So Much to Say, So Much to Do!

We blessed Isaac on April 16 and enjoyed having Nathan's parents, my parents, and my sister Minda's family in town to share that occasion with us.  Things got really interesting within a couple hours after the blessing when tornadoes touched down in Raleigh.  Fortunately they didn't affect our house at all.  I was really worried about where I would stuff 14 people away from windows if necessary.

The next day we had two showings for our house (more relief that the tornadoes didn't damage us) and one of them put in an offer, which we accepted.  It was more heartbreaking than exciting, really.  The sad reality is that with the declined market, our mortgage is under water, and there was no way to come out ahead.  Our realtor advised us that the final offer wasn't too far from probable appraisal value.  Maybe there were buyers out there who'd offer another thousand or two, but a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush.  Agreeing to sell at such a low price really hurt.  I actually started crying after I called back to convey our acceptance.  Dear sweet David asked what was wrong, and when I told him we didn't get as much money for our house as we needed, he snuggled up closer and said, "Mom, you can have my money."  I love that boy!  Of course, we're not going to take his savings.  We'll get by, but I sure appreciated his willingness to share.

Shortly thereafter we were inundated with the parade of people coming to inspect, appraise, give repair estimates, etc.  Most of them showed up the week Nathan was on a business trip to Dallas.  We played chicken with our buyers over the repair agreement.  They were being absolutely ridiculous in their demands, but we stood firm on our end despite their threats to walk away, and they finally backed down at the last minute.  More relief.

Next we needed to find housing in California.  Nathan went out there last week for business and took a couple days to find a place to rent. Plans to buy a house in Los Banos got obliterated the moment we agreed to the offer.  No more cash for a down payment.  We planned to rent an apartment there for a little bit anyway to get to know the area, test the commute, etc, but we were surprised to find out that there are only low-income housing apartments in Los Banos.  Nathan did not want to rent a house for a variety of reasons, so we scrambled to find potential apartments closer in to San Jose.  It was a long, frustrating couple of days to look at endless apartments that were too small for our family and too expensive for our budget.  Nathan was feeling pretty low about how this decision to move to California would impact the entire family.  We decided to see what kind of houses we could rent, and revisited the Los Banos idea.  I found a beautiful home advertised on Craigslist, bigger (and cheaper! yeah!) than our current home, in the neighborhood we are interested in eventually buying in.  Nathan drove out that evening to meet the owner, got on an airplane home the next day, and after a week of waiting out the application process, we finally got confirmation that they wanted to rent to us.  One more "whew!" for this tale.  So glad to finally have a forwarding address! (Not going to post on the blog--email me if you want it)

So the plan now is to pull out of here early on June 16.  We will rent a huge Penske truck and are sharing some space with my parents, who are in the process of moving from SC to UT.  They will be driving the truck out and we'll drive our van separately.  We'll meet at their Utah house to unload their things and then drive the truck out to California.  When it's all said and done, we expect to arrive there around June 23.

Meanwhile D1 and D2 had a small round of colds which means David is coughing again.  Ugh.  We're waiting to see a pulmonologist in California rather than interrupt any ongoing treatment from this end.  He is immensely proud of his very first loose tooth and hopes to lose it before we move.  I also enrolled him in swimming lessons and he's making great strides there.  My hope is that he'll be an independent (enough) swimmer by the time we're done so I can actually go to the pool by myself with 3 kids.

Daniel is ever the happy-go-lucky, distracted little soul.  I'm frequently amazed how different he is from David!  He likes to spend his days in his little imaginary world, emerging occasionally to ask for something or wrap himself around me and tell me how much he loves me.  He's also tuned into Isaac now and loves to give him hugs and kisses, and tells all the world about his baby brother.

Isaac is such a good baby!  I feel truly blessed.  He is so sweet and content, all smiles and snuggles.  He likes to do leg presses and looks immensely proud of himself when we help him stand in our laps.  He was slightly tongue-tied so I got that clipped a few weeks ago.  He now loves to stick his tongue out (MomT, he reminds me of Lizzie).  He's got his hands in his mouth almost as much as David; I guess some teeth are working their way in.  Isaac is also a very long baby.  He's only 3 months and I just started putting him in 6-9 month clothes.

Somehow in the thick of kids and moving I'm trying to get caught up on my digital scrapbooking. I think I started digi-scrapping in 2004 and managed to be pretty thorough until Jan 2008.  In this recent push I've gathered wayward photos from our earliest years and got all those pages done, plus filled in some gaps along the way.  I compiled the pages from 2001-2006 into a book at Blurb.com and was delighted to get that delivered this week.  I'm glad to be caught up on the earliest years and now need to get cracking on the recent years.   It's been fun to revisit this hobby that's been on the wayside for so long.

I think that wraps us up for now.  Love to you all--
natals

Tracheomalacia

I know, right?  Tracheomalacia is a word that makes you want to say "gesundheit," and you wouldn't be too far off.  This word of the day is brought to you by the doctor at Carolina Allergy & Asthma, and it is his diagnosis for David's chronic cough.  He's pretty confident that's the case, but went ahead and tested David for asthma and allergies just so we could rule those out, and David tested negative on both counts.  The doc advised me to Google tracheomalacia, and that there wasn't any "bad information" on it.  Okay...?  So I did, and came up with a variety of medical sites, but I think this one describes it best, in spite of all the medical terminology.  The other sites I looked at all made it sound scary, but the doc didn't seem overly concerned.

The short explanation, if I understand it correctly, is that the trachea has bands of cartilage around it to keep it rigid and prevent it from collapsing.  David's are softened, however, so whenever he gets a cough associated with a virus, such as a cold, his trachea flaps and he gets a loud, bronchial, brassy cough that hangs on for weeks and weeks after the offending virus has fled, and then just stops spontaneously.  The cough is not contagious and the condition is something he should grow out of.  

They x-rayed his chest to see if his aorta is leaning against his trachea to contribute to the collapsing.  David is excited to tell his classmates that he got an X-Ray since they always learn that word when studying the letter X.  The doc will review those images and open a dialogue with David's pediatrician to come up with a treatment plan.  That's all I've got for now, but at least I feel better that I wasn't blowing smoke as I got frustrated over the years with the pediatricians giving me a wide variety of guess-planations and ineffective treatments for what sounded to me like, and now I'm sure has been, the same cough.

House Feedback!

We got feedback from our showing on Sunday.  Hooray!  I won't inundate y'all with details from every showing, but I'm excited for my first:  

"Great home - well staged and immaculate. Client loved everything but the yard and the price is more than he wants to pay, but it is still on his list. Thank you for the cookies."

Picky, picky, picky.  That is a bummer about showing it this time of year.  Our Zoysia grass looks pretty thin in the back and pathetically yellow all around over the winter.  It will green up and fill out soon.  I guess another down side that I'd kind of wondered about is it looks especially bare in the back since we rake up all our pine straw beds back there each spring to encourage the grass to extend its boundaries.  We'd toyed with the idea of planting grass all the way to the fence but have never gotten around to it.  How bad would it be to just lay fresh ground cover and see what he says?  At least he liked the house and cookies.  Who wouldn't love cookies?  Our agent responded asking if the buyer would place an offer if we seeded or did lawn treatment.  Here's hoping we're at the top of his short list and he feels generous.

We also got a new garbage disposal installed yesterday.  It purrs so nicely!  Much better than the cacophony the old one made before it went projectile on us.

On a completely different note, Isaac has started smiling and it just made my day to have him beaming at me first thing this morning.

Just Keep Swimming...

Four years ago we moved cross country, bought a house, had a baby, and potty trained. All within 4 months. We knew it was crazy and laughed about whether it was possible for us to make our lives any harder. Somehow, in spite of that experience, we're doing it again, albeit in a slightly different order.  I'm trying to laugh through this time too, but I must admit it's harder this go-round.  

#1: Wrinkles
As you know, Isaac was born on February 9. Fortunately, he is a very good baby and a marathon sleeper, for which I am immensely thankful, as it generally allows me to work on all the other chaos in our lives at the moment. The boys have received him well and are very attentive to his needs. David loves to hold him. Daniel complains that Isaac is too heavy to hold, but he likes to look at him, plug the binky in, and occasionally pat his head.

By the way, we're blessing him on Saturday April 16.

#2: Extra Pounds 
Nathan has decided he's done dealing with big-boy diapers and has been trying to potty train Daniel for months now. Really what this means is we have lots of M&Ms in the house.  Unfortunately I'm not good about following through with Daniel during the day because frankly, I'm not ready to focus on that right now, and I don't think Daniel is really ready, either. But we did enjoy two consecutive days of solid business in the potty last week.  And I've enjoyed walking past the M&M bowl.

#3: Hernias 
We're moving to California the first week or so of July. We wanted to wait for David to finish school (June 30), but we also want to get to Cali, drop off our stuff, and then drive back to Utah in time for Nathan's sister's wedding on July 15. We've decided to rent an apartment on the other end for a few months while we get to know the community we're interested in, and test out the 80-minute commute before we're locked into it with a mortgage. Incidentally, David announced to me this morning that there are exactly 100 days until we move (which he decided will be at 4 pm on the last day of school).  Which makes me think that maybe I should start filling the stack of boxes sitting in our garage.

#4: Gray Hair 
Moving cross country means sell the house. Which, I've decided, is one-hundred times more stressful than buying one, especially with active little boys. And the economy stinks, so we're losing what little equity we have and then some to get out of this house.  Our Realtor did not have a particularly aggressive list of things to do to get the house ready (yay!), but it still took me a week and a half to get everything done between kids' demands.  As much as I like this house, at this point I just want out so I don't have to worry so much about spills, dings, and messes that come from kids having fun.  And that's after only being on the market for 3 days.

We had our first showing yesterday.  I wish I could have glowing reports on how that went, or any reports for that matter.  We haven't heard a whisper of feedback, and it's making us crazy.  Or crazier, I guess, is more a appropriate description.

#5: Migraines 
The day before Isaac was born, David started coughing and complained that his throat hurt.  Long story short, he's been on three different antibiotics over the past six weeks and he's still coughing.  We've been to the pediatrician a couple times and the ENT, all without any conclusive diagnoses.  Meanwhile I keep having teachers telling me in carpool that he has a bad cough.  Like I hadn't noticed for the past month?  And the poor Primary children are besides themselves when he has a coughing fit.  I guess he had a particularly bad spell his first Sunday back after Isaac was born.  I'm told you couldn't even hear Sharing Time over his cough, and kids were crying "please make him stop!"  He got to spend 3rd hour in the foyer with Nathan.  I've been told by several moms that their kids came home and prayed for "the boy that coughs." I suspect allergies are the underlying cause of the cough and several other little issues he has.  We're going to a pulmonologist (asthma & allergy specialist) this week to see what we can find out.

Almost as stressful as listening to the cough is trying to deal with the insurance company.  His allergy test is covered, but I can't nail down a dollar amount in advance that we'll be responsible to pay.  I keep getting a run-around.  The pulmonologist says they don't have contracted amounts in their computer, and it can vary each time they submit the same code, so call the insurance company.  Our insurance is through Blue Cross in Washington.  They say the contract price is determined in the State of service, so I need to call the provider (lot of good that did) or the local BCBS office.  The NC office says it's processed through the home office, I need to call Washington.  You'd think I asked them for Permit #838.

Meanwhile I'm still having issues with a fractured tooth that got crowned last fall, I'm supposed to go see a periodontist about another tooth but that will probably wait until California, and oh yeah, Isaac gets to see a pediatric urologist.  Who needs money, anyway?

And because we needed a few things to laugh about:
Our baby swing died.
Our washing machine decided it will only do the spin cycle if Nathan loads it.
Our garbage disposal objected to a few of its parts and literally spit them out at us.
...All in the last three days.

I think I'll go eat some cookie dough.

Meet Isaac

Hello all!

I was scheduled to be induced on Friday the 11th, but when I went in for my checkup yesterday, I was dilated to a 5/6 and the doc said, "Why wait? Let's just break your water and have a baby." Woohoo! So I went straight from my doctor's office and checked myself into Labor &; Delivery at the hospital. I arrived around 11:30; it was around noon by the time I was all settled in my bed, IV, etc and waited around for the attending doc (who happened to be the same one who delivered Daniel) to come in and start my labor by breaking the water sac. He didn't come in until around 2:30 or 3:00 (think Jeopardy theme song), but once he broke my water, things moved pretty quickly... as in, Isaac was born 2.5 hours later. Sooo, announcing:

Brent Isaac Nash
born 2/9/11, 5:30 pm
8 lb 15 oz, 21.5 inches
lots of dark blonde hair
he looks just like his brothers.

He and I are both doing great and expect to be discharged tomorrow morning. Thanks everyone for your well wishes! We're glad to finally have Isaac in arms.

New-ish Software

A while back friends and family would ask me what program I use for digital scrapbooking.  Several years ago (2007?) I got a new program, and although I tinkered with it a bit, life happened I never got around to using it.  Or my old program, for that matter.  No scrapbooking since January 2008.  *sigh*  Determined to catch up as much as I can before Baby Isaac appears, I sat down tonight to start the repentance process.

So I'm now using My Memories Suite by Polaroid.  And while the interface is a little different than I'm used to with my old program, I'm getting used to it and I like what I can do.  What's killing me is the program keeps crashing!  I wish it weren't so buggy.  I pretty much have to save my work after any change I make, or I'll have to start over.  And six pages and probably a dozen crashes later, I've started over plenty of times tonight.  Good thing it's New Year's Eve and I'm staying up late on purpose.

An hour later...
Golly gee whiz, it might help if I actually installed the latest version that I bought 6 months after I bought the program!  Installed it now and hoping that helps.

Now if only I could get the yellow ink nozzle on my photo printer unclogged so I could actually print these works of art...

Tick-tock

So often David lives up to his name's meaning, "Beloved."  He has such a tender heart.  The past couple of days he has shown particular interest in new baby Isaac's wellbeing.

Yesterday as everyone was bundling up to go play in the 7+ inches of snow we got (!!!) he said, "Mom should stay inside, because we don't want Isaac to get cold."  He's got a point there.  I'd better stay dry and cozy inside with a cup of hot cocoa... ;)  Seriously though, I was glad for his concern, because my midsection is rapidly making my warm outerwear gather dust on hangers.  I can get by for brief stints outdoors, but I'm not really equipped for snowball fights and snow angels.  Not that I could get down to actually make a snow angel...

But I digress...  Today David asked me at lunch time if I had eaten yet.  "Not yet," I replied.  "Mom, you need to eat because Isaac will get hungry.  He won't be thirsty now because you just had a drink."

Bedtime prayers: "...please bless Mommy and baby Isaac, and please bless Isaac when he comes out that he won't be cold, because it will be winter time..."

As I tucked him in and arranged his yellow blanket (his favorite since he was a baby), he said, "Mom, I'm getting too big for this blanket, so we can give it to Isaac."

What a precious boy!

Meanwhile the reality of the close proximity of Isaac's birth has started to sink in for Nathan and me.  I had David two weeks from this point in the pregnancy.  I've still got 5 weeks to go, but give me three more weeks to incubate this fella and then I'll be happy to push him out any time.  I'm tired of being pregnant!

So anyway, I've been thinking this past week that it's probably time pack the hospital bag (and by extension, dig out baby clothes and buy diapers), and type up the boys' schedules/routines for whomever lands them on the big day. Today Nathan was talking about how he's going to rearrange some exercise equipment in our room to make room for setting up the pack-n-play.  Which means that I also need to start thinking more seriously about how we're going to arrange all three kids' sleeping quarters once Isaac is ready for the real crib that is currently set up as Daniel's toddler bed.  I'm not sure I'm ready for David and Daniel to share a room (they'll keep each other up at night and will wake each other up pre-dawn, I guarantee it), but I'm not ready to give up my spare bedroom, either.  Okay, truthfully, I'm just not ready to give up that closet.  In the absence of much usable attic space, it's my favorite storage place in the house, and I don't want to mess with it.  But, something's gotta give, and the clock is ticking!

Christmas Panic

I woke up to Daniel hollering that he was ready to get up. I nudged Nathan and said, "Hey, the little guy is ready to come out. Shall we go down?" 
Him: "Really?!" 
Me: "Yeah, it's 7:00." 
Him: "Oh, Daniel! Be more specific next time!" (he thought I was in labor)