Open head, empty brain
I’m really feeling the need to brain dump before I get up and get my day started. I need this gray cloud over my head to go away so I can move forward.
First and most prominently on my mind, Laura texted me this morning from the doctor’s office. Baby Nathan is still not gaining, despite taking 8oz of donor milk a feeding OR formula mixed specifically with an extra scoop to provide additional calories. This has been going on for months now, and honestly I’m a little disappointed at our pediatrician’s handling of it. I mean, I get it. She assumed (as we all did) that he wasn’t gaining because Laura’s supply disappeared for some reason, so once he was on bottle feeds, especially with the extra scoop of formula, everything should be fine. But in reality, she should’ve been keeping a much closer eye on him. There’s really no excuse for waiting a month between weight checks for a FTT baby. With Xander, even though he WAS growing, we had weekly weight checks to make sure he continued to grow. Anyway. Didn’t really mean for that to turn into a rant about my otherwise wonderful pediatrician. So they’re getting blood work done today, and Laura is so scared that he’s going to die. 🙁 I just…I wish I could make everything right for her. She’s been through so much with her boys, and she doesn’t deserve it (not that anyone does). So we’re waiting to hear back on the blood work and find out what’s going wrong.
Another somewhat big thing on my mind is that my plans for this house have been turned upside down. A brief recap – when we moved in here, we signed a year lease, with the intention of signing on for another 6 months afterward. This is because due to the nature of Wes’ job, we cannot get approved for a mortgage until he has been with the union for 2 years. Since his pay is variable, they have to do an average of the last 2 years to get an income to base approval on. So we’d have 18 months to save up a downpayment and be able to buy a house at that point, possibly even this house. Well, Wes’ work was crap this year. I haven’t run the numbers yet, but I’d be surprised if Wes made more than $25,000 this year (not including unemployment, but still, unemployment isn’t exactly a great amount, either). Not only does that mean we’ll have a very low income to use when we go to apply for a house, BUT it also means our savings when to paying bills and such when he wasn’t working. We currently have about $800 in savings. That’s it. So I was really hoping that as long as we kept paying the rent on time and were good tennents, Lynn would be willing to extend the lease for longer – maybe even another 2 years or so, until we could get a really good deposit and buy it from her.
Well, I talked to her a few days ago and she asked if we knew what we were doing yet. I told her we were possibly going to need to renew for a year instead of 6 months when our lease was up, and she pretty much said that wasn’t an option. She said even stretching it the 6 months was going to be difficult. She needs to sell it. So we have until August to decide for sure if we’re going to buy it or not. (If we are, she might be willing to give us the 6 months to get the loan, deposit, ect). I really don’t know what we’re going to do. I LOVE this place. We’ve put so much work into it and I finally feel at *home*. But…I really think she’s going to want too much for it. Prices have dropped a LOT out here in the last year. Where a year ago there wasn’t a decent (aka not a run-down trailer in the middle of a field) house to be found in the county for less than $180k. Now there are tons of really nice houses for $130k-$150k. As much as I love this house, I really think unless she’s willing to take a HUGE hit on it, we could find something newer that would need less work for less. She said it was appraised at $209k about 5 years ago. Granted, that’s before the market went to shit, but when we were looking at it last year, she said she had talked to her neighbor about buying it for $170k. That’s just too much for a house this old, especially when housing is so cheap right now. Wes said she’d really have to take less than $150k for him to feel like buying this house was a good idea. We’re going to have a friend of MIL’s who is an appriaser come out and look it over and tell us what he thinks, that way we can be armed with a number when the time comes.
But the fact is, I just don’t know what to do. We planned on getting goats in the spring so we could have milk, but now that has to go on hold because there’s no point in re-fencing the goat area and getting goats only to have to move out, possibly to somewhere not goat-ready, and have to get rid of them. The good news is that we have several loan options that require no deposit, but the issue still remains of getting approved on such a low income. (And yes – we CAN afford it. At $150k if we get the interest rate I think we will, our mortgage will be less than we’re currently paying her for rent). I don’t know. *sigh*
I start school today. I’m excited, although I do feel bad because it’s definitely putting extra stress on Wes. My classes are Tues & Thurs 8-9:40. That means Wes will be responsible for putting Mal to bed. which really means that he will likely be up until 10:30ish when I get home. And he has to get up at 4 to go to work in the mornings. But really any earlier would’ve left us counting on his mom too much, and I really didn’t want to do that, because they play music often at night. So we’ll see how it goes, I guess.
Alright, I need to go do house cleaning.
