New House?

We put an offer in on this house yesterday:

We knew putting the offer in that they weren't going to accept it.  It's $45,000 under their current asking price, and $85,000 under their original asking price.  It's also $105,000 under what the current owned apparently has into it.  But, it's been sitting on the market for 5 months with no offers.  It's certainly not in turn-key condition.  It's 33 years old and while it is extremely well built, and way better quality than any other homes in the area, very little in it has been updated since it was built 33 years ago.  It only requires cosmetic work, though, and after thinking about it for awhile we are confident we can get it looking very modern without spending a ton of money.  We'll just have to DIY a lot!

We expect them to counter offer much higher than our original offer.  We hope we can land somewhere in the middle of our offer and their asking price.  We will see what happens.  It's also conditional on us selling our current house (anyone want to buy it?;). 

This house is pretty perfect for us.  It's on over half an acre, and is extremely private (you can barely see it from the road) with a circular driveway.  It's a 2300 sq foot bungalow with a 2300 sq foot basement with huge windows like we have in our current raised ranch (so it's pretty bright down there, not like a normal darkish basement).  The basement was finished last year, but it's not completely done.  For example, a lot of the basement walls are missing trim; a possible bedroom is missing flooring, a proper ceiling, and trim; there is a new bathroom that isn't actually dry walled, they just put up panelling for the walls, etc, etc. However, there are three sets of stairs leading to the basement - one from the house, one from in the garage, and one from off the covered porch.  Pretty cool!

There are 3 bedrooms upstairs, with the possibility for 2 more bedrooms upstairs since there are two rooms that we wouldn't use for their current functions (a formal dining room and a sitting area, both measure 11x14 and have big windows).  We would just have to wall off the large openings and put in doors.  There are 4 bathrooms total, 2 full and 2 partial, but the partial one downstairs is huge and has the plumbing roughed in for a tub shower or even a stall shower and whirlpool tub.

The backyard has room for a pool, if we choose to put another one in.  It has a great brick shed, concrete paths winding through the trees (kids would have so much fun with that!), a big patio on one side of the house, and a huge covered patio built off the other side of the house (covered with the actual roof of the house).  It also has a bunch of pear trees that produce a ton of fruit every year! 

The biggest draw for us is probably the 33x33 ft garage.  That gives Justin almost 1100 sq feet to set up the gym, and room to train 10-12 people at a time INDOORS (which is not possible in our current 400 sq ft garage).  It also happens to be right across the street from the high school Justin has been transferred to for the fall.  And its 2 minutes from my parents house!!  I am so excited to be moving back to town instead of living 25 minutes away!

With us selling our house and negotiating on the new house, there is a TON that has to occur before we can actually call this home ours.  It could all certainly not happen, but I'm trying not to stress. We are moving to town regardless, so that's in my favour. And I am really trying to hold on to the whole "if it's meant to be it will be" thing. The way this has all happened so far makes me think that it might be meant to be. For example, we were not even interested in looking at the house at all because of the asking price and the pictures. Then on Saturday we were driving home from my parents' house and we saw it was having an open house. I was still not interested in looking, but there was literally 10 minutes left in the open house so I told Justin we might as well take a look. We ended up actually liking it and feeling like we could live there.

So, next, we decided to try and go to the open house on Sunday, which was from 1-3. It ended up working out PERFECTLY with Isaiah's naps, and that is hard to accomplish. Then our realtor wanted to meet with us at Remax at 4pm, which ended up totally working with Isaiah's next nap! He slept at my parents' for half an hour and woke up 12 minutes before 4. So we made it to the Remax office RIGHT AT 4.

Considering how hard it is to do things when working around Isaiah's naps, the fact that everything has worked out so far, timing wise, has me feeling optimistic.

But who knows.  Maybe they won't want to go low enough on the price.  Maybe our house won't sell fast enough.  There's a lot that has to happen.  Wish me luck!

Isaiah is 8 Months Old

Last time I logged in it had been so long that I forgot my password and had to change it.  And that just happened AGAIN!  Screw google for not letting you use the same password you've used in the past!  I'm never going to remember the one I just chose!

Anyway, Isaiah is 8 months old today... yay for being on time with a post!

So, at 8 months old...

-Isaiah weighs 19.5 lbs.

-He is about 28.5-29 inches long... it was hard to measure him; he didnt want to stay still.

-His head circumference is 18.25 inches.

-Still no teeth... I never would have guessed he would still have no teeth at 8 months since he started teething at 4 weeks old.

-Still exclusively breastfed with no bottles and no solids.  He did have a tiny taste of a pear I was eating the other day, but he just licked it, didn't actually ingest anything.

-Like last month, he's still in the awkward place between 2 and 3 naps, but moving closer to 2.

-He is now cross-crawling on his hands and knees!  I just love crawling babies, they are so darn cute.

-He is pulling up to stand.

-He moves from laying down to sitting up (and vice versa) with ease.

-He is starting to become more adventurous in travelling around the house, so we now close the gate at the top of the stairs.  We also recently put our mattresses on the ground because he is too mobile.

-We cosleep, and honestly sleep is not wonderful for him lately, but still within the range of what is biologically normal. The past few weeks have been really yucky for sleep.  One night he woke up 6 times.  He is waking up a minimum of 3 times a night, and almost always wakes up within the first hour of going to bed.  I expect this now so it doesn't bother me like it did when Noah did it. I just go in, nurse him, and he goes easily back to sleep.

-He's doing pretty well in the car.

-We still babywearing all the time. I'm still a carrier-churning maniac, and right now I have 32.

I have been awful about taking pictures in the past few weeks, but here are a few of the recent ones!

Right after a haircut... I didn't realize 1/8 inch was so freaking short!:

What's Been Happening...

I have been absent from blogging for 1 month and 1 day.  Yikes!  I have never not blogged for that long.  I also never thought I wouldn't blog for that long.  Not only have I not been blogging, but I also have not been reading any blogs, so I am seriously behind in what is going on in your lives!!  When I tried to get into blogger again I had completely forgotten my password.  I had to actually reset it.  That's how long it's been.

I know I don't owe anybody any explanations, and possibly many of you don't even care to read them (haha), but I would like to write some of the reasons why I haven't been blogging and also some of what we've been up to.  I will try to write fast, as I'm doing this during Isaiah's nap time, while Noah would like my attention and I have other things that need to be done!

I think the two main reasons I haven't blogged are:

-My blog is a secret from everyone I know in real life except my husband.  I used to keep my blogger dashboard open on my laptop browser all the time.  But whenever my family visits they use my laptop for various reasons, and sometimes my blogger dashboard has been open and they've gone on there... yeah it's just a disaster waiting to happen, a secret waiting to be discovered, which I don't want because I have private information/complaints about people on this blog.  So I stopped keeping blogger open, which means I forget about it a lot.

-Isaiah doesn't nap in a carrier anymore, and I used to blog while he napped on me because we had to be quiet anyway.  Now his nap time is time for me to spend with Noah/do things that are difficult to do while babywearing.


So,  what's been going on in our lives?

-Justin is training a lot more.  By choice he used to just train one client 3 times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday), but he could always have done more.  We decided a couple of months ago that he should start trying to grow the business a little bit more, which could possibly lead to him teaching part time and training part time.  He now has "open sessions" on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.  They are all very well attended with up to 10 people at a session (10 is way too many for our "facility" aka garage, but he can make it work with the nice weather by using the driveway).  It's difficult to find a balance between having enough available sessions to make the clients happy and hopefully gain more clients, but still have enough family time.  We're managing, though.  It's nice that Noah is at the age where he can actually go hang out outside while Justin trains.

-Justin is surplus at his highschool again. Unlike the other 2 years that he has gotten a surplus letter but was able to stay after all the staffing decisions were said and done, this year he will actually have to leave the school.  It's ridiculous since he has taught there for 5 years, so you would think he'd be safe, but it's a seniority thing.  In the last few years his school has lost so many teachers that there is now only 1 person underneath him in seniority, and his school is losing another 4 teachers.  Out he goes, and we have no idea where to.  It sucks, because he has no say in where he ends up and we've heard rumors of him ending up at a school that we really don't want him to go to.

-I recently discovered that during the first 2.5 years of Noah's life, we had a family snapshot taken on 7 occasions.  That's it.  30 months, only 7 family pictures.  That is so lame.  For the past month I've been making a specific effort to get a family picture taken every week, even if it's a crappy iPod picture.  Here they are in chronological order!

This was the first one, an impromptu iPod picture from when we were playing on the floor, but I like it :)

Playing outside... Noah kissing the soccer ball??:

This one is my favourite, and definitely the best of the bunch!:

I'm not a big fan of this picture and neither is Justin, but it still makes me happy that it exists: 

This was yesterday - crappy iPad picture, and rather amusing.  Noah is sick right now and looks very grumpy, but he actually wasn't:

Okay, gotta go.  Between this and Isaiah's 7 month update I've been on the computer for way too long.  See you in another month?  Haha.

Isaiah is 7 (and a half) Months Old

I'm so so behind on writing this since Isaiah turned 7 months on April 22 and it's not May 6.  But I still have to write a few things. This is not his 7.5 month update, though, it will only be up until he turned 7 months.

So, at 7 months old...

-Isaiah weighed 19lbs

-He was about 28.75 inches long

-Still no teeth... I never would have guessed he would still have no teeth at 7 months since he started teething at 4 weeks old.

-Still exclusively breastfed with no bottles and no solids.

-I stopped bathing him in the sink right at 7 months old when he started literally trying to climb out.

-We switched to using all fitteds and wool covers (all sustainablebabyish) around 6 or 6.5 months.  He'd had red, raw chafe marks on his chunky thighs from his PUL covers that would NOT go away.  It was an expensive switch, but a fun one!  And the new diapering system is sooooo cozy for him.

-Still in the awkward place between 2 and 3 naps, but hopefully moving closer to 2.

-He is army crawling.  Still not cross crawling, even though he's been pushing up on his hands and knees and rocking since he turned 5 months old.

-He's a great sitter, moves from sitting up to laying down fairly easily, and looks like he's starting to try and figure out how to get from laying down to sitting up on his own.

-He is a lot more content to stay in one spot than Noah was.  Maybe it's because I babywear all the time so he gets carried around the house constantly, seeing different things, so when I do put him down he is fine staying within the same area.  Noah was already into everything all the time at this age, crawling through the whole house.  Isaiah stays in the play area when I put him there.

-We cosleep, and honestly sleep is not wonderful for him lately, but still within the range of what is biologically normal.  He wakes up to nurse 2 or 3 times a night, lately it's usually 3 times. I would be at my wits end without cosleeping.  I'm going to figure out how to nurse him while laying down more easily.  At this point it's too hard to get positioned properly, so I might as well sit up to do it (and that's what I do).  But sometimes I'm sooo tired that I would really like to be lying down with my eyes closed.  It's hard to do this properly when we're sleeping on different mattresses though.

-He's okay in the car and has fallen asleep in it a couple of times when it was nap time for him.  Unfortunately, though, he won't fall asleep in the car without crying for awhile first.

-We still babywearing all the time.  I'm still a carrier-churning maniac, and right now I think I have 30.

Here are some pictures from right around when he turned 7 months old... I am not neglecting my child or my attention to his milestones, development, and picture taking.... I'm just neglecting my blog!

First bath in the big tub:

Noah had to join!:

He plays in his exersaucer beside the kitchen table while we eat dinner:

Noah always did this too: