House Hunting: The Agony and the Stomach Acid

With our impending arrival on the horizon, the fire under our "let's sell this townhome and buy a 'real house'" burner has been turned up to boil. We're currently conferring with a realtor who's guiding us through the decision about whether to sell versus lease; what needs to be done to our house to get it ready; etc. We've also been casually looking around online at homes in different neighborhoods. We love our current neighborhood so much and had hoped to be able to stay nearby but once we started looking around we realized that it would be nice to have a little more house than what is available in our neighborhood, in our price range. Once we ventured out of our neighborhood and started looking in other areas we were pleasantly surprised at how beautiful some of the other neighborhoods are. We're not willing to move too far from where we are now, but we've found a couple of neighborhoods that are just a tad farther Northwest and have huge pine trees, green grass, rolling hills--just really great scenery with cute houses.

So, our realtor had set us up with an internet account so that whenever a home that meets our criteria becomes available, we get an email letting us know and showing us the details. Over the course of the past week or so, we've accumulated quite a few promising properties so the next logical step seemed to be to go out and see these places in person. We went out yesterday for our first round of "look-sees". Little did we know that we'd find a house that was darn-near perfect for us! We're not quite in the position to start the process of buying the new place yet--we'd prefer to get this place all taken care of and even (ideally) sold or leased before taking the next step. Unfortunately, real estate doesn't work quite that way and as luck would have it, our perfect house, which has been on the market for 2 months with no contracts, is getting a contract on it TODAY. So, our realtor contacts us to let us know and says that now would be the time to put in a bid if we were the least bit interested. Talk about the flames shooting up underneath our pot! So, the last that I heard from Kevin, he was going to make a modest offer and see what happens. We're both sort of the mind-set that if it's meant to be, it will happen and if not, then it won't so we'll see....stay tuned.

Pregnancy Blog

I thought this might be a good place for me to document this pregnancy and all of the funky things that are going on with my body.

The most interesting symptom has been my food cravings and/or aversion. I've always had odd cravings--never really been a breakfast-food person, for instance. If I had eaten something really yummy for dinner the night before, I'd often wake up in the morning, craving the same thing (i.e. Niko Niko's delish roasted potatoes with Tzatziki sauce; fried pickles from Katz's Deli). So, when I found out I was pregnant, people always asked me the standard question: "Are you craving pickles and ice cream?" to which I'd answer, "Sure...but that's totally normal for me".

The oddest thing about my food cravings have been the intensity of them. For instance, when trying to decide what I'm hungry for, I mentally run through the checklist of possibilities. Instead of several choices sounding good, NOTHING sounds good--to the point of nausea at the thought. When I finally think of the one thing that doesn't make me sick, it's a situation where I have to have it--I mean HAVE TO HAVE IT. One night last week, I went through the mental litany: "Burrito? (gag) Salad? (intense gagging) Pizza? (maybe...frozen pizza? yuck, I must lay down now. Pizza Hut, thin-crust pizza with extra cheese and some breadsticks? BINGO!)" After it's established what I'm hungry for, then it's a quest to get said food as quickly as possible.

You can imagine my frustration over the weekend when the "chosen food" happened to be pasta salad. Already starving and on the brink of nausea, I set out on my quest for pasta salad. Ideally, I was hoping to find prepared pasta salad, to cut down on my wait time. That didn't happen, so I had to buy a pasta salad mix, which I knew would take at least 30 min to cook the pasta, mix the dressing and chill in the fridge. Luckily, I was able to last the duration and went on the consume the entire bowl of pasta salad (roughly 12 servings) in an 18 hour period.

My cravings hit an all-time high (or low, I guess) last week when the "chosen food" was a hamburger from Whataburger! I haven't eaten meat in 2 years, so you can imagine my surprise that a hamburger was my craving of choice. I decided to give in to temptation and got a Whataburger Jr meal. What I was craving as the mustard-y, pickly goodness that is Whataburger hamburgers. I had to call Kevin immediately to let him know that I was absolutely certain that it was his baby that I was carrying--due to the Whataburger craving. I told him that, "The force is strong in this one"...