If today were a movie this would be a simple way to depict it.....
The plot: A young family of three travel to OKC to sign closing papers on the home they just sold.
The villain: Hallie Grace, 13 months old.
The hero: a strawberry flavored Sara Sara cupcake.
Well there you have it folks. I could leave it at that and you could fill in the rest with your imagination....but that wouldn't be like me, now would it?! Actually before I can tell you about this lovely headache of a day, I must first rewind back to last Sunday for the full story. No wait!! Actually I must keep going back to the day we found out we had a bonified offer of our house. Holds onto your seats because HERE WE GO!!!
August 16th: Riley got a call from our realtor, Gina, telling us about our first offer on the house. An offer?!?! Pinch me because this can't be real! Riley kept this juicy secret all day from me until he talked details with Gina and got some advice on whether or not to take the offer. He told me that evening and I felt like I was having a deja vu. Rewind back to that day in November of 2010 when Riley told me he had been offered a job in Woodward. I just remember staring at him in the kitchen thinking "did I hear you right?!" That's kind of how I felt when he told me we had an offer for more than our asking price. "WHAT? I don't get it?! What's the catch?" Well, it turns out there wasn't a catch. Just a nice young couple who wanted our home and offered us over asking price in hopes that we would cover closing costs and other costs that popped up. Costs did pop up.....but we dodged em. Or more like we wacked em out of our way. It was kinda like we were playing that game in an arcade where the little beavers pop up and you bop them with a mallet. Yep, just like that. ;)
August 19th: we accepted the offer.
August 23rd: bad news. Riley met with the buyers, Gina and a home inspector. Riley got home late that night to tell me that the inspection could have gone better than it had. He now had a list of things he needed to fix (or hire someone to fix).
August 25th: more bad news. A structural engineer was sent to the house to give a report about a sagging area of brick about the garage. This is where I get confused. Let's see if I can explain this: something about a beam that wasn't supportive enough and needed to be repaired and would cost $3000. Hmmmmm.
August 26th: we buried our heads in our hands.
September 1st: we devised a plan. The buyers had been eyeing our new bedroom furniture and we had given them a price to consider. They had decided they didn't have the cash to buy it at the time. It just so happened that the furniture would be a good bargaining piece. We offered them the furniture for FREE (ugh) if they wouldn't make us pay for repairs on the garage. Hook, line and sinker. YES!!! And NO!!! I was excited for two reasons: we wouldn't have to move the heavy stuff and we wouldn't have to pay for repairs. I was sad for obvious reasons: the furniture was exactly what I'd always wanted and it was nearly brand new considering it's been sitting untouched for almost a year.
September 4th: moving day. It was that time. Time to move all of the stuff we'd been ignoring. Well, kind of ignoring. We had convinced ourselves that it was serving a purpose being kept in the house for "staging" purposes. Basically that meant we were too lazy to move it all until absolutely necessary. Well, it was absolutely necessary last weekend. I was already in the city after the OU game the night before so I met Hallie and Riley at the house for what I thought would be an hour of loading. One hour turned into six hours. I had forgotten that Hobby Lobby had thrown up inside my house and I hadn't touched a bit of it since we moved. It was all there waiting for me. Like each of my favorite pieces were sitting there looking at me saying "where the heck have you been? So it looks like you completely forgot about me?!" Yes, yes I had. We began the moving and loading process at warp speed...no messing around that day. I had a grand plan to take the opportunity to get in a workout while we packed so I enthusiastically told Riley that we should run from inside to the car back and forth for an extra workout. Let's just put it this way: I was the only idiot jogging in and out of the house all day. ;)
The controversy of the day was this: to leave the mirrors or not to leave the mirrors? Is it possible to actually be in love with a mirror? Because I think I was. In fact I was in love with four mirrors that I'd specifically and carefully picked out for the three bathrooms in the house. After taking one down in hopes that Riley would be on a roll and pack it up without noticing what it was, my plan didn't work. I had to kiss my mirrors goodbye.....
See, it just jumped off the wall to leave with me. ;)
What was the babe doing all of this time? Oh, just being absolutely positively PERFECT. We could not have asked for a more well-behaved and content child that afternoon. She started out on the kitchen tile just reading books while we removed things from the walls and counters. She was a huge helper as we took down curtains and rods and loaded stuff on the dolly (and I don't mean baby dolly).....
"Load me up and take me home already"
"I've got the ladder dad. Don't worry, you aren't going anywhere"
Once we moved the operation outside she set up camp in her high chair with some Goldfish, milk and teething rings we found in the freezer....
Oh, and look what else we found in the freezer........
"I think we forgot some stuff in here"
Yeah, that hurt a little bit to throw all of that out. That is until I made a game out of it. Basketball with year old frozen items is kind of fun. I tossed things while Riley held a box for me and Hallie looked at us like we were crazy. After looking at all of that food, we realized we'd worked up at appetite so I ran to get lunch for everyone. And I mean everyone....
"We've been waiting mom!" (check out Riley's cool hat he found in the attic)
"Did someone say lunch time?"
In these next three photos I captured the thought process of a one year old:
"Something smells good and I sure am hungry"
"Yum, that's where the smell is coming from"
"Don't mind if I do..."
After lunch we got back to work on the attic. Aka Junk City. This is what took the majority of the time. Never have I seen so many stupid useless items that I once thought were important. But we had a blast. No, really, we did. We couldn't stop laughing while emptying the ridiculous item after item. Lots of badgering and making fun of eachother for items we'd saved over the years. Riley was having way too much fun throwing items at me from atop the ladder when I wasn't expecting it just to see the look on my face. All were soft harmless items I might add. If he started throwing glass I may have been worried. Hallie was behind us in her high chair continuing her streak of angel behavior. I just couldn't get over her good girl ways that afternoon. Little did I know that inside she was a girl who was working on getting sick. :( She was a trooper though and didn't even shows signs of being sick until we made a quick run to Walmart for a garden hose. While we waited in the checkout line she started rubbing her belly and threw up a bit of her lunch. I started to pay closer attention and sure enough she felt warm. That was my cue to get on the road and head home. We left Riley who was busy bitterly crossing things off of the repair list made my the inspector and the buyer. Hal hardly had room to ride in the backseat after we finally had everything loaded up....
"Don't mind me mom, I'll just use this rug as a pillow and this curtain rod as a seatbelt"
I just couldn't resist getting one last picture of my big girl in her baby girl room. Not a tear fell that day as I'd decided to put on my big girl panties that morning for Riley's sake...he's heard me whine about the
house for 8 long months...the least I could do was suck it up that day. Here's Hal in her room made specially for her with love....
Hard to believe...
She's just getting so big
September 9th: CLOSING DAY. I told you it all happened pretty quickly. Three weeks and it was a done deal. Have I mentioned I love our new realtor?!?! She has been outstanding over the past two and a half months. We still couldn't believe that we were actually closing on the house this morning when we woke up. We both had short mornings at work and were on our way to OKC by 11:00. (roll the movie) This is where the unsuspecting parents in the movie get a taste of what is to come during the course of the day. For the sake of brevity (which we all know I am not good at) let's just say that it involved about 90 minutes of screaming/whining despite Hallie being beyond exhausted. I won't even put the situation into words because I want to forgot today as quick as possible. Once we pulled into Yukon we were more than ready to bail from the car. Hal was the recipient of a quick outfit change (one that wasn't covered in banana and antibiotic). After getting cleaned up despite her efforts to escape every way she knew how, we headed into the bank to pick up a cashier's check for closing. After more lovely screaming in the bank we loaded up in the scream machine (aka car) for a short fifteen minute drive to Ms Mindy's house. Ring any bells...our old neighbor who was Hal's babysitter? Ok, now that I've caught everyone up....we dropped her off at Mindy's after visiting for a few minutes and left for the title company. I guess I should share my reluctance to leave such a fragile child with a babysitter whom she hadn't seen in months but Mindy had actually volunteered to watch Hal and wanted to get it some playing time. I warned Mindy about her shenanigans today and her alter ego that she'd been introducing us to so far that day. I gave her plenty of fair warning....I think. We had a little spare time before closing started so we went across the street so that I could stock up on some new scrubs for work. Yippee! Nothing like new work clothes to turn the less than desirable day around. Riley ended up having to drag me out of the store (I probably could have stayed in there all day...I love scrub shopping) because it was that time. Dun, dun, dun.
I haven't yet mentioned the fact that we were in fact happy that we had sold the house. I thought that might be important to get out in the open. Lol! Yes, we were happy. Happy that we will only be making one house payment and paying one set of bills....and we will no longer have to think about "what ifs" and "how longs". We patiently waited for the buyer to sign all of his papers and then it was our turn. Everything went fairly quickly and within an hour the house was no longer ours. What a load off! Burden removed. We can breathe again!! We picked up our sleeping grumpy, I mean beauty, and made our way (screaming the whole way) to the outlet mall. Miracle of all miracles.....Riley was excited about going shopping!!! I must've died and gone to heaven. I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that his enthusiasm may have had something to do with the fact that we no longer have a mortgage to pay. :) My excitement level was on the lower side which mostly had to do with the screaming creature in the backseat. I say "creature" because we were beginning to wonder if someone had stolen our child and replaced her with a look-alike. We had forgotten the stroller and had decided we could tough it out and take turns holding her through the stores. I don't think she would have tolerated the restraints of a stroller on this day anyways so it really wouldn't have mattered. We had our eyes set on the Nike store so that was our first stop. Screaming, screaming and just plain embarrassment ensued and I was ready to go after collecting a few items and chasing a barefoot crazy hooligan through the store. I kept looking around for the people who had stolen my sweet girl and replaced her with a very angry baby. No where to be found....
"If you buy me one of these I'll consider being quiet..."
"Is that a threat?!"
Riley took his time browsing through the Nike and Under Armour stores while Hal and I braved Carter's and Gymboree. Nightmare of all nightmares. This is when I decided that today would be characterized as my worst day of parenthood thus far. Now I had never really thought about naming a specific day for something so negative. But today was that day and there was no denying it. She spent our time in these stores throwing her cup at shoppers, slinging her binky across the store, tugging on my purse and screaming when I would take it away, pulling her hair, flailing on the ground and banging her head into the floor and last but not least trying to shoplift. Yes, there's a sly girl inside that tiny little body. I had to set her down on the floor for a tiny second while I grabbed my wallet....my darling daughter decided to make a beeline for the opened exit door while holding a toy block set that she so conveniently snatched off a shelf. Holy. Shoplifter. I was mortified as I dropped my shopping bags and purse to chase after my red-handed lady. This is the moment where I proclaimed my famous saying ..."I give up." Right after that, Riley came walking through the doors to meet us. As I leaned over to hand her to him she let out the scream of all screams and latched onto me like I was leaving her forever. 25% cute. 75% mortifying. Did I miss the memo? Was today "Embarrass your Parents Day"? No, I'm pretty sure today was Grandparent's Day. It's going to come as no surprise that we hightailed it out of the mall...I stopped and grabbed some food to go for the three of us at the food court while Riley and Hal headed back to the safe zone. Or so we thought. A nap seemed very appropriate at that time. But villains don't give up that easy in movies, don't ya know? After screaming for another 90 minutes we were able to hear our own thoughts and actually speak to one another without hollering to be heard. This is when the hero prevailed and the villain took a much needed nappy poo. I ate my cupcake in silence. Golden, delicious silence. Sigh....
I wanted to make sure and end this post on a happier note so I've saved this part for last. Funny I should call this a "happier" moment considering I thought it would be anything but.....however, it turned out okay. Before we left Hal with Mindy, we pulled in the driveway of the house that we used to call home to say goodbye. Not like a corny walk around touching the bricks and crying while I think about all the fun times we had there kinda goodbye. No, it was more like this: I wanted to get some pictures (of course) of our big girl on the steps of the house so she will be able to see the place where she first came home to....and where we got to spend that precious first three months together at home....and where she got to spend time making Grammy so happy....and where we discovered that she was the love of our lives....
Her first home
This is the kind of goodbye I wanted. I only shed a couple tiny tears today....and nobody even knew. That must've been my own personal goodbye to the house. Although, I can't promise that there are no tears falling as I'm typing this right now...but I didn't make any promises. ;)
I know that the people who bought 305 Lakeside are going to make it a happy home.
It sure made us H.A.P.P.Y.
No comments:
Post a Comment