He's Defying Gravity

Funny thing, he really enjoyed the show tunes, but wasn't too interested in Bon Jovi.



So no house for us. This is OK, we are far too free spirited to commit ourselves physically to San Francisco or the Bay Area. We are a butterfly, free to flutter around wherever our whim takes us. And the best part is, I get my Sundays back.

Back on the roller coaster

OK, now is the time to buy stock in Prozac and any of your more popular mood-stabilizing drugs. And chocolate.

We seem to have bought our first home today. We passed the first hurdle anyway, which was getting our offer accepted by the sellers and signed. That took about a week and a half. The next hurdle will be to finalize our loan, and then to meet with inspectors and make sure the house isn't actually a cardboard cut-out of a house with flowers drawn on the front in crayon. Because it totally could be.

Aaaaaand in the middle of all of this we leave for Chicago and Minneapolis on Friday. First trip with the baby, and at this point I'm dreaming about quart-sized zip lock bags filled with baby Tylenol and Desitin.

Oh, speaking of baby, guess who learned how to razz today? And guess who looooves to razz? At his mom, at his dad, at the dogs...

Oh, Come On

After our last potential house buying experience--which ended up with us not buying a house and what I consider to be more than my fair share of tension and anxiety--we're going to take a little break from house hunting. Just a few weeks, then we'll get right back out there and have our hopes and dreams dashed to pieces weekly, again.

One week until we leave for Chicago and Minneapolis! One week until Samson's first airplane trip! One week to figure out how the hell I'm actually going to get through this! More anxiety! Yay! Exclamation points!

Tonight, the Sharks could clinch the Pacific Division title. All we have to do is beat the defending Stanley Cup champions. Hey, no problem! Historically, the Sharks do really well against Anaheim when I have sushi for dinner. Happy to oblige.

Yaaaay! I mean, booo! No wait, I mean, yaaaay!

We are constantly living the roller coaster ride that is real estate. Home buying-induced heart attacks and ulcers have to be somewhere in the top 5 list of causes of dementia. Or something.

We put an offer in on a cute little corner house in Bernal Heights yesterday, and we're still waiting to hear from the seller whether or not they are accepting our offer. So we get approximately 48 hours to get very excited, then terrified, then hopeful, then worried, then hungry, then nervous, then motivated, then sleepy, and repeat. Fun!

No more rolling over since Thursday, and that's fine by me. The sooner the baby can move around, the sooner he can run from me when I try to dress him in sailor suits.

What a difference a night makes

So never mind about that whole house thing. It's going to cost way too much for us to fix that house up, and we are not house fixing up type people. Too much, too much. It's not for us. Some other handy couple with nothing but time can have it, and they can turn it into the 3 bedroom 2 bath with a hammock that it deserves to be. As for us, we'll take a little break then dive back into the choppy churning sea that is house hunting, blindfolded and with cement blocks tied to our feet.

Make a house a home

For the second week in a row, we found a place during our weekly Sunday house hunting appointment with our realtor that we were nearly able to squeeze into our very narrow and potentially unreasonable idea of what a house should be, where it should be located, and how much it should cost. On both occasions, we put offers in on Sunday evening, received counter offers on Monday, and lost out to higher offers on Tuesday. That's a lot of stress and anxiety to experience in less than 48 hours. Especially for someone as emotionally attached to houses as I am. None of these houses were love at first sight, and they're all far from perfect, so it already took some emotional convincing on my part to even out the offer in. And even though we're slowly establishing reputation as The Lowball Couple in San Francisco real estate and the chances that our offers will even be countered let alone accepted is like one in a million, I'm very good at playing out the whole process in my mind: the offer acceptance, getting the keys, moving in and sprucing up various kitchens, yards or bathrooms, and of course having 5 or 6 more little babies to run around the place while bake cookies and Max smokes a pipe and reads the Evening Post. So by the time we receive the seller's outrageously priced counter offers, I've already watched Samson put his first lost tooth under his pillow in the kid's room (all 7 or 8 kids will have to share a room because we can't afford anything over 2 bedrooms). It's devastating, repeatedly devastating.

So this week, one of our Sunday offers was accepted. Whaaa? The offer we put on an old, poorly maintained little house in Bernal Heights was accepted, and we are officially in escrow. I repeat, whaaa? This all happened very quickly, and it's totally blowing my mind. Unfortunately, being in escrow isn't nearly as fun as it sounds, and we have to get all kinds of inspections done now so that we don't accidentally buy a house that's falling apart or was built on some sort of Vampire infested landfill. As good as I am at playing make believe about the future of our new home in the 24-ish hours between making an offer and not being able to match the higher offer waiting right behind us, I am surprisingly bad at trusting that this particular house will pass inspection and that we'll actually be handing anyone a check on Friday

I foresee many more Sundays with our realtor as she drives around the city in her monstrous Acura SUV, blocking driveways as she ushers us into our fifth open house of the day, explaining once again how certain parts of Western Addition really aren't that bad, and mispronouncing Junipero Serra. And we'll make more offers. And we lose out to higher offers. And eventually, the right combination of house and offer will come together. Has that happened this week? I doubt it. But you never can tell.

The only instance in which it is ever OK to refer to a 4 month old as sexy

The cold is continuing on its course and the baby now sounds like Kathleen Turner. Part of the hoarseness is probably from the massive amounts of crying he did Friday and Saturday--you know, when I was pinching him and putting all of his binkies in the Cuisinart? But he's developed a husky voice so it just sounds hilarious when he laughs (when I'm not pinching him and destroying his binkies) and he's also got this demure, princess-sounding cough that seems as if its going to stay for a while.

I'm really done with house hunting. No more condos, tandem parking, storage lockers or shared gardens. But also no more teeny tiny shoe box sized single family homes with lots of termite damage and dry rot in questionable--at best--neighborhoods. Just no more. This is one of those times when I really wish I hadn't gotten my hopes up so high.

My Little Mouthbreather

Samson has come down with his first cold. It's all at the same time heartbreaking and adorable. He seems friendlier in general, less likely to break into the fussing-whiny-screamy for no apparent reason mode throughout the day. But his audibly labored breathing is just so pitiful, and he's taken to sticking his fingers in his mouth while he eats so as to make it easier to breath through his mouth (WHAT a smart baby!) but a bunch of the milk runs down his neck. After two days of this, he doesn't smell so great.

So we bundled him up today and Max took the day off so we could give our visiting friend a tour of San Francisco. You could totally tell that we miss living in the city so so much; it was basically the Deb and Max heritage history tour. We drove past our old apartments, the restaurant where we had our first date (8 years ago this month!), our favorite parks, cafes and bars, even had a beer at our old neighborhood French cafe while Max got a hair cut at his old neighborhood barbershop. Sigh. We really miss the neighborhoodiness of San Francisco and the urban hum that accompanies living there. We appreciate the living space that renting on the peninsula affords us, and the amenities like backyards and 2 car garages. But we're just not whole without the corner store and terrible lack of parking. The outing really cemented the decision we made months ago, to move back to the city as soon as our lease is up this summer.

Soon after we initially made this decision, we decided it would be best to finally bid our rental apartment days goodbye and to buy our own place. 10 weeks and four trillion open houses later, we finally put an offer on a 2 bedroom condo in Northern Panhandle (I think that's a made up name for the neighborhood just east of Stanyan, south of Grove, north of Fell and west of Masonic) and were outbid in approximately 6.8 seconds. It was a learning experience and a relatively painless initiation into the cruel and messed up world of Bay Area real estate. Hopefully, the next time I blog about this, it will be to announce that I'm finally buying that hammock I've always wanted for the backyard or deck I've always wanted. In the house that I've always wanted.

Now I'm going upstairs to suck the mucus out of my baby's nose with a rubber bulb syringe. Which is almost as fun as hammock shopping.