Slacker!

I have definitely been living up to my slacker roots lately. It’s just been too damn hot to do much else but sit in the air-conditioning and sing songs to the baby, so that’s what I’ve been doing.

The baby, by the way, is trying to learn how to walk. She stands up and briefly lets go of whatever she’s anchored to before she plops back down on her butt. Or her face, which is what she did yesterday. Twice.

We had our 1-year checkup last week, and it went really well. Kid is growing and growing and growing, up to 22.5 pounds and 30 inches! It’s only the 75th percentile for both, so I’m interested to see a 99th percentile kid. Her head, however, is in the 91st percentile, which makes Mama very proud. Lotsa brains in there!

In other news, the Great House Escape is progressing. We rented a storage locker and moved a bunch of stuff out (mostly things that haven’t been unpacked since we lived in Ohio… ten years ago), including my treadmill, which puts a wee kink in my fitness plans. I suppose I could chuck the baby in the stroller and run outside but it is, like I said, too damn hot. My lazy ass is going to have to start getting up early, I think. Shit.

But, yeah, the house’s fitness program is going well. Now that the majority of the clutter has been shoveled out, all that remains is to organize the rest, clean like an OCD patient, and then call the Realtor to come take photos.

Then I’ll have to maintain this freakish level of cleanliness so the house will make a good impression on potential buyers. Yikes.

On the other end of the process, we are seeing houses now and then to try to gauge what’s out there in our price range. We saw one this week that was… nice… but not quite what we wanted. The bedrooms were absolutely miniature, and the garage was at the back end of the back yard with no obvious way to get a car back there. It was a tad confusing. But the rest of the house was really nice.

The other house we saw was a shithole. For one thing, if you’re trying to sell your house, some air freshener would not go amiss. We walked in and were confronted with the kind of smell I associate with a poor family who has toddlers. You know what I’m talking about. Smells like food and babies and poor. Even if the house was lovely (it wasn’t), I would have been totally turned off by the stank.

Luckily, the house was a total shithole. The rooms were small, and the only way to get up the stairs was through one of the bedrooms. It was weird. Once upstairs, the dormers (it’s a Cape Cod) made the ceilings all crazy and there is no way my king-sized bed would be making it up there. So that one was a definite no.

The good news is that prices are sliding way way down and the kinds of houses we’re starting to see in our price range are improving. That does not exactly bode well for the house we’re trying to sell, but we are hopeful that our Realtor team will be able to help us market it effectively and we’ll be able to flee the premises before too long.