Happy 2010!

Wow, I never thought I'd make it to 2010. I'm not sure why... I just thought I'd be old and gray by now. Oh wait... I AM old and gray! But seriously folks... I never could have imagined how happy I would be being married to a super cool guy with two beautiful and healthy children. If you had told me I would be living in Massachusetts... I would have laughed at you! But here we are... in the year 2010. I am not completely sorry to say that I am glad to see 2009 go... it was a good year in that my beautiful son Grant was born. But it was a stressful year. To sum it up: We put our house on the market in January, sold it 3 weeks later, and then moved to Massachusetts. We lived at my in-laws in Plymouth for a month which was really exhausting. Then we finally moved to Natick, the same weekend I found out I was pregnant with Grant! Then I spent most of the year pregnant, which we all know I don't like! But then baby G arrived and things began to get better :-)

Now here we are embarking on a new year... and we just found out we have to move again!!! Our landlord is putting our place up for sale. The price is right, but we don't like the layout of the home. The master doesn't have a closet or a bathroom (which technically means it's a loft and not a bedroom), and the two kids rooms are on a different floor, and both of the bathrooms are located IN the bedrooms... so in order to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you have to either go down two flights of stairs to the first floor half bath, or tip toe into one of the kids rooms and quietly go to the bathroom! Kind of annoying. It's unfortunate because the location is awesome (I can walk to the train station but there isn't any train noise here). We also like that we have a 2 car garage... something we probably won't have in the next place. It has come in handy during the past couple of snowstorms. Our least isn't technically up until February 28, so we have some time... but with two little kids in the house, what usually takes a few weeks to do now takes a few months! We are hoping to enlist the multitude of family members in the area to do a little babysitting so we can pack and move.

A lot of people have been asking me, "Why don't you just buy a place?" Well, we certainly don't have enough money to put down for a house in a decent school district that has all of the amenties we want. We took a loss on selling our house in Virginia last year. While we actually broke even, that meant that we had 0 dollars to use toward our next house. So we had to start from scratch with the savings. We make too much money to qualify for the good loans (go figure), and we don't qualify for any of Obama's nice tax breaks. First... we are not first time home buyers. Second, if you owned a place recently you can get the $8K from the government, but only if you owned your last place for 5 or more years. No kidding... we owned our place for 4.5 years. Saving is also difficult when you have two kids in daycare!!! Daycare is pricey!!!

So... our goal for the year 2010 is to SAVE, SAVE, SAVE!!! Our goal in 2011 is to BUY, BUY, BUY! Oh, and donations WILL be accepted! :-)