House hunting again...

Now that the holidays are over, we are starting to house hunt again. Looks like more houses are on the market too. We spent a day looking at 9 houses this past weekend, nothing jumped out at us. Their were mostly non-offensive, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. After looking at so many houses (mostly before M was born), we pretty much have a good idea/feel for what we want and thus pretty much know immediately whether we like a house after walking in. Perhaps we've gotten more efficient at the whole process.

So we looked at 9 houses (we had 10 on the list, but didn' t have time for the 10th one since we started the day late, a side effect of rounding up the traveling circus). The sad thing is that they ranged from $749k to $998, with most of them being $899 and up. :-( The price we pay for house hunting in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are plenty of houses over 1 Mil, but we've excluded all of them.

Since the house hunting is on again, it seems like weekends should be 3 days long:

Day 1 (Saturday): Half the day is "go go go" due to taking care of M, rounding her up for Musical Lapsit at the library, coming home to prepare M's lunch, then DH's lunch while he tries to get M to nap. So half the Saturday is gone. The rest in "work" in the form of house chores & errands, maybe even a Costco run.

Day 2 (Sunday): House hunting. It takes us an hour to get to our destination city, then a few hours of getting to all the Open Houses with one or two comfort stops (food, restroom), then another hour to get home. We're tired at the end of all of this.

Day 3 (Extra weekend day): Veg day. I rarely feel like I have any down time. DH, has been working long hours at work (he often gets home after 7pm, usually closer to 8pm), then he often works after he gets home. After getting M through her nighttime routine and hopefully into bed between 8 pm to 8:30 pm, it's time for us to shower, cook & have dinner. That only leaves us with 1/2 hour to an hour of veg time before bedtime. So we would really like to have a day to veg. DH really needs it after his long & stressful week at work; he likes to spend it playing computer games (currently Empire Earth). And of course we like to have some quality family time together too. :-)

On second thought, there should be a 4th extra weekend day, every other weekend, for visiting the inlaws. M likes to see her dai nai nai, nai nai, yeh yeh, goo goo. She often asks about them at home, and I have to tell her we'll see them soon.

Oh, let's just flip flop the weekdays and weekends ... I vote for 5 days of weekend, 2 days of weekdays. How does that sound? Well, either way you spin it, it's the same amount of "work" for me ... I'm working around the clock 7 days a week, and always "on call".

M has surprised us today. Twice. Both times involving fruit.

M bit into an apple! Whole! She was fussing to get her hands on an apple. So I gave her one thinking she was just going to hold it, maybe drop it. It would be the sacrificial toss around apple for the rest of the day. Boy did she surprise me when she started biting into it!!! Where did she learn that? She's never seen us eat an apple that way, and we always cut up her apple. She ate about 1/3 of that apple.

The other thing she did was eat a grape whole. When she was really young, I would remove the peel and then cut it into smaller pieces. When she became a better solid food eater, I started to peel them and cut them into larger pieces. Then later I would leave the peel, but cut the grapes in half. Today she put a small grape into her mouth and had no problems biting into it, and knew she should chew it instead of swallowing it whole. I guess this is to be expected for someone who will be turning 2 yrs old in less than 2 weeks.

Oh, this is her "movie star" pose... :-)

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