Quickie Update

Staying to busy around here these days.

- Saturday we had four couples come through to see the house.
- Sunday we had around 10 or 11 (I lost count) come through.
- Monday and Tuesday we had Realtor showings
- I will be cleaning all day tomorrow for open house this weekend
- Boys and I went to the zoo on Tuesday and had lots of fun
- N is now sick with cold-like symptoms and fever that comes and goes
- I'm not feeling great either; very tired and sinuses are not good
- Called 6 references for two architects and got 5 voice mails; sixth one had not set it up; waiting to hear back.
- Made a list of all changes we want to the plan we like. Looking forward to meeting with architect, hopefully next week sometime.
- Received book Be Your Own House Contractor yesterday and have been pouring through it, taking notes and preparing to create a project plan:).
- The husband and I are meeting with a guy this evening who was his own G.C. His new house is on the next block over from our lot. We though he might give us some pointers. It seems he would be happy to, if we want to pay him:). We'll see how the meeting goes.
- We close on our lot tomorrow afternoon.
- Now we just have to sell the house, although I have been praying that it will happen in God's perfect timing.
- The boys and I were able to stay home all day yesterday and today and chill, with no preparations for showing the house either day. It was quite a relief, especially with N sick and me not feeling 100%.

That's my quickie update. Ta ta for now!

Winding up

We are winding up for our second weekend of open houses. Last weekend we were pleased with the response we had and we have had tons of people take flyers from the box in the yard (although I think they have slowed down now that all of the people in the neighbor have gotten one:).

We have listed our house on MLS and the agent we used also pushes it out to about 30 other real estate sites. We received a call today from a guy who left a message, asking some questions about the house. Unfortunately, his call came in when N was talking to daddy on my phone so it ended up going to voice mail. We left a return message this evening but have not heard back yet.

I listed the open house on Craig's List today also. It will be interesting to see how many people come by this weekend. I think we really missed the busy season, since people normally try to move before their kids start the school year.

The boys and I had a good week. The house was very clean so we really took it easy and had fun for much of the week. I took them to the used book store on Monday and we picked out a handful of great books. We have been doing lots of reading this week. I also ordered a couple of things from Amazon. One is a kid's calendar kind of thing that we change together every morning. It includes seasons, weather also and it is really cute. The boys are both enjoying it. I'll write more about it later or maybe post a picture. One of the other things I ordered is a positive parently incentive program type of thing for kids. I'll write more about that later too. We have not received it yet but it sounds really good and positive. I also ordered a book about being your own general contractor and a couple of books for the boys.

I spent a good deal of today cleaning again and that will likely be my life on Fridays until we sell the house. The dusting and floors have to be done on Friday, in order for them to look good for both Saturday and Sunday. So, that's my life on Friday's for now.

I had a doctor's appt on Thursday for a skin check. I have so many moles and so many atypical moles that I have to have regular checks and it seem they always want to take at least two of them off, as is the case this time. One is a tiny one on my toe. The doctor said we need to be very cautious with moles on the feet and hands, especially on the palms. All these years I have been having mole checks and I never knew that. This one is on the upper side of my toe and it is very small. There is one other one on my leg that he wants to remove. The insurance company would not cover the removal of both moles in one visit so we had to schedule two separate visits, one for 20 minutes and the other for 10 minutes.

Right now, everyone is asleep except me. I am still ramping down from all of the work I did tonight, while the dad was putting the boys down. I had better get to sleep though. Good night!

First Open House

We had our first open house today and it went very well. We really didn't expect many people to come through but we had 4 couples and 1 single guy (an architect). We also had a couple of others who stopped out front and picked up one of the flyers from the flyer box we got at Home Depot.

We were able to get a very good For Sale By Owner sign, the flyer box and the Open House signs from Home Depot for a reasonable price. The husband took the boys with him to print some color flyers to go in the box. Today we just used some black and white flyers with no pics, since we just got the box last night. The color ones will have nice pics of the outside and inside of the house, so that will be nice.

On Monday, we plan to sign up with an organization that will list our home on MLS. We can also order one of the lock box things that go on the door, in the event that a buyer's agent wants to show our home. We will pay a buyer's agent a certain percentage and the husband is thinking we might want to pay them a little more than they would normally get at first, to see if that helps. Since we won't have to pay a seller's agent, we can give the buyer's agent a bit more and still come out ahead.

So we had more people come through today than we really expected, which was great. It is very hard to tell who might be interested but it is definitely a numbers game so the more the merrier. We are having another open house tomorrow from 1-5 and we will likely continue to do this every weekend that makes sense (not holiday weekends). If we get this many people come through each weekend, we should sell it in a reasonable amount of time.

The boys did great, although I found it a bit stressful, trying to keep them busy while also talking with the people who came though. I may take them somewhere to play tomorrow. It is hard for them because they don't get to take a nap and they can't be loud and run around and stuff like that. They did well today because they watched two movies (started becoming bored about half way through the second one) and then they played outside for a little while and then I took them upstairs for a little while and let them play up there. It was still hard though because they could not make messes. They had to pick up their toys after playing with them, before getting out something else (hey, this might be a good thing!). They are not used to doing that and I know they got tired of hearing me tell them to pick up that and put this away, etc.

I think we had a good first day and we both felt good about the method we are using to sell our house. That is a good thing. Thanks for your thoughts and prayers. We appreciate it. Hope you had a good Saturday.

The latest

Since we didn't receive enough contacts to successfully do a bidding process, we have canceled the bidding process / 5-day sale and are currently listing the house in a traditional way by owner. We are having an open house this weekend.

We have not yet discussed how long we will do this but, at some point, maybe sooner than later, we will likely list with the same company that helped us sell our place in Houston. I think it is called Assist-to-Sale or something like that.

We still have some work to do to have the house ready for the open house on Sat and Sun but we are close to being ready. I still have some weeding to do out front and a little mulching I want to do in the side yard and I still have some further cleaning to do in the house. I'm waiting until the last minute to clean the windows and some other last minute items.

That's our latest. The excitement of the 5-Day Sale method is over, and I'm OK with that. I always had a hard time with the idea of how they told you to price it for the 5 day sale (half of what you think it is really worth, minus 500 to get to the "magic number"). After all, when the bidders sign the registration sheet, when they are seeing the house, indicating they want in on the bidding, they could put as little as one penny as their starting bid. So this "magic number" was not a starting bid. Also, the way they tell you to advertise it, it implies that you will take as little as the "magic number" for your home, "or best offer". I seriously doubt there is anyone who has ever done one of these sales who has taken that small amount for their house.

The idea is that you will have enough bidders so that it will never be a problem. So that basically means that your "magic number" is only out there to catch people's attention and get them to come to your sale and hopefully help bid the price up higher.

So, there are some things that I think are good about this way to sale a house. But, I always felt just a little dishonest about it. I know others also had this same issue. When I posed the question of false advertising on their forum, they referred me to the archives, so I'm sure lots of other people have had this concern before too. If lots of people have this concern, then it is probably true. So, overall, I am kind of relieved that we are no longer using this method. I can be open and honest and can talk to people about this wonderful house and feel good about it now.

We are still happy to have your prayers that we will sell our home quickly. Thanks!

Hmmmm, we may have to cancel

We are not getting the number of contacts that are required to successfully do the round robin bidding. I think I already explained that we need at least 25 contacts from our ads in order to proceed with our open house and use the 5 day sale method successfully. So far, we have receive around 6 or 7 calls/emails I think (we have them documented downstairs but I am sitting with the boys and can't go look at the list). I believe there may be 1 of those who might be seriously interested. Of course, you never can tell. But, based on my conversations with people, that would be my guess (and it may not even be 1).

I have had a lot of time to think about this today. I still believe that this is a good method and that you learn a lot about your house and the market. What I think we have learned is that, in today's market, not all houses can be sold this way successfully. What I mean by successfully is getting close to what the house is worth in a 5 day sale.

This method has a lot of pros. You only have to have your house looking great for two days. You don't have to pay realtor fees. It is a very fast way to sell a house. It makes a lot of sense from a free market perspective.

But I think the housing market and the economy in general have changed a lot since the book was written. It seems that, when the book was written, house sales using this method were on fire and people were making more, on average, than when selling with an agent. But now the market has really slowed down and people are having trouble getting loans. Also, many people are trying to save more and/or trying to pay down their debt and many people who are buying new homes are looking to downsize.

I think what this means for us is that the available market for our house is much smaller than it might have been a couple of years ago. We have a large house in an upscale, gated community and it is on the higher end of the market. We are fortunate that we do not have to sale in a short amount of time. We wanted to because we are concerned that the market/economy is going to get worse before it gets better so we were hoping to get out of this house quickly so we could start building a more energy efficient home. That being said, there is nothing that is forcing us to sell our house so quickly (in five days) that we have to take a huge loss.

We tend to believe that it might take a bit longer to find a buyer for our house in this market/economy. We could be wrong but those are our thoughts.

So, what are we going to do? After discussing it, we have decided to continue with the ads and continue with gathering the contacts. When it is time to call them all on Friday evening, if we do not have 25 contacts, we will inform everyone of that and let them know we will not be doing the round robin bidding. We will also let them know they can still come to see the house, if they are still interested and anyone can place an offer, if they so choose.

We will have to decide if we want to put a number out there first, such as in a traditional home sale. We have not discussed that yet and we may not have to concern ourselves with it, if nobody wants to come see the house.

If nothing works out with this, we may then pay to list our house on MLS and maybe some other sites, although I think MLS is the best one. I personally kind of see that as a flaw in the 5-Day Sale method. By advertising only on Craig's List and possibly in the local paper, it seems that you miss a large segment of the market.

When we moved to from Houston to Oklahoma, I pretty much used MLS exclusively to look for homes online. I found the home that we bought, that we are currently living in, on MLS and it was actually the first house we looked at when we came to OK to look for a house. So I tend to think MLS is the best place to list a house and I would never have thought to look on Craig's List for a house. I look on Craig's List for a used kid's bike or a used ping pong table but I would never have thought to look for a house. I also never look in the newspapers. I use MLS and maybe a couple of agents' sites that I like, because of the way their sites let you search for homes.

So, we don't regret trying the 5-Day method. It has worked for many many people and, if you really have to sell your home very quickly because you have to move for a job or something, it might be your very best option, even in today's market/economy. We have learned from it and will follow it through, just in case we stumble across someone who is really interested in our home.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Making progress

This morning three ladies showed up to clean our house. They were here from 8:00am to noon and they did an awesome job. It was wonderful because I was able to read to the boys and hang out with them, go to the grocery store, think about what to make for dinner and all of those kind of things I normally do on a regular day....and yet, my house is clean! And the boys had a much better day! That is a good day.

Actually, I did not have them mop all of the wood floors because it is too early in the week. They will come back at the end of the week and re-sweep the floors and mop all of the hard wood floors.

We still have plenty to do. Tomorrow I need to do some additional outside work and I am hoping to finish it up but I will likely still have more to do on Thursday outside. I think I have a lot of weeding to do. After the outside work is finished, there are a few odds and ends on the inside but that's about it for me. The husband is working on cleaning up the garage and still has a couple of piles to go through in his office. Overall, we are getting close.

Also, the house inspector came today and our inspection went very well. We found out about a couple of things but nothing really big. One important thing is that there is a very tiny gas leak at the water heater in the garage so we need to get that fixed. We have two faucets upstairs that need a new washer and the husband will do that. That was it!

We posted our ad on Craig's List this afternoon. We received one call within about an hour. We received an email within another hour or two after the call. Since then, nothing. I looked at the ad and it is already well down on the list. I left a post on the 5-Day forum asking if only two responses so far is a bad sign (it does not seem very promising to me) and also if there is a magic time of day to post on Craig's List so that your listing stays towards the top longer. I have a feeling that the answer is no but we'll see. If we don't see an improvement in the number of responses tomorrow, we may very well be calling off our 5-Day sale before it ever really begins.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this in an earlier post but, if you don't get 25 contacts by Friday night, you are suppose to postpone the sale, try to determine where you went wrong on your advertising, in that you didn't reach enough people or did not advertise in such a way to grab their attention...or something.

So, we wait, and work, and wait, and we'll see what happens.

Whew, what a day!

This has been a very busy one. Today the boys and I went to the local newspaper to give them an exact copy of the ad we wanted to run in the paper and on their website from Wed through Sun. After that we went to a furniture rental place to rent a formal dining room table and chairs. Then we went out for a bite to eat and some play time, although play time was cut short because N wet his pants. After that, we went home and the boys took a nap while I finished preparing the kitchen for pictures. We have to take pictures of the more significant rooms to post in some of our ads.

The husband came home early today and started working on his office because we were planning to take pictures of it also. I spent the afternoon and evening working on the formal dining room. The table and chairs was delivered around 5:00ish. The husband and I finished our respective rooms around the same time and took the photos. It was probably around 8:30pm when we finished.

The poor little ones are so tired of us spending the vast majority on all of these things and they so want more of our attention....even if it is negative. The husband and I are a bit stressed, at times overwhelmed and very tired. This does not make for a good combination.

The newspaper sent me a copy of what they worked up and it is wrong so I have to work this out with them first thing in the morning. We have some house cleaners showing up at 8:00am tomorrow, which will be my life saver. We also have a home inspector showing up around 3:00pm tomorrow afternoon.

The husband is working up our Internet ad as I type (I'm sitting with the boys while they fall asleep). The ad should be posted tonight so we will likely start getting emails tomorrow. I think emails will be easier to respond to, since we can have some prepared responses ready to go. Our newspaper ad will start running on Wednesday and will run through Sunday so we may start getting calls on Wednesday. From what I have heard, more responses are normally received via Craig's List and other Internet ads than from the print ads.

What a crazy week. I'll be glad when it is over. Really, if it was not for the boys, I think I would have fun with it. But they are having a tough time. Nick is now telling us over and over that he is not getting enough attention. Both boys are telling us that we have not read to them very much. And we all know that we are grouchy and it totally impacts how they behave and also how they treat each other. I am very hopeful that I will be able to spend a lot more time with them tomorrow.

Sorry if I am repeating things. My brain is mush. Prayers are greatly appreciated.

Total Exhaustion

We are all so tired over here. It is really amazing how much junk a family can collect, and a rather small family at that. We have been de-junking, cleaning, organizing drawers, cabinets, closets, garage, attics, etc. Wow! What a lot of work.

I have learned something from this experience. From now on, I will make sure that I go through and declutter on a regular basis. Before I was married, my motto was 'if you haven't used it during the past year, get rid of it'. I was pretty good at keeping things decluttered, for the most part. Add a husband, two children, a much busier me and a house that is almost three times the size and you have a perfect recipe for a huge cluttery mess. I will be on guard for this in the future.

Regardless of whether or not we sale our house next weekend, we are doing a lot of work that would have had to be done at some point to show the house and also to move.

The movers came today and took a BUNCH of stuff. I had packed up a bunch of boxes with stuff that we were not using, extra sheets and blankets, lots of pictures and a bunch of other stuff. They also took all of the furniture from the upstairs gameroom, along with my EFX machine (as they walked out the door carrying it, I said "you guys are getting more exercise from that thing than I had over the past year!":). They took tons of stuff and we have a pile of things to take to Goodwill also. They also moved the furniture from the library/formal dining area to the upstairs gameroom. So the upstairs gameroom will finally be used for the kid's playroom, as it was meant to be used. And we will rent a formal dining room set to stage in the dining room so it will also look as it was meant to look. It seems funny seeing it so empty.

I am still working on arranging the furniture in the upstairs gameroom so it will look it's best and we still have to bring all of the kid's toys upstairs. We are going to have a problem with where to put them all, so that they look orderly. We had tons of shelves in the library/dining room and we do not in the gameroom. We have some that I can move up here but this room is not as big so there is limited space. My goal is to make it look as orderly as possible and to hopefully keep it from appearing cluttered or too full. It will be a challenge.

The boys have not had a nap in days and it shows. They have also not had nearly enough of our time and that shows too. I let them watch extra movies today as a special treat and they were very excited. They had the best time watching the movers, trying to help and getting on and off their truck. After the movers and the husband left, I noticed the both boys had very very dirty feet and knees and hands. I was trying to get them down for a nap quickly, before it was too late (we were on the cusp) so I just sat each of them on the side of the tub and washed all the dirt off but they will definitely still need a bath later. At least their sheets won't be black like their feet were.

They fell asleep quickly so I had better get back to it. Still lots to be done so I have to take advantage of this nap time.

The 5-Day method

So here is the scoop on the 5-Day Sale, in a nutshell.

The sale always runs from Wednesday through Sunday.
You advertise from Wednesday through Sunday. We plan to advertise in our local paper and on the internet, although I have read on the 5-Day Forum that Craig's List does nicely for some people.
You show the house from 10:00am to 5:00pm on both Saturday and Sunday.
The round robin bidding process starts at 7:00pm on Sunday and goes until it is finished.

The book includes samples of various documents you will need to help organize the sale and run it and instructs you on the various things you need to do to be prepared. Some things to do before hand are: have the house inspected and have a nice inspection report available to potential bidders, cart away any furniture or odds and ends that make the house appear more crowded, clean:), repair any obvious things, prepare a document, explaining how the bidding process works, for potential bidders, among other things.

When you advertise the house, you are suppose to price it at half the value that you think it is worth, minus $500. So, if you think your house is worth $400,000, you would price the house at $199,500. You also include info in the ad indicating it is a bidding process and the house will be sold on Sunday night. You do not include your address, although you do include a general area or subdivision name. You include your phone number if it is a print ad and your email address if it is an Internet ad.

You keep a log of all calls and a folder of all emails. When anyone contacts you about the ad, you provide a detailed explanation of how the process works, including that either party is free to back out at any time until a contract is signed and the house will sale on Sunday night.

If you receive 25 contacts about your ad by Friday night, you are good to go. If not, you should postpone because you ad did not reach enough people. If you are good to go, then you contact everyone on Friday night and give them your address.

That is pretty much the gist of it, although he of course explains it in much more detail in his book. I have been reading a lot of the posts on the forum and the method seems that it is not necessarily working as well in certain parts of the country, in this economy. Let me correct that to say that the method works, it always works because it is a free market solution. The issue is that, in certain parts of the country, homes have lost a great deal of their value and people are not ready to accept the lower bids they are receiving.

We are really not sure what to expect. Our part of the country really has seen very little impact in terms of home values. Our home is in the higher end of the market here and we are just not sure what we will find but we figured we would not lose anything by trying this method.

It is an interesting method and it makes a lot of sense. The only thing is that if your home is worth $400,000 and you only receive bids for $300,000, I'm not sure that you would really be ready to settle for that. I know we would not. We have calculated how much we are willing to accept for our home and I am sure there is a bit of give and take with that number but we would certainly not settle for $100,000 less than what we thought it was worth without first trying other methods.

All that being said, you might see where my issue with this method lies. I have an issue with starting the bid at half of what the house is worth, telling people it is a bidding process that either side can back out of at any time and that the house will be sold on Sunday night. If we are definitely going to sell the house on Sunday night, then we would not be backing out, right?

The guy who wrote the book and also other people who post on the forum discuss how many homes they have sold successfully this way. We are willing to give it a try and see what happens. I'm not 100% convinced and I don't think the husband is either but we are willing to give it a go with high expectations and see what happens. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else.

We sold our townhouse in Houston in about 3 weeks with Assist to Sale and we sold it for quite a bit more than the guy from Assist to Sale thought we could (I insisted it was worth more:). We held our own open houses and we had a great turn out for them and that is how we ended up selling it. Hopefully we will sale this place quickly also....if not with this method, then with some other method.

I'll let you know how it goes. We will start advertising on Wednesday. Please keep us in your prayers.

Backfire

Well, today N again was fine for a little while and then things got bad again. I tried to take a new approach today, thinking more in terms of consequences rather than sitting down.

He did not want to get dressed and this can be a challenge with him sometimes so I decided I would let him stay in his PJ's and wet pull up for a while and see how that went. I asked him again, after breakfast if he wanted to change and he did not. A bit later we were going outside so I could do more yard work and he said he needed to change his clothes. I told him he could just go in his PJ's, since he refused to change earlier. He was perfectly fine with that and actually seemed pretty happy about it:(. We were outside for a while and eventually his pull up started leaking through. He still didn't seem to mind, although I did see him once, with his pants pulled down, trying to pull the overly wet pull up back up. It was so heavy, it would not stay up very well. Still, it did not seem to matter that much to him.

At one point when I was busy working, the boys got into a bag of that powdery cement stuff. They were pretending they were cooking and they had it all over them:). I was not too happy about it at the moment but it was actually kind of cute and funny in retrospect. So, we all went in and I put the boys in the bath while I jumped into the shower real quick.

So, N is clean and dry again and he smells much better. He agreed with me that it is nicer to be in dry pants but, overall, I think my attempt at making him want to change into clothes backfired.

We also had a bit of an ordeal over breakfast and he behaved so badly for so long, including shoving his plate away and dumping his food on the counter, that I finally said his breakfast was over. He was not too happy about not getting any breakfast and was very hungry when snack time rolled around but I do think this lesson will stick with him and he won't shove/dump his food any more. I hope so anyway because I didn't not enjoy the consequences and it took everything I had to stick with it.

I don't know why mornings seem to be so hard for him. It seems that, generally, afternoons are pretty good. Really, if we can get past breakfast in a good mood, we usually have a great day. It seems our issues resolve around his moodiness around breakfast. Maybe he is too hungry and it impacts his mood. I might try giving him a quick something to munch on while I am making his breakfast and see if that helps a little.

I am already so tired and my body is a little sore, which tells me how out of shape I am, sadly enough. I spent yesterday afternoon/evening working on the huge bed around the sandbox, cleaning it up, weeding and raking. I still have a big pile of debris to pick up.

This morning I worked on the beds outside of our kitchen window. I picked up all of the old mulch and put down river rocks. I find it interesting how quickly mulch becomes dirt. So if you are putting it on top of that cloth that is suppose to keep weeds out, it kind of defeats the purpose because the weeds just start growing in the decomposed mulch on top of the cloth. Also, if you just continue to put down more mulch every year or season, it raises the level of the ground. In all the beds around our house, the people who lived here before (or maybe the builders) made the beds too high relative to the foundation of the house. So there is really very little room for mulch or rocks. When we moved in, the mulch was at least 6 inches or a foot over the stucco siding of the house and we spent a lot of time lowering in the beds as much as possible. Hopefully in our new house, we can do things in such a way where they will require very little maintenance. I would much rather be spending time with my family than weeding, mulching and lowering flower beds.

We have a home inspector coming out on Tuesday and the husband is calling around to find the best deal on a settlement agent, in the event we do sell the house next weekend. He also got the storage area and is working on hiring some people to help us move some things this weekend.

We still have a lot to do but I know it will go quickly. I am just feeling overwhelmed because I am so tired from working outside two days in a row. We are back in the 100 degree weather here again this week and I sure didn't miss it while it was gone. Today it feels like 102, according to the local weather station. I feel bad for people who don't have air conditioning. This is brutal. When I was a kid, we didn't have air conditioning but I don't remember it being this hot. I think things don't bother you as much when you are a kid though and that (no air) was all we knew.

Boys are asleep for a short nap. We got a late start on naps today because we had to run an errand after lunch. We needed to pick up some magazines at a couple of grocery stores nearby. They have those racks out front where the free magazines on apartments for rent, cars for sale and homes for sale are. The husband called and asked me to pick them up so we could decide where we want to advertise, in addition to the local paper and we also have to pick an internet site. Busy busy busy!

So much to do, so little time

We have decided to have our 5 day sale next week. We just decided this last night so now we are on the run, as we have tons to do to be ready.

Originally we had decided to have our 5 day sale in mid September. But then last night, the dad was upstairs putting the boys to bed and I was downstairs doing my thing. When he finished, he came downstairs and said he was thinking maybe we should do it sooner. It was the funniest thing because I had just been thinking the exact same thing. So we moved it up.

I bought 10 bags of mulch and 10 bags of river rocks today. We have two large flower beds that need to be mulched and one of them has a lot of water that drains through it during a hard rain so I have to put the rocks on top of the mulch, here and there, to keep it in place. Next week I will be cleaning the house from top to bottom, including washing windows and baseboards, etc. and I have to do lots of decluttering.

The husband is doing some repair work to woodwork around some of the windows, recaulking and repainting, and he is also going to finish painting the closet in the boys' bedroom. We started it a long time ago, before the boys came home, and we never finished it.

This coming weekend we will be renting a storage unit and moving a ton of stuff into storage. We have always used our formal dining room as a library/playroom (we had bookshelves built all the way around it but it is a large room so it can still be used as a dining room) and we need to turn it back into a formal dining room for when we show the house. We will be moving out a bunch of stuff in the upstairs gameroom (ping pong table, air hockey game, elliptical machine, a couch and trunk and a bunch of other things) to storage and then moving the library/playroom upstairs to the gameroom. Most of the books will have to be stored too but at least the boys' toys and books can go upstairs to the gameroom. And we will move out a few other extra pieces that make some of our rooms appear smaller because they are too full.

My friend who has twin daughters and is pregnant with another daughter has offered to let us lock up our cats in one of her rooms and she has also offered to take care of the boys while we are showing the house next Saturday and Sunday. This is an answer to prayer because I was very concerned about both the cats and the boys. My friend's husband has some older children from his first marriage and they will be there that weekend and will help keep the little ones entertained. I think we will also offer to pay them, since we were considering hiring our babysitter and we would have paid her.

We will be showing our house next Saturday and Sunday from 10:00am to 5:00pm and we will advertise it in a few places from Wednesday through Sunday. We are hopeful that we will receive a lot of interest and will have a few people who are really interested in it and are willing to pay close to what we feel it is worth (based on area comps). Please keep us in your prayers.

Something is going on with N and I don't know what. Maybe he feels some stress with the talk of all of the changes (and last weekend was promotion Sunday at church) or maybe he is just going through a phase. Regardless, it is not a good thing. He has started wetting his pants, sometimes 3 or 4 times a day. Yesterday evening he even did it while sitting at the table eating dinner and today he did it while sitting at the kitchen island eating his snack. He is also being very defiant, even about the smallest thing. If I make him sit down for hitting his brother or throwing something out of anger or whatever, he will run away or he will simply just refuse ("No! I won't!). I'm not sure what is going on with him but it sure is frustrating for all of us. I know it does not make him happy either. Sometimes he will wake up in the best of moods and then, out of the blue, it seems he switches over to mister I-can't-be-pleased grouchy-pants and there is just no getting him out of this mood. When he is like this, he treats everyone badly. I have started telling him that I won't let him play with B if he is going to treat him badly. So far, I have never had to follow through on that threat because he wants to play with B so he generally will back down from mistreating B.

Today I decided to try something new and I told him that if he can't mind me and be nice then he won't get to watch his 30 minute movie today. Oh, that REALLY upset him. He was misbehaving badly at the time and, boy, he started boo hooing over that as if his heart was broken. He ended up changing his attitude and everything was good again. So I might have found something that will work with him, at least for a little while. Both boys really look forward to their 30 minute movie each day and they keep track of who's turn it is to choose the movie. They watch it after their nap. I told him that if he is going to refuse to mind me then he would take a nap while B watched a movie.

I am also willing to try making him go to bed 30 minutes before B, which I think will also make a huge impact. He would not like that at all and we would not care for it that much either but if it makes him change his behavior, I would do it. I think we would likely only have to implement either of these punishments once to see a marked improvement in behavior.

So, I am hoping that I have found something that will make him strive to improve his behavior. Still, I wish I understood what is causing him to act like this. Granted, he has never been the 'pleaser' type of child and he has always been a bit of a challege but not like this latest behavior. And I have implemented (or tried to anyway) positive reinforcement also but it does not seem to make much of a difference to him.

He is really a sweet little guy who is so loveable and is always leaning over to give a hug and tell me and the dad that he loves us. He is really good (for his age) at showing his feelings and expressing them also, most of the time anyway, and he surprises me at how adept he is at reading social situations, again, for his age and most of the time. He is usually pretty good at sharing, especially with friends during play dates and he is pretty good about letting others go first....except for lately.

Well, hopefully we have a solution. I sure hope so.
Well, boys are waking so must go. I have some pics to post, as soon as I have some time.