Folks

Milo: Milo has a cough and a 102 degree fever. Also, he needs to get tubes in his ears. He still has a hearing loss, especially in the lower range. But this appears to be a very minor procedure, so that's good news.

Milo wants to be Spiderman when he grows up. He loves to climb these days and is very brave about heights. He'll go far beyond what Nora is willing to tackle. Milo is pretty adventurous.

Milo is really picky about what he'll wear. He won't wear any pants that aren't sweat pants. He also rejects about 90% of his shorts for reasons that are mysterious and do not seem to be guided by any set of coherent rules that I can determine.

Nora: Nora wants to be an astronaut and Spiderwoman when she grows up. I haven't had the heart to explain the current state of our space program to her.

Last night Nora learned how to cheat the iPad addition program. She was getting the answers far too fast for her to really be counting up the sums. She explained that when there are a lot of things to add, she just picks the biggest number.

Nora is also really picky about what she'll wear. Recently her favorite friend at school gave her a bunch of hand me downs, so now Nora is into wearing dresses. But she only wants to wear sleeveless ones, not the long-sleeved or short-sleeved dresses. So I make her put the sleeveless dress over a shirt since it's not, you know, 90 degrees out. And then she always looks funky. It's funny how both kids are so picky about what they'll wear but not in a way that actually results in them looking halfway decent.

Spring: Has retreated into chilly, rainy days. Boo. It's spring break so the kids have 10 days off school.

Jake: Jake needs to have a corneal transplant. But this is a complicated surgery that is going to require several weeks of recovery time, so it won't be easy to schedule. He needs to time schedule that much time off of work in a row. Apparently summer is the best time to get a corneal transplant. Lots of motorcycle accidents means lots of available corneas. This isn't a surgery that needs to happen immediately, so he has time, but it's still a drag, that's for sure.

Rainy Friday

THANK GOD it's spring break. It's 2:55 p.m. in the office here right now and only my untenured colleague is still around. She's writing up a storm.

Mentor and I had an interesting talk today. First, he offered me a co-authorship on a very visible project. The people who get offered this sort of thing are typically people who are much more senior and famous than even Mentor is. I'm psyched to have a chance to be involved through him, which is the only way I'd ever get a chance at doing something like this. So that is exciting.

The thing is, though, it's really been a bad couple of weeks work wise. There are structural problems in our department that, it is clear to me, are not going to go away. We are both too ambitious and both too frustrated to be content with this situation. So that means looking around at other possibilities. Today we talked about whether it'd be possible to engineer some sort of dual hire situation so that we could go to the same place and continue collaborating. There are spousal hires, but we're not spouses, we're academic collaborators. I wonder if you can make a case for an academic spouse, so to speak. Hard to say. Especially hard for me because if I did that, I'd also want to try to engineer some sort of real spousal hire for Jake as well. I don't have anywhere near enough seniority or cache to try to pull something like that off, despite the nature of our small field. Who knows...just brainstorming.

The truth is that there are only a small number of institutions I'd want to go to that would also work for Jake and our family. There is one fairly close to my current location geographically. There is another in the bay area. Just food for thought, I suppose.

For the moment I need to just let go of work-related frustration and enjoy the fact that next week will be quieter, fewer meetings, more chances to write and do the things I really enjoy when it comes to work.

Edited to add: This doesn't really convey how depressed and trapped I feel; how betrayed I feel by my department's insanity and my dean's lack of support. This has never been just a job for me. It has been, in a sense, a love affair with the place and the university and the job and the history of my field here. I want to love it here and stay forever. I don't want to start over somewhere. But I don't want to feel trapped in a dwindling, dying area due to crazy politics while our area is being explicitly supported and aggressively grown at other universities across the country. I don't want to leave. But it's starting to feel like I can't stay without it ultimately becoming a slow career death.

Full of Possibility

It's really interesting to me how hard it can be to predict how things will work out. The problems that crop up and need to be solved are seldom the ones that I was able to anticipate ahead of time. The things that become important are often things that began small, and didn't seem so significant in the moment.

A few years ago I took a trip to Ann Arbor to attend a training about implementing a particular assessment measure. It was a mundane, 36-hour trip. The training ended up being useless. But the trip totally changed my career. Somehow when I was there I came up with a new idea for the career grant I was planning to write. I knew the idea I currently had wasn't working that well, and I wasn't totally excited about it. But something that day sparked a brand new idea and as soon as I had it, I knew it was the right one. All the pieces fit together just right, and it was the perfect conglomeration of everything I had done so far and wanted to do moving forward. So I ended up using the 8-hour useless training session to outline my grant idea. By the time I returned home, I had the whole grant mentally laid out, and I was prepared to get started writing on it. And, in the end, the grant was funded and has profoundly influenced my research direction and my career choices.

I don't know, who would have thought something like that would come out of a short training trip?

And of course, lots of other short training trips end up being nothing more than short training trips.

This sense of possibility is always with me when I prepare to go to another conference or do something new. Who knows what unexpected thing might happen that'll change everything from here on out? Who knows what conversation I'll have that'll spark a new idea for a collaboration or an article? Who knows what brand new person I'll meet who will actually end up becoming a really important person in my life? It's all so unpredictable.

Morning at the Museum

Yup, that's really as high as it looks.

Figuring Out Their World

This morning the kids had an extended conversation with each other about how things will be when they're grown up and can do whatever they want. They decided they're going to live in their own house (not living together didn't appear to occur to them) and paint the walls whatever colors they want! Milo is going to paint the walls black, red, and white. Nora is going to paint the walls all colors. Later, on the way to school, they asked about how they're going to get this house.

Nora: We'll need help building it.

Me: Well, you could just buy a house that has already been built.

Nora: But then we would need help lifting it.

Me: Why would you lift the house?

Nora: ...? Well, if we don't lift it, we'd need help moving it.

Me: ...? Why would you move the house? (I had no idea what she was talking about.)

Nora: We need to drag it home! So we can put it where we want.

Oh! Right. Her conception of the order of the world is based off our home, which is her home base, so I guess it makes sense that even if she had her own house, it'd be "at home", next to our house.

Milo was more concerned about how he was going to be busy doing whatever he wanted.

Milo: Where are we going to have all the toys? The big kid toys.

Me: Well, you can buy toys at the store. With money.

Milo: But how are we going to get all the paint?

Me: You'll have to buy that at the store with money too.

Milo: But how are we going to get the pets?

Me: At the store.

Milo: But how will we get the pets?

Me: You can buy them at the pet store.

Milo: I'm going to buy lots of parrots to talk to me!

Nora: Yeah!

So it's decided. They'll live in their own house so they can do whatever they want, which consists of painting the walls whatever colors they want, and having lots of parrots.

Pet Peeve

Somebody posted on FB today about how they never thought they'd have a job as a waitress or a short order cook, but now that's changed since they've had kids.

This line of reasoning really irritates me. You know, the "I'm a Mommy! That means I'm a chef, a chauffeur, a housekeeper, a personal organizer, and a personal shopper." Funny how you never hear them also claim the job of prostitute.

Because you know what? Cooking and cleaning for your kids is not the same as doing it for paid labor. And claiming that it does denigrates the hard work involved in doing that stuff for a living.

I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant for one short summer. It was a seafood restaurant and I cut and cooked fish all day. For 8 hours a day. I was in college, and it was a good job for a young person because it is exhausting to stand in a hot kitchen cooking fish all day. My entire body hurt at the end of each day, especially my arms and shoulders because the counters were too tall for me. I smelled of seafood by the time I got home, and it felt like I could never really wash that smell away. I counted down the minutes to my two 15-minute breaks because I would spend those 15 minutes with my arms straight down, resting them.

I'm not even going to pretend to know what it's like to do a job like that for years or decades. I was a spoiled college kid who basically spent the summer learning to appreciate how decadent it is to go back to school and sit in classes all day.

On the days that I'm home with the kids, I do a crapload of cooking and cleaning. I'm pretty much on my feet all day long. I make french toast, omelettes, or pancakes for breakfast. I prepare a mid-morning snack. I make pasta or sandwiches for lunch. I prepare a mid-afternoon snack. I make a homemade dinner every night. On Wednesdays I also bake something like scones or muffins or bread. It's a lot of cooking, but it is not the same as being a short order cook. Give me a break. I make what I want for the kids. I'm in the comfort of my own home. I take a break when I want to. I do it because I choose to do it. Yes, it's busy and it's tiring, but no, it's not anything close to what actual cooks do. I mean, come on.

You can make the same argument for any of those other "jobs" if you spend about half a second thinking about it or even trying to have an ounce of empathy for people who do those jobs. Being a mom is hard. Yes, it's a ton of work, and yes, it's physically exhausting. There are plenty of things worth discussing about what it feels like to do all of those tasks for your family, and what it can be like to not get much appreciation, or to face the fact that you have to re-do everything every single day, or the fact that you pretty much don't ever get to just be sick and stay in bed, because even if you're sick, there are kids to take care of. All of that stuff is super labor intensive. But it is not the same as being, say, a maid who cleans other people's toilets for a living. And I find it insulting to pretend that it is.

Vulgar Phonics

Tonight Nora wanted me to "teach her how to read", so I started writing down some words she knows and then replacing the first letter with different letters to see if she could sound them out. Like, she knows CAT:

CAT

SAT

MAT

FAT

By the way this technique totally doesn't work yet. Neither kid understands the concept of replacing the first letter with something else and just keeping the rest of the word the same. I thought it'd work, because they're so into making rhymes, but it doesn't. So Nora just has to re-sound out every new word to figure out what it is. She is, however, starting to figure out out how to do this so that she can read new words, which is pretty cool to watch.

Anyway, we were working on FAT and Milo had joined us, so I asked, what's the first letter?

Milo: F!

Me: What sound does F make?

Nora: Uf uf uf...no...

Milo: What?

Me: What sound does F make?

Milo: ...Fuck!

And then Jake and I try not to laugh, and basically fail. (Then Jake suggests that I start with the next word being "yuck").

Drizzly Saturday

I can tell how good a friend is by how much I feel like I need to clean the house before they come over. Whether they have kids matters, too. If they've got a couple of preschoolers I'm less worried about it, because I know their house will be just as messy as ours and plus ours will be a disaster by the time the visit is over anyway.

I love having our friends-with-baby over. They come over so much that we don't really feel like we need to go crazy with housecleaning. They'll understand. The kids love playing with the baby.

Tonight we've got new people without kids coming over. Major cleaning. They wouldn't understand the child-related detritus.

Portrait of a Twin

This morning Nora said, "Mommy, do you know that I can talk a lot?" Yes. Yes I do.

Lately Nora has become interested in what letters words start with. When she hears a word, she can usually figure out what it starts with. Like Frances, which starts with F, and her sister Gloria, which starts with G. Apparently somebody has been talking about doubling at school, too, because Nora likes to rattle off "2 + 2 is 4, and 4 + 4 is 8, and 5 + 5 is 10!" She has no idea what this really means, she's just memorized it. But she loves showing off the stuff she knows. I have a feeling that Nora is going to enjoy the game of school. She likes things with structure and rules.

Meanwhile, when Nora draws a picture of Milo, I think she is behind on some sort of milestone because she is still drawing a picture of a giant circle with arms and legs that come out of the circle. Nora likes to draw Milo. She'll draw his face, and hair coming out of the top of his head, and legs coming out of the bottom of his head. Like this (this is not Nora's drawing, but her drawings sort of look like this).

So I asked her, what are those lines (pointing to the legs coming out of the bottom of his head). She said, those are his legs. Then I asked, why are his legs coming out of his head? Nora looked at me like I was crazy. She said, "Mommy, that's not his head. That's his body!" I asked, "Oh. Where's his head?" Nora pointed to the top part of the giant circle, and said "That's his head!" And suddenly I realized, oh. To Nora, that giant circle isn't Milo's head, which is how I always thought of it. It's his head and his body. I saw legs and arms coming out of Milo's head. Nora sees legs and arms coming out of Milo's body.

Just goes to show how perception determines reality. And how their perception is so different from mine, in ways that constantly fascinate me.

Tipping Point

God, what a shitty day. I work with some insane assholes.

But then others are really great, so...I don't know.

Mentor was asked today to apply for a chair's position in London. They're hiring 9 (NINE) people in our area to build up their program. This is happening at universities across the country and world, whereas today I sat in a faculty meeting and listened to a colleague gripe that the department should never approve any more positions in my area because we already have plenty of people (we have 4, which puts us as one of the smallest in the country).

I kind of feel the tides changing sometimes, like maybe I'm not going to be here forever. My area colleagues and I were talking about how pissed off we are about department/university bullshit but how much we like our town. Sometimes I think it's just going to be a matter of when, not if, each of us reaches the tipping point and bails.

Switch to Biking?

My running is better when I'm barefoot. My knees hold out for longer. This weekend I felt pretty great. My knees were doing well, and I did some good sprints at the end.

Then later that night I noticed a strange pain in the top of my foot, but I forgot about it and went to bed.

Then the next morning I walked to work, and a few minutes into my walk my foot started hurting a lot. By the time I got to work it was really bad. I googled "pain on top of foot" and a bunch of barefoot running sites came up. Hmmm.

Now it's 2 days after my run and my foot hurts just as much. I was about to walk in to work again today but given the pain I have decided to take the bus, because I imagine something needs to heal. And now I feel pissed off that I'm not getting my daily hour's walk to and from work. I don't know what on earth I did. My foot didn't hurt at all while I was actually running. I've never had foot pain from running before in my life.

If it's not my knee, it's my foot...am I just not cut out for running? Every year I get a little more frustrated and contemplate giving it up for something else, and then things get a little better and I stick it out, and it's this cycle of better, worse, better, worse. The cycle has beeng going on since 2003, so that's kind of a long time to stick with something that keeps aggravating various injuries. But it is so heartbreaking to think about giving something up that I love so much!

Maybe this stubbornness of mine is just dumb, and I can come to love biking just as much as running. Maybe this weekend I'll get on my bike and spend an hour doing that and see how it feels.

My graduate student and my post doc are training together for a marathon this May. I actually feel physically jealous when they talk about it. Like, my stomach hurts because I feel so bummed out that I can't do what they're doing. This is silly. It is time to let go, maybe. It's just running. It's not that big of a deal. I bet biking can be fun too, right?

Crack Up

Nora asked me to explain what happens to food after it's been in our stomach. So we were talking about that tonight at dinner, and of course the conversation wandered to waste products. And, the kids like to say the word "poop".

Me: You know, there's a grown-up term for poop.

Nora: What?

Me: Feces.

Jake: I prefer the term excrement.

Nora: I prefer the term kant.

Jake: Kant, as in, Immanuel Kant?

Nora: Yeah.

(We all contemplate that in silence for a moment, then Milo speaks up)

Milo: I prefer the term turd!

Our Bodies

Today was a day of sleeping in until almost 9, for me. The kids were quiet this morning with Jake, which was really something. They were already heading outside by the time I got up. It was a day of sunshine, shorts, bubbles, watering cans, basketball dribbling, and trips to the park.

This evening I went for a run while Jake made cold soba noodles with a peanut and spinach sauce. Cold noodles is a very refreshing, satisfying dish to eat after a run in the hot air.

Going to the gym twice a week in the evenings and running on the weekends means that my exercise habits are highly visible to the kids. And kids emulate their parents. Milo is has incredible balance and coordination; he can even do a hand stand. Both kids like to pretend to lift weights.

I feel like I need to be very careful about how I approach health and fitness when it comes to modeling something for the kids. Here is what I do do: When they ask why I go to the gym, I say that I do it because it is fun, makes me feel good, and I like to be strong. Here is what I don't do: I don't ever talk about my weight. I don't ever skip meals (even if I'm not hungry at the time; I want the kids to see that we all eat normal meals, every single time). I don't ever talk about how I shouldn't eat this or that, or engage in any kind of "oh, I shouldn't, but I guess one bite" kind of talk that women sometimes engage in when they indulge in treats. I don't ever talk in negative ways about my own body, or about anybody else's body. I don't ever, ever use the word diet, or fat.

This afternoon our cat, Caspian, lunged himself into a grocery bag as I was unloading the groceries. He always does this and then looks hilarious as his hind quarters and twitching tail sticks out of the bag. Caspian is a huge cat. He's big and tall and fat all at the same time. Jake starting laughing at him, and said, "Caspian, you're such a fat cat sticking out of that bag!" Milo immediately picked that up, saying "Fat cat! Fat cat! Ha ha ha, Caspian's a fat cat!"

Stuff like that is why I feel like we need to be very, very careful about how we talk about stuff. A shocking degree of 6-year old girls are on diets. At age six. What I want to model is healthy attitudes towards our bodies. Love and acceptance and pride in what our bodies can do. I compliment my own strength in front of the kids. I do handstands to entertain Milo and talk about how we need to practice to get better at things. This weekend he's been practicing and practicing at dribbling. I talk about how, when I was his age, I couldn't dribble a ball, but then I practiced a lot and learned how to dribble.

I don't want the kids to get the idea that I exercise to try to be thin, or look a certain way. I don't want to promote looking any sort of way. I want to promote having fun with athletics and celebrating the great things our bodies can do. I know that this isn't going to do much to stem the onslaught of harmful, degrading images and messages the kids are going to get about appearance and weight as they get older. Especially Nora. I hate thinking about that, about how that will infiltrate their current natural childlike state of simple acceptance of who they are. But at least that shit is not going to come from home.

Ides of March

Twelve days ago, on March 3, Jake took this picture:

Today, I took this one. A few days ago we were cleaning out our garage and I noticed something. Every fall I put many of our pots from the back patio into the garage so that the snow and ice doesn't crack them over the winter. Some of these pots have perennials. Then in April I take them back out again. But this week I noticed some of the plants were already growing, so I took some of the pots out of the dark garage and set them outside. And today, on March 15, this one is already blooming:

And our lilac bush has buds on it. In March!

Yesterday as the kids played outside I cleared away a lot of dead leaves and plant remains from some of our flower beds. Once I did this, I saw the tiniest bit of green poking out from the ground, wowed at how our perennials are coming up already. But then this afternoon I walked around and looked again, and there was literally an inch and a half of plants showing through the ground. They grew an inch overnight. Is that even possible? I feel like I could crouch down and stare, and if I watched closely enough, I'd see them wiggling their way towards the sun, like in a sped-up film.

Today I walked to gym class (16 minutes, my ipod told me) in shorts and a t-shirt. I walked back home an hour later, and it was still warm even though it was dinner time. As I reached my street I congratulated our neighbor, who just got tenure this afternoon. He was sitting on his front porch in bare feet, with a well-deserved beer in his hand.

I really love living here. Living with seasons suits my personality very well. A perverse part of me knows that I relish spring and summer so deeply because of its contrast to winter. By the time October comes, I'm ready for the romantic feeling of autumn. I enjoy feeling the highs and the lows, and the changing seasons is just one manifestation of that.

Sunny Wednesday

Well, it felt more like a June day than a March day. What a happy feeling. We spent the whole day outside. Morning in the park. After lunch riding bikes and shooting baskets. After nap at the zoo. After dinner outside in the back yard. Milo made 35 baskets after dinner alone!

In the afternoon it was shorts weather. I was sitting outside on the stoop and I looked at my calf and thought, what's the weird indentation and bulge on my leg? And then I realized, oh. That's a muscle. It's a clearly defined muscle that just never stood out like that before. I love my gym class so much because strength training has such noticeable results in terms of muscle definition.

The kids fought all day. Milo has been really aggressive lately. Not only with Nora but with other kids at school. I'm tired from all of the fighting.

But I LOVE the fact that we currently have all of the windows open.

Bad & Good

Good: I managed to get the kids to school by 8:15. I had to get them there early because today was a field trip day to see a children's play.

Bad: The theater got the date wrong, so entire busloads of preschool children arrived when actually the play is tomorrow! So I need to somehow get the kids to school early tomorrow as well.

Good: A symposium I'm part of was accepted, so now I'll be traveling to DC in mid June!

Bad: That's only going to be about a week after I'm in Savannah, which is a month after a trip to Philadelphia, so poor Jake! I always feel guilty when I travel a lot in a short time span. Not about the kids, who are fine, but about Jake because it places such a burden on him.

Bad and Good: An instructor we'd hired for a 2-year position is leaving after his 1st year because he got a tenure-track position. This is good for him. Bad for us. I'm happy for him, but it might mean not offering the courses we'd slated for next year for an important service program. This is especially troubling for me because I was scheduled to collect data in his class next year, and this messes that up. It's also a huge problem for my doctoral student, who was supposed to do his dissertation on data collected from participants in that program next year. I'm not sure what my doctoral student is going to do now.

Bad: Mentor and I had a pretty big fight. Fight is a bit too dramatic given how low-key he is, but he was really mad at me. And I was even more angry than he was. After 7 years of smooth sailing in our professional relationship and personal friendship, this year has been unexpectedly rocky. I wonder if some of that has to do with changing the equilibrium now that I'm tenured and he is no longer "mentor" so much as just friend and colleague.

Good: We made up, so now we're buds again, to use his term. This matters a great deal to me, not that I'm copping to having father issues that I subconsciously try to resolve with every older male authority figure in my life, but whatever.

Good: My office is completed and looks great!

Good: It's totally spring and it is super awesome! It's supposed to be 77 degrees on Wednesday! I can't even say how happy this makes me. And the kids. And Jake. Tonight the kids played basketball outside before dinner while I cooked.

Finally

Finally, after 90 minutes of half asleep constant coughing and suffering, Nora has managed to fall asleep and her room is silent. Finally.

Croup is such a drag.

Spring Day

This has been the BEST WINTER EVER. And now spring seems to be springing early, and it is so great! Usually I spend March (and the first half of April) incredibly jealous of everybody else enjoying spring while we're still slogging through snow. But today we spent the entire afternoon outside in the 60-degree, sunny weather. Every kid in the neighborhood was outside. Parents emerged, pale and blinking in the sun. Impromptu gatherings coalesced on the sidewalk and at the park.

Jake and I trimmed down our overgrown shrub in front of the house as the kids went into an orgy of spring-related excitement, rediscovering all of their outdoor toys. Look, the balance bikes! Bubbles! Balls! The sand table! Aaaaaa! They ran around like crazy people, and then our neighbors came by with their two kids and everybody blew bubbles and played in the sand and rode around on their bikes and we all talked about how great it is today.

Then we came in and as I made a spring vegetable risotto (leeks, broccoli, spinach, chives and parsley, with a finish of goat cheese, so good), we both said, huh. We don't want to leave this block. We don't want to leave the park. It's so nice here.

Then later as we were eating dinner Jake started sadly talking about the house we lost, and right in the middle of his reverie Milo interrupted him, saying, "We're all going to be gone when we die." And Jake stopped talking, and looked at Milo, and said, "You're right. None of that house stuff matters." And Milo hugged Jake's arm and said, "I like you, Daddy", and we smiled as we finished our risotto.

Drama Drama Drama!

Here are some pictures of that house. The stonework and the original front door and entry are so charming. I love houses with a vestibule, a place to take off your coat and boots. Having a double entry keeps a house warmer in our winters. This house still has the original 1920s tile in the vestibule.

And yet! The thing that makes it a dream house is the combination of old and new. It has the charm of an old 1920s house combined with a modern addition and a kitchen to die for. Cherry cabinets, a viking range, double oven, undermount sink...

And closets! Closets galore. Double closets in the master suite, which also has its own private deck, and a bathtub in a turret. A turret! This addition is so well done because it is a high-quality addition (brick), but also well designed architecturally. There are so many additions in this neighborhood that are basically just giant blocks added on to the back of a house. This one was an interesting architectural addition to the house, and nothing like a giant block.

And the closets!

So the house has closets, an open family room / dining room / kitchen area, 2.5 baths, but also an original portion with an office off the living room, the original fireplace, and period details. I just love this view from the living room into the vestibule towards the front door, for instance:

And then the open family area in the addition has nice details like tray ceilings:

So Wednesday I stayed home with the kids, and Milo was sick, and I spent 10 hours cleaning and decluttering our house. Then I cooked dinner, then after the kids went to bed I had several friends from the neighborhood over for wine and dessert. Two of them live on the same street as our dream house, so we talked about that.

The funniest thing is that I told them about how I have a nemesis who I didn't want to get the house. (I'll call her RT). And one of my friends immediately said, "is it RT?" This friend has never heard me say RT's name, I've never talked about RT with her, and yet she pulled that name out of thin air! I was flabbergasted. My friend isn't even a professor, how does she even know RT? She said, "I just thought of her for some reason because she's basically your opposite."

Yesterday morning I got up, rushed the kids to school, did some last-minute cleaning prep, then went and saw the house. Confirmed our decision to make an offer. Came home, showed our house to people. Then called Jake, we decided to meet up over lunch with our realtor to write up the offer. Then, Milo's school called. His teacher thought he was still sick. So I went and got him. Change of plans, Jake would come home to write the offer. Jake came home. Jake, Milo and I looked at the house again. Then we went back to our house and wrote the offer while Milo napped.

Then Jake and I hyperventilated a bit because it was sooooooo expensive. Like, 20K more than the top of our psychological barrier for how much we'd ever want to pay for a house. Also, financing is not straightforward, at least it wouldn't be until we sold our own house. I put all the pictures of our own house up onto a web page, and we prepared to advertise it once our offer was accepted. It was a full priced offer with no contingency, so they'd be crazy not to accept it.

I went to the gym.

Came home. Our realtor called. Another couple has also written an offer, and they knew that another offer (ours) was already submitted when they wrote it. Even though realtors aren't allowed to reveal the details of a competing offer, they are allowed to reveal that there does exist a competing offer. So the 2nd couple knew about our offer (even though they didn't know how much it was for), and were probably writing a better one. A couple of hours went by, the kids went to bed. Our realtor called. A THIRD couple has written an offer, with the knowledge of the first two offers!

Midnight -- the sellers picked the 3rd offer, so we lost the house. They must have gone above the asking price.

Although we are disappointed, a part of me is relieved too. It would have been a lot of money, maybe too much. It felt risky, and Jake and I are pretty conservative with our personal finances. There is something to be said for maintaining our nice small mortgage with only 18 years left on it. Also, the bright side is, we really do like so many things about our current house. Right now I'm sitting in our sunny kitchen (home again, of course, with sick kids, 5th day in a row) and appreciating the fact that our house gets so much sunlight.

So it has been a very dramatic week! I'll be glad when the kids are done being sick, when Jake and I start to feel better, when we can relax a little after all of this business and excitement. I'm looking forward to spring and replacing part of our fence and planting tomatoes (this time with chicken wire) and gardening and enjoying our park. It's all good.

Awkward

Two years and 1 week ago, I sent an email in response to Super Senior Professor's offer to go for coffee. I gave some dates and times, and he responded and we went for coffee. Two years ago.

Today, I received a response to that 2 year old email. He suggested we meet for coffee on the 24th at about 10 a.m. (The 24th is a Sunday, which would be an odd time to meet for coffee).

Did he send that 2 years ago and it just got to me now? Or was he going through his old emails and didn't look at the date and somehow thought I sent him this email just a week ago?

Or is this his way of initiating coffee again, two years later, in a really weird manner?

This super senior professor is at an age where it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that he might be a little confused. (He's about 15 years past the typical retirement age).

Very Very Very Fine House

In 2 days I'm going to look at a house at 9:15 a.m. and that day we're going to make an offer on it. (We've already decided to make an offer. This has always been Jake's dream house, for years.)

However! My nemesis is also trying to buy the house! What, you don't have a nemesis? Why not? She's the Newman to my Seinfeld. Has been for the past 7 years. And now she is trying to swoop in and buy our house.

Meanwhile! I'm looking at the house at 9:15 and then other people are looking at our house at 10:30. We haven't even listed it yet or anything. We haven't even made a webpage yet or even advertised on the listserve or on FB or anything. But what happened is that recently two different people wrote to our neighborhood listserve and asked if any of us was thinking of maybe selling our house, because they want to live in our neighborhood. So I wrote them both and said, yeah, actually, maybe. So family #1 is looking at it on Thursday morning and family #2 is looking at it on Saturday morning.

This has made for a busy week. On top of, like, working and taking care of sick kids and stuff, Jake has been talking to our realtor and trying to get a mortgage pre-approval letter and I've been cleaning everything and getting rid of the cluttering knick knacks.

One thing for me to remember if my nemesis gets our dream house is that we are actually very happy right where we are, so it's okay. And there's something to be said for maintaining a cheap mortgage. Just think of all the trips we could take!

The Worst of Winter

Milo is super sick. He currently has a fever of 104 and is drifting off on the couch next to me as we wait for the Tylenol to kick in. I think we'll be home most if not all of the week. I am just hoping against hope that Nora doesn't get it too. The poor guy feels miserable.

This week is crazy. Deadlines, office moving / painting, surprise high-drama house buying potential with an iffy at best chance of success, last-minute crazy house cleaning to show ours to some people, and of course no sleep because of Milo's croup. One thing I've noticed is that after a sleepless night (or three), bright sunlight really helps in feeling more cheerful and making it through the day. I did all right today because it was so nice and sunny.

p.s. Milo seems to be sleeping right now on the couch but he keeps moaning in his sleep. He'll be cruelly awoken in about 5 minutes when Jake returns from school with Nora.

Croup

Milo is okay, but he has croup. A long few nights ahead of us.

Milo woke up with a barking cough and wheezing, panicking because he couldn't breathe. Jake just rushed him to the hospital.

Bits and Pieces

-- Jake has discovered Pandora. (I know. Welcome to 2006). Now it's all 80s, Depeche Mode style, all the time. How much of that can I take? It remains to be seen.

-- I am getting new furniture for my work office on Tuesday! The movers are coming to take away the old furniture on Monday. Then I'm going to surreptitiously paint my office on Monday afternoon.

-- Nora says, "Mom, are you ready to see something truly amazing?" as she stands on one leg and spreads her arm wide to create a dance pose.

-- March is the cruelest month. You have spring on the mind, but then you get a giant snowstorm.

-- Tonight after the kids' bedtime we heard some doors opening and closing upstairs, but we also heard somebody going to the bathroom, so I chalked it up to that. But then 45 minutes later I heard a lot of cracking up coming from upstairs. So I crept up the stairs, tracing the laughter to Milo's room. Wait a sec...two kids are cracking up in there. I open the door and sure enough there's Nora on Milo's bed with him and they're laughing at some private joke.

-- Oh God. Jake's station is playing Send Me An Angel. I can't take this anymore.