We (almost) officially have a house in AZ (and other little life updates).

this post is also at https://old.reddit.com/user/DecentData5441/comments/1gtivuo/we_almost_officially_have_a_house_in_az_and_other/ if you would like to comment and/or talk over there! 

Happy Sunday everyone!  It's still fairly early and both kids are still at sleepovers. I kind of shocked myself this morning when I declined my younger sister's invitation to go to breakfast and then attend services with the this morning. Usually on these weekends when Bubs has been out of town, I'm always super starved for human contact and jump at any invitation. This morning it just felt right to stay home, walk the dogs and get some stuff picked up and organized. I have always been an extreme extrovert (some would say annoying) but I'm finding more and more that I really enjoy and need my alone time. 

I'm going to try again to cross post this on reddit, I like this blogger platform for many reasons but I so miss interacting with everyone in a conversational way. I read all of your comments but this place is just not set up for interactions to go past comment/reply where reddit is. I'm always a bit nervous because of how fast Bub's last account was nuked but I guess if they come for me again, I can still post here. 

Yesterday, we decided on a house in Tucson. Bubs went around with our real estate agent to do last looks on the three houses were on our final list. Two were more or less cookie cutter suburban houses but well within our budget. Those two are also in a great school district which pretty much everyone recommends as being excellent for both students and teachers. The third was basically my Arizona dream house in a very charming little neighborhood right next to the University of Arizona. That house was pushing our budget and also needed a lot of work (a dream come true for me, a nightmare for Bubs). The Tucson school district is apparently in pretty bad shape and while there are OK options, most of the people we talked to send their kids to charter schools.  So with all that, we decided on the larger of the two tract houses in a little community called Vail. It's going to be a new experience for us as this is a development community where just a few years ago there were ranches and family farms but all that land has been sold to developers. You can literally stand on the hill that has the grocery store and just see row after row of tract houses. It's not aesthetically pleasing but the schools outweighed my desire to have a charming view. It's also much further from Bubs work than he'd hoped so he's gong to have to get used to commuting again (although it's only about 20 minutes). It's a compromise house for sure but we are going to get settled and then start looking for small vacation rentals to buy in the San Diego area and that be my project house for the next couple of years. It's going to cost us more initially but I'm hoping that doing Airbnb will help with the expenses, I get a beach house and Bubs would only be 6 hours away from his dream of being able to call himself a surfer.  We are so blessed that we've been able to do well enough financially that we can even consider doing things like this. So anyways we put the offer in yesterday afternoon and our real estate agent told us she's almost certain the seller will accept. We expect to hear back from them either this afternoon or tomorrow. 

If they accept the offer, there's a very good chance that we will be able to move door to door in December. Our moving plan is to let me and the kids finish this semester at school, do Christmas with our families and then drive out between Christmas and New Years. In the mean time we'll get rid of a bunch of stuff, have the movers come and start to share our current house with Bub's sister who is going to rent it from us starting in January. We are all excited because it means we will still have a footprint in our home town, we are going to give his sister a great deal and she gets to live in a house that she has fond memories of--and then she'll live down the street from her best friend (my little sister). Now she just needs an engagement ring  and some babies and she'll fit right in (as I've talked about before, things don't always go in order in my family). Fingers crossed, her boyfriend (who will all absolutely adore) will finally pop the question--we're doing our part by giving them a four bedroom house with a study on the cheap that needs to be filled up! 

In other life news, I got such a nice email from a person I had not heard from since my reddit account got blown up. She was always so sweet and one of the people I was really sad because I expected to not hear from her again. But she said she's been following the blog for a while now and wasn't sure if it was appropriate or not to email. But beyond saying hello, she asked if we knew the gender of the baby yet. I was actually floored because I could have sworn I'd talked about this on the blog, but looking through I hadn't--and it's actually been quite a while! 

So discovering the gender has always been a source of major disagreement between Bubs and I. I want to know, he wants to be surprised. With our first, I pretty much told him that I was a nervous wreck already and I was the one with severe morning sickness, zits and desire to nest, I was going to find out. With our second, I said we could do it his way but the ultrasound images almost made it seem like our son was showing off and it was unmistakable that he was a boy. 

Since our kids are going to be well involved in the process, we wanted them to be involved in the decision of we were going to find out the gender or not. My sisters wanted to do a massive gender reveal and I'm always down for a party so I pitched the kids that we wanted to find out. Bubs gave them his spiel that its way more fun to find out the day of the delivery.  The kids decided that would rather be surprised so that's what we are going with. I had my first ultrasound at 8 weeks and everything was great. I'm 18 weeks along now (almost half way!? what?) so we should be able to find out the gender at the next ultra sound in a couple of weeks. I'm hoping the kids change their mind but if not, we will honor their choice as we want them to feel like they are a part of their new sibling being brought into world. 

In general, this pregnancy has been very easy compared to the first two. I was so sick and hormonal for the first few weeks but since then things have been fine. There are the normal issues of getting nauseated or being uncomfortable but, knock on wood, this one has been very easy. The first time I noticed I had a little bump was when I squeezed on my shiny black spandex for Halloween. In the weeks since though, it's pretty unmistakable that I'm pregnant. My sisters bought me a few outfits but we've also saved everything from our 8 combined pregnancies and it's been fun to go through the boxes with them and pick out cute outfits that I never thought I'd see again. 

So to wrap up with the situation from earlier in the week. Our "friend" hopefully got the hint and has not contacted Bubs again, though I have sent him armed guards to stand perimeter around the hotel in case she decides she's going to just show up. She did that a few times when he was playing baseball where she would just sort of "happen" to be standing by his truck after practice and would say things like "oh that's so weird, I didn't know you were still on the team." God I fucking hate her. I wish I could get over it but I can still see the three of them snickering as I opened up folded piece of papers with stickers and hearts surrounding the very cutesy looking "for Danielle" written on the outside. On the inside were the signatures of my classmates telling me that they essentially thought I was ugly. If that were the only thing they did to me, I'd still be justified in my dislike but 18 years later--she's calling my husband to tell him how lonely she is? For fucking real? And that's not to mention every other little jab, or snicker, or telling me "when you're boyfriend discovers you have man shoulders and no tits, what do you think he's going to do? Why do your sisters have such big tits and you are so flat, you're a freak!" I should have put my gymnastics body and "man shoulders" to good use right there on the bus and pummeled her. 

I did talk to my mother in law about how inappropriate it was for her to give away Bubs number. I love my mother in law and she's been on my side since I was a little kid as her parents' neighbor. But those type of things just don't resonate with her because in her world, everyone is just supposed to be friends.

Anyways, I'm off track now which is always a good sign that I've run out of things to say. I need to make the rounds and pick up kids so we can go over and watch the Cowboys and Texans at my parents house. Have a great day everyone!