Back to it

We had a fun and relaxing vacation week last week here at home. We went to the zoo and we went to see Papa and Mimi, where the boys got to ride Uncle Kelly's tractor and Papa's four wheeler. They always enjoy that and we had not been there for quite a while so they had a fun time.

On Friday we had a sitter for the boys while the husband and I went to the local Home Show. The boys were very happy about this because they had been asking for Katy to come over to play with them for quite some time and they had a fun time with her.

As for the husband and I, we thought we would spend about three hours at the home show and then go to dinner or a movie or something. We ended up spending the entire time at the home show and we were not quite finished when we had to leave to head home. We went home and got the boys and took them back with us so we could finish up. As it turned out, we had basically already seen everything that we needed to see so we were not there very long with the boys.

We talked to a lot of people at the home show and received a lot of good information about building an energy efficient home. We are currently considering building our home with Structured Insulated Panels. We are still doing our research on them but we really liked what we heard at the home show about them. We did end up buying one thing while we were there. We put a down payment on a storm shelter / safe room for the new house and we got an awesome deal on it. The plan is to put it in as the closet in the guest room. If you do it in the right timing, they can build around it and make it less noticable quite nicely. They have to anchor it into the foundation so we will have to coordinate with them after the foundation has been poured, although they said it needs to be 21 days after. If we go with SIP, we may have a three week period where we can't do much of anything, while we are waiting for the 21 days to pass, but we'll see. Our next meeting with the architect is Wednesday and I am excited to see what he has come up with as his initial draft.

We are getting back into our routine. We had another open house Saturday and Sunday. This week we shortened the hours for Saturday, as we have seen that nobody really comes before 1:00pm on Saturdays. We did Sat and Sun from 1:00 to 5:00. We had fewer people come by than we expected on Saturday and more than expected on Sunday, as the weather was very cloudy and periodically rainy.

The husband and I were discussing the turnout at the end of the day on Sunday and we agreed it seemed that the people who were out looking in the dreary weather seemed to be the serious lookers, which was nice. We had a couple of people who came through who really seemed interested. One man said he would get back to us one way or the other. He is in the process of moving here from California and he couldn't get over how much you get for your money here compared to there. He said that our house would be over a million dollars in California, although I can't remember what part of California he said he was from. He seemed very interested and wanted to know if we are willing to negotiate on the price. Another couple also seemed interested and were trying to figure out if their furniture would fit right in various rooms. They wanted to know if we would consider a contingency offer, which we had not thought about or discussed. After they left, we discussed it and decided we would not agree to a contingency offer, for many various reasons. Anyway, we are hopeful that maybe we will sell soon, although still praying it will be in God's perfect timing.

We still have much to do before we are ready to start building anyway. We have to finish the house plans and we need them to start getting bids from the various contractors. I am working on gathering resources/contractors to whom we might ask for bids. It would be nice if we sell the house in the right timing with when we are ready to start construction. So, we shall see how it works out.

In other news, N has been sick. He threw up once and has had a high fever, although it seems to have broken now so I am hopeful that it was only of the 24 hour variety. Neither of our sons had ever thrown up before, since they have been home anyway, so I wondered how he reacted to it. I was the bedroom changing after church and N had sat down on the couch and was looking at a book. The dad was not in the living room either but was there very soon after and said N did not really react at all.

On our way to church, the dad said N had only eaten two bites of oatmeal for breakfast, which is not like him. I thought he would really be hungry by lunch time. We got out of church at noon and our open house starts at 1:00pm so that does not leave much time to get everything ready.

While we are in open house mode, we don't go out to eat after church on Sundays. Instead, we go after the open house on Saturday evening. When we come in from church on Sundays, I quickly change clothes and then start getting the house ready for the open house, while the dad fixes a sandwich for the boys. Yesterday N said he wanted a sandwich and then decided he was not hungry. This was when he was sitting on the couch, looking at a book, and then he threw up. It was not long after that his fever was up up up and he just wanted to be held by mommy. We ended up giving him Ibuprofen, which brought the fever down but we think it was around this time that his eye lids started swelling pretty badly. I was beginning to think his eyes were going to swell shut but they didn't and it didn't seem to bother him much. We are not sure if it was the Ibuprofin that caused this but we are being cautious and not giving it to him again yet. The dad put a little of it on a bandaid and put the bandaid on his back to see if he has a reaction to it.

So far, nobody else has gotten sick, although I am very tired and have a bad headache today. The tiredness is understandable, as I was up with N during the night and I laid with him in his bed until he fell back to sleep. So I missed a couple of hours and then woke early this morning, hearing him yelling because he did not want to take the tylenol the dad was giving him. After he had the tylenol, he went back to sleep, thankfully, although I think we will all benefit from a nap today.

Today we are having a relaxing day, as much as one can have with two almost-four-year-olds who may not be feeling their best. After a weekend of open house, Monday's are always nice because everything is already clean. I do a few quick chores in the morning and I do one or two loads of laundry but that's about it, except of course snack/meal prep and clean up.

The husband called to let me know his trip to Boston has been cancelled (in case you were wondering about it CEP). He was scheduled to go to a conference in October but they would not have had enough docs in the office so he had to cancel. He was understandably disappointed. He starts one week of hospital duty on Thursday morning so things will be really hectic around here next weekend. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. I really do prefer the one week hospital duty stints much more than the two week ones. Much much better.

Well, this started out as a quickie update but I have had to change the title, since I have written a book. It's naptime so it's time to sign off. I hope you all had a great weekend.