House hunting

I like to picture the pioneers who spent months of their lives traveling to their new homesteads and finally reaching it and getting out of the wagon…having a nice stretch and then looking around at the wilderness thinking “WOW, this looked a lot different on www.realtor.com”.

Peter and I have spent so much time browsing through houses for sale online that I truly think there is a chance we have seen EVERY house for a 20 mile radius of Fayette county. It was fun at first, it was exciting to look and imagine and hope for the bright shiny future home! Now, it’s like doing algebra homework….”Oh no, it’s house browsing time again?”

Seriously, it is a wonderful tool to have at our fingertips, we’ve been able to figure out where we want to live, where the best schools are…we are able to ditch whole groups of houses based on the lousy schools. We have our list of necessities and then we search and we search and we search.

Then Pete and I sit and do the “wild imagination” times….where he looks at houses that are cheap fixer uppers…I look at houses about 350,000$ out of our price range…we consider what we’d do with 13 acres…we play “what if money weren’t an issue”….something to break up the monotony.

It’s been so nice having Pete home the past week. The kids have enjoyed him being here while they’re out of school and we’ve been able to squeeze in some really nice family time. Our home seems whole again, it’s messy, it’s loud, this is how we like it. We’re already anticipating Pete having to pack up and leave on Tuesday, I’m encouraging them with the plan to go up for a visit around Nathaniel’s birthday in late January.

I can confess I’m a little neurotic these days. Peyton’s bruised up right now…her platelet count is great…I KNOW it’s nothing but normal kid playing….the bruises are healing!….but I can’t stop watching them and checking them 20 times a day. It just freaks me out to see her legs all banged up and today she had a new one on her butt cheek….she LOVED me checking that one over and over again today, let me tell you. I keep telling myself not to worry, that I’m letting my imagination get the best of me, especially because I have her counts from Wednesday rattling around perfectly in my head. But it’s that cancer parent paranoia…the need to check for random fevers, the watching every bruise like a hawk, staring at them to make sure their color looks good…I AM CRAZY, but I admit it and I move on.

However, tonight I got the great joy of watching Nathaniel break out in a very mysterious rash. He’s already had the chicken pox, he has NO other symptoms…just a spreading rash on his torso, groin and underarms. **Note, please don’t attempt to self diagnose via Google, I put in his symptoms and got back BUBONIC plague. However, this is also the search engine that we used to look up “Wetus”, a Powhatan Indian house, and got back 4,000,000 sites for porn.

My paranoia came rushing in, the kid went to bed tonight marked in red sharpie…so that I could see where he was currently broken out and if there are new spots in the morning, I’ll know. Because, again, I am CRAZY. How crazy am I?? Before he went to bed, he sighed and asked me “Do I have to stay in my room again until this goes away?”

Considering they’ve been all over each other all through the Christmas break, I think its pointless now…but thanks for offering, Son.

f.r.o.G.
–Anissa