Raven Street Notes no. 5

Oh—yes, it’s been a whole month since I’ve disappeared from the web because we’ve been Getting Our House Ready to put on the real estate market. We’ve been Fixing Walls, Laying Mulch, Installing Garage Doors. It’s all exhausting unless you specifically take a vacation from the rest of your life just to Get Ready.

Our home has been on the market two weeks today. We’ve had what seemed to be a serious buyer. He called Sunday to say he chose our house, he likes it the best. He needed to bring a woman by, another representative of the company that wants to buy our house, and on Monday he said they would try to come. On Tuesday he said they would try to come. Their schedules just never were compatible. It’s Wednesday now and I haven’t even gotten a call.

Waiting to get a decent offer on your home is like waiting for a baby to be born. You don’t know where. You don’t know when. And getting phone calls where potential buyers express that they Like Your Home the Best is like losing your mucous plug two weeks before you give birth. I’m sorry and excuse me for the biology metaphor, but it’s an accurate one. That mucous plug means birth may be imminent or that birth is two weeks away or anywhere in between. So, we’ve lost our real estate mucous plug.

I should, on one hand be thrilled about that. On the other hand, the carrot dangles even closer before me. That house we found sitting empty is just waiting for our offer, if we can make it, if we ever get one on our house. And hopefully we’ll make it before someone else does.

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Meanwhile, the husband is on a week-long training trip to Seattle, staying with some of our best buddies on the off-hours. Lucky husband. He does not need to keep the Raven Street house on-the-market spotless, all by himself, while taking care of sick kids. When I say sick, I mean fevers, full body viral rashes, vomiting, lots of laundry, lots of dispensing of children’s Tylenol, lots of night waking, crying, glassy-eyed whining. But you know, it looks worse on paper than it’s actually been—except for that day when the car battery died. But really, we’ve been well taken care of. We have Grandpa nearby. He makes us dinners. He brings them to us. He jump starts my van. He’s taking it in tomorrow for a battery diagnostic. What would we do without…?

But there are some clues that some of my parenting chutzpah is waning. Like when I put the baby to bed and forgot to turn off her bedroom light. Like, when, today, I took the kids to an I-give-up lunch at Panera so I wouldn’t have to clean up our kitchen after (in case “the house people” come later this afternoon). And the day I subsisted on Dagoba chocolate bars (quick energy and no cooking) and still managed to lose a pound.

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Oldest is loving a book series—The Mysterious Benedict Society. I am loving these four-hundred-page novels full of the precocity of brilliant children. After Middle and Tiny are in bed, Oldest and I read until her bedtime and we can barely stand to stop when our time is up. But we are already grieving: soon, we’ll have no more Benedict Society to read. And what will we do then?