Good Work, Good Messes.

5) I'm so very very grateful that my husband is doing work he loves, work that helps people AND has the potential to make us a good living.

We're leaping into our first "open enrollment" period for the products he sells, which means that Medicare recipients are going to be demanding much of his attention for the next two months or so. I'm very accustomed to having his help-- cooking, laundry, kid-watching are all things he's very skilled at. It's going to be an adjustment for me to have him occupied elsewhere. May I keep remembering what life was like when he worked for a ministry that wrang everything out of us and left us in a damp moldy unhappy heap, or when he worked in the office at the crusty outdated chalkboard manufacturer and made his supervisors look productive while they paid him in beans (well, not quite, but almost). A little sacrifice is well worth the benefits-- monetarily, but most especially in the way he thinks and feels about his life and dignity.

6) Hooray for progress on the home renovation front! Sunday the handyman/carpenter who my parents use called to let us know he was available for a project we've decided to do rather unexpectedly. Our 1916 American Foursquare house has had only two families own it before us, and it's badly in need of renovation in multiple areas. My husband needs a meeting place for clients during enrollment season, and we figured out a way to do it inside the house. This means that the renovation required to bring those areas out of "1970's fugly" into a presentable condition is a tax deduction. So bring in the handyman, to remove all the woodwork and the 1970s paneling; bring in a drywaller, to hang 1/4 inch drywall; paint it (ourselves?); and bring back the handyman, to put back what he'd removed. Voila! Non-ugly office and entryway/meeting room!

(But yikes, the chaos that began in my house yesterday. Nails and splinters all up and down the staircase carpet. Pile of paneling on the front lawn, with no sure plan on how to dispose of it. Gaping ugly holes around my old windows and doorways, with cold air seeping in everywhere. Let's get this done asap, PLEASE!!)

7) I love that there is something this beautiful available for our dining room:

...of course, it's nowhere near affordable for us at this point. But there it is, my little (well, rather big) dream. It makes me smile. I am willing to wait for our opportunity to purchase it.

Already but not yet.

Howdy, fella. May I introduce to you-- and me-- my little boy's face, courtesy of an unexpected ultrasound yesterday.

Is he not beautiful? Just look at those fat little cheeks.

Mysteriously, those healthy, fat little cheeks have a left kidney that's "dilated"-- meaning that it's-- in my opinion-- enormous, at least four times the size of the right one. Along with that (probably because of that), I'm swollen with lots of extra amniotic fluid-- not a good thing. So now we've been launched from "absolutely uneventful, perfectly normal pregnancy" into "let's get you an appointment with a perinatologist asap. How about Friday morning? And we'll probably be needing to do stress tests, and see you more often, and" et cetera et cetera. Including the fact that my primary care provider, a midwife nurse, may have to turn over my care to the ob/gyn, a perfectly competent man (I'm sure) who I inherently distrust because he makes part of his living doing boob jobs and other plastic surgery. (Sigh. I took this risk when I chose this clinic, I suppose.)

And I'm trying not to google too much, worry too much, or say too much until after Friday. But oh, I am so afraid.

Not so much that he may be born with a bad kidney-- I've never been one to use the phrase "as long as it's healthy" as if health were a prerequisite for a parent's love or approval or thankfulness for the gift of a child. If he has a problem, we will learn and love and deal with it.

But I have a sick spot in my gut that simmers all day long over this thought: I am deeply afraid of not ever getting to touch those little cheeks or hold these little hands and feet that are drumming away at my insides these days.

Please, God, let it be something that can be helped or fixed or healed or managed, by you or doctors or me or anyone or anything else. Just let there be something we can do.

***
I was holding my anxiety in check pretty well until about thirty minutes ago, when I discovered that my washer was on strike. My "new" 15-year-old bare basics washer, which was donated by my parents to replace my 5-year-old energy-efficient fancy washer that needs a $400 keypad repair and, according to reviews and Consumer Reports and etc, is likely to have further motor, drain, and other repair issues. We've decided that paying for the pricey repair would be akin to pouring money into a lemon of a vehicle, so the fancy washer is getting the boot. Dad came and hooked the freebie up for us last weekend because my husband's back is injured. (Dad entering our basement and seeing the state of our workbench/tools/etc is never a good thing, particularly for our husband, but it couldn't be avoided-- we needed the washer, needed the help, and weren't able to prepare the basement before he showed up.) I did one load of clothes successfully tonight before it decided not to drain the water out of the tub for load #2.

Now I have a load to wring out and haul to my mom's (to use her fancy new washer that finally replaced this one). That is a stupid thing to sit in the dining room and cry about, I admit. But it was really just a final straw on a long list of stresses this week.

I also have tenants-- ex-tenants-- who cannot seem to get all their belongings (or their butts) out of my house in Florida, six days after their move-out date. This is deeply difficult to manage from eight hundred miles away or so. Painters, carpeters, realtors are all standing at the ready to begin fixing it up and taking it off our financial back. But they can do nothing until the place is empty and clean. I had a smooth, quick transition to On The Market planned, and now it's all shot to hell.

I also have a nice mixer with a burnt-out motor. A bathroom window that's been covered with a paper tablecloth for the last eight months-- which a certain toddler just shredded in her enthusiasm to see "owside!" (So now anyone peeking in can see us, facing them, setting on the pot.) There's a beautiful dishwasher out in the garage that I'd love to be using, but we need to hire a plumber to install it into 90-year-old iron pipes, and the money's not there. And I'm enjoying (ha) a steadily shrinking wardrobe as my belly gets bigger and bigger. I'm at 31 weeks pregnancywise, and 38 weeks sizewise. How big can I get in the next nine weeks-- assuming that I have the immense privilege of having a full-term baby? Will I have any clothes at all, or will I be buying used Mumus from the thrift stores and refusing to leave the house in a month or so?

I have the vintage gas stove of my dreams-- some parts of it are in my house, having been given $250 worth of reporcelaining. The rest is in a guy's garage in Tulsa, waiting for him to have time and inclination to restore it for me. It's been there since April.

I have a house that I adore-- that badly needs a $3500 paint job that I can't give it. It has beautiful horizontal board wooden interior walls-- covered with wallpaper, paint, and ugly wallboard that I'm not yet allowed to remove. And in four months, my rent-to-own lease expires, and the grumpy half of the two sisters that own it is likely to demand that we purchase. And without the Orlando house sold, no bank will give us the loan to do so. (We have the option of appealing to my father-- but oh, how sick I am of appealing to my father for help, be it washer installation or financial loans.)

I feel like I'm a living example of one of my husband's favorite spiritual illustrations-- living "in the already, but not yet."

I already have:
A husband
A beautiful sweet mischevious brilliant toddler gal
...thank God those things are present, settled, and being enjoyed here and now. We also have:

A house I love that we have resources to buy
A fabulous stove
A kitchenaid mixer
A washer
A dishwasher
A tidy house/garage/workbench
... and most of all a beautiful, beautiful little baby boy about to enter our lives. And it's possible that all this will come to fruition in a relatively quick time span.

...But the full experience of so many of those things hinge on other (known or unknown) factors. It's such an occasion for uncertainty, doubt, fear, faith. I have them already, but I cannot relax and enjoy them just yet.

These are hard days for me, I think. Even without the addition of a high-risk pregnancy-- which makes everything else on that "not yet" list seem suddenly trivial.

Please, God, make him okay. Or okayable.

Consumption.

Hmm. Linky links:

This recent post, from a favorite blog.

And this, about a commitment I've been interested in all through 2006.

And this.

I know I can't buy nothing new, since we'll be moving into a new house.

But how close could I come to it?

Hmm.

I hope he fed his children with that $150.

Our realtor called today-- first time in months he's called on his own initiative. Offer-hope rose trembling in my heart until I heard the tone in his voice, and I could tell it was not good news.
Our a/c unit, located in our backyard, has been vandalized. Busted into, the condenser coils stolen for scrap metal. The thief makes about $150, and we're out a $2,000, two-year-old a/c unit.

Can you believe that? No fingerprints due to rain, no evidence. Our homeowners' insurance should cover it, but there will be a big ol' deductible. I'll call tomorrow to find out how much. So frustrating, when the house is already bleeding us dry financially.

The more frustrating issue is, once we've had it repaired, the house is still basically untended. The thief could very conceivably return and double his money. We're going to have to lock the back gate in hopes that that will be enough to keep it from happening again.

Oh, God, please sell our house. We need to be out from under this.


~~~

Other than that, life's been good. The babe is a total joy, other than her persistent desire to eat houseplant dirt and play in the dog's food and water bowls. The holidays have been fairly simple, due to my family's decision to white-elephant the giftgiving this year. And we're enjoying our perhaps-church-home more and more as we keep going (on the weekends we're in town, anyway). We have a New Year's invitation to a party with people our own age, which feels nice, and I have a couple of nice surprise gifts for my husband and daughter, which is fun.

I went to a Christmas service underground on Sunday night, in a local (tourist) cave. Flute and female voice only. Absolutely beautiful acoustics. I will reuturn next year, with friends.
(I love our area's limestone caves. So amazing, to know that underneath our calloused, unknowing feet are caverns and rivers and waterfalls and all sorts of wonders that we are never aware of. This one had been used for moonshining, so its ceiling was blackened in one area, and many of the stalactites were broken off for souveneirs decades ago-- but it's still astonishingly beautiful, even abused as it's been.)

~~~

Oh, and that house? Yes, we're going the home-equity route. Financially, it's not the cheapest move, but life is not all financials, dadgummit. Consider this:

• We have been living in my parents' basement for eight months. EIGHT. LONG. MONTHS.



• My husband longs to be "the man" in his own household again, and I long for it for him (although it's far easier for me to live in my childhood home on my parents' dime than it is for him).



• We deeply miss our stuff, our winter clothes, our other pairs of shoes, our own pictures hung on the wall, cooking our own food. It is amazing how much we missing the little beauties and comforts of the life we've built together over the past eight years. I cannot put words to the ache we both feel, but we both feel it.



• We miss time alone with our child, and the joy of having friends over for dinner and hangouts. Both of those are awkwardly difficult to impossible to achieve while living here.



• We've found a house we love, a house that now has other interested potential buyers. In the year I've been hunting for a home in this little town, I've seen nothing that suited us as well. If we don't "rent to own" it now, another family is clamoring to do so.

The decision's been especially hard because my parents are not going to completely understand. My dad is the king of thrift, and he thinks this is wasteful-- to say nothing of his opinion on buying a 90-year-old house. And I hate to displease him.

We are deeply thankful to my parents for their generosity. We are happy and comfortable here. We love them dearly, and still love them, and have been blessed financially and emotionally by our stay with them. But all that doesn't change the fact that we feel a real need to establish our own household here.

The day that we pretty much made our decision to pursue this, a friend called who, like us, has escaped Florida ministry and found a new life in business in his parents' hometown. He and his wife rented an apartment, then found their perfect home (also an old house). They're paying double right now-- rent and house payment-- because they didn't want to lose the opportunity to own the house. They're completely at peace with this.

"Life is not all dollars and cents," he said, and something in my heart sounded a clear note. (So much of our hearts sound a clear note with theirs-- we love being their friends.) There is peace in this decision for me, even if it costs us some money. In the five years we've owned houses in central Florida, we've made more than a little money. We have some to spare, and I'm okay with "wasting" some on this.

It's hard to displease my parents, but I am thirty-two years old. You can't live your life to please your parents forever.

And oh, how we love that house. We will be so happy there... even though our lifestyle, until the house sells, will be an exercise in How Cheap Can We Possibly Live to keep that home equity line of credit as low as possible.

We'll be eating beans and rice, wearing layers, stripping ugly wallpaper, staying home and playing board games on the weekend, but we'll be in our new home.

...it sounds just lovely to me.

Financial Conundrum.

I really, really hate this.

See, there's a house we've found-- a beautiful 90-year-old house that's almost untouched, has pocket doors and a grand staircase and four bedrooms and a playroom and a mudroom/laundry room all packed into less than 1800 square feet. And a basement. And nearly two acres of land on three lots, much of it planted in old bulbs and shrubs.

I adore it with all the white-hot houselove in my nest-oriented little heart. I want to sit on its front porch in the swing with my coffee. I want to raise my babies there. (I want to conceive more babies there.) I want to shuffle up and down those stairs in my old age. I want to be the person who has its floors refinished and its kitchen modernized and its walls painted, taking care of it so it'll be there in another hundred years.

(Did I mention that it's had two owners in those 90 years? Just TWO?? And that, other than some ugly paint and wallpaper and siding and shag carpet, easily changed, it is basically completely original?)

And, based on what we believe our Florida real estate is worth, we can afford it-- even though it needs its floors refinished, its walls painted, a dishwasher installed, etc etc. But the owner needs to sell it, and we don't have the moolah yet because our property hasn't sold.

We first saw this house last June. It has been for sale by owner since then; no one has bought it. But she is about to list it with a realtor.

And I am so afraid that we will lose it. She offered this week to rent it to us with all the rent going toward the purchase price when we are able to buy it. It's a generous offer, but we still can't afford that along with our other mortgage/utilites/etc in Florida.

Do we take out a home equity loan to do this? Is that a really stupid idea? That's what I'm trying to figure out. And it's so hard to gauge financial risk like this when your heart's all pitter-patter for the 16-pane-over-1 windows and the window seat in the dining room.

...sob...