

Porch #1 (open). The house is a 2,900 square foot New England farmhouse, circa 1850ish, with attached garage/barn. 14 rooms, including 4 bedrooms and 2 baths. (Yes, that’s a lot of space for the three of us, but there will be a mother-in-law apartment for Penelope’s mom, and besides, it might not be “just the three of us” for long!)

As for the new house, the inspection went fine. It needs some insulation and the barn roof needs patching, and there are plenty of cosmetic changes we’ll want to make, but for a 160+ year old house, it’s in great shape.

Porch #2 (enclosed) — hot tub not included in sale, which is fine with us: Penelope and I both think hot tubs are a bit skeevy.

Here’s the hitch: the sellers agreed to have the septic cleaned before the closing, and when they did that, they learned that the leach field was failing. They (the sellers) have some relative who they thought would be able to do some kind of ‘quick fix’ for just $1,000, but we didn’t think that would fly with our bank, and we didn’t want to wind up buying the house and having to replace the leach field two weeks later when the ‘quick fix’ failed. For a while, it seemed like this would derail the whole deal, but eventually we negotiated a new agreement: they will put in a new leach field, designed by a real engineer, and we will pay half the cost (but only if the sale goes through).

Nice, bright kitchen that might be ours. The cabinets aren’t even ugly! (Every house we’ve looked at — and we’ve looked a lot — has had ugly cabinets.)

Now that we’ve settled that, we still have to wait for the results of the bank appraisal (which was done on Thursday), which is the last hurdle we need to clear in order to get our mortgage.

Dining room that might be ours. I’m a sucker for French doors.

What about the house we already own, you ask? Good question. It’s been on the market forever, with very little interest — not because it’s not a nice house, but because the housing market in our present town is one of the most depressed markets in the whole state. But the rental market is booming, and we’ve had a lot of interest in our Craigslist ad, so that’s the plan: to rent it until the market improves enough to sell it. We’ve had a few prospective tenants in to see it, and we have two more families coming on Tuesday, so we’re confident we’ll be able to find tenants.

Enormous living room. The fireplace is in the middle of the room, so this photo only shows about 2/3 of the space.

Here’s the other big hitch: We want this move to disrupt Hank’s life a little as possible. That means not starting to pack until we are 100% certain it’s actually going to happen. Initially, we thought the inspection would be the decision point, and that was scheduled within 14 days of going under contract, but we extended that deadline when the leach field problem was discovered.

Wide center hallway between the living room and dining room. Not the best use of space, but definitely period appropriate. We’re thinking we’ll put the piano in here, and maybe a big ol’ antique hall stand, if we can find one. Plus, we always need space for our many, many bookshelves.

Now here’s what I’m worrying about: the contracted closing date, while not set in stone, is on-or-before July 13. That is now less than a month away. UPDATE 6/18/12 – It’s going to take longer to get the new septic system than anticipated, so it looks like the closing will be pushed back by about 2 weeks.

One of three upstairs bedrooms. (One, not pictured, is a terrible pink that is sort of cross between Pepto-Bismol and that dreadful “dusty rose” that dominated grandmotherly decor in the mid-late 1980s.)

Tonight at dinner, I made lists of things that need to be done in our present house before we move out, and things that will need to be done in the new house before (or shortly after) we move in. (Hank sometimes takes a long, long time to eat, and we try to stay at the table with him until he finishes, so it’s good to have something to do to pass the time.) Both lists were intimidatingly lengthy, and the tasks on each list were both time-consuming and expensive.

Downstairs bedroom. This room, the attached bath, and several other of the downstairs rooms will be a mother-in-law apartment for Grammy, if all goes well. It will be so great to have Hank’s babysitter under the same roof.

Here’s my fear: All the stars will align, the septic system will get fixed, the appraisal report won’t make the bank balk, we will get our official closing date, and we will have a mere two weeks to get everything done. Penelope and I moved seven times in the first decade of our relationship, so we have packing down to a science… but that was before we had a baby. As every parent knows, it’s hard to get anything done with a toddler nearby, especially if the task in question involves putting things into boxes: toddlers like nothing better than to pull things out of boxes so that they can look at them, play with them, carry them around, and hide them/flush them/break them/eat them.

And if my gut instinct is wrong, and ALL the stars align, toddler-patrol might be the only job I can do, since many of the things on the lists (painting, insulating, heavy lifting) are not safe for pregnancy. I should be so lucky, right? But if I am, will Penelope ever forgive me?

-C.

Home in Bloom

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Spot the Toddler!

You can’t do much outdoor gardening before late May, when you live in Vermont. The temperatures are still too extreme. While it isn’t unheard of to have daytime high temperatures in the high 70s and even 80s this time of year, the nights still have some bite. We had a frost warning this past Friday.

The other factor complicating our gardening ambitions this year is the fact that in two short months, we may very well not live here. We have a home under contract in the next town north, and while we haven’t yet done the home inspection (scheduled for Tuesday after next) or all of the mortgage hurdles, there is a very good chance we won’t be here to see the seeds we plant now grow to harvest.

To solve both of these issues, we’re opting to do most of our gardening in containers this summer. We can move containers inside or onto the sheltered porch if cold threatens, and we can put them in the back of the moving van (in theory) if the home-buying adventure goes well. (I say “in theory” because Penelope is a lot more optimistic about being able to move containers full of eight-foot-tall Kentucky Wonder pole beans than I am.)

Anyway, each spring for those few weeks when the poppies and rhododendron burst into bloom, our front yard suddenly looks almost charmingly wild and whimsical (rather than merely unkempt, which it generally is). This might just be my favorite time of the year.

-C.