The Agony of Parenting

My happy little two year old had two close calls this weekend, and I swear, I feel like they each took a year off my life.

Last night, we were getting ready to go out. She climbed in the car and we weren't quite ready, but we let her climb around in there anyway. Yes, I now realize that was intensely stupid. She opened the front passenger side door, and the next thing I knew, she was falling out headfirst.

Honestly, I was certain she was going to break her neck, the way she was falling. And yet somehow, she seemed to fall in slow motion, and only ended up getting a graze on her forehead and a lumpy lip. I have no idea how that all transpired, seriously. She was upset, but had some milkies and got cleaned up and said, "We still going for ice cream?"

Tonight, we were cleaning up after dinner. She was tootling around in the kitchen while the hubby readied the watermelon. I was in the living room. Suddenly I heard a spectacular shattering noise, and then she started screaming.

I ran in and saw her right eye filling with blood. I mean, just filling and pouring. I was horrified, but tried to be calm and reassure her while I grabbed her up and whisked her up to the bathroom. I held a cool wet cloth to her eye to see if I could stop the bleeding, so I could see where it was actually bleeding from. Fortunately, she calmed down pretty fast, so I guessed there wasn't a shard in her eye. When I finally looked, she had a tiny cut, right in the middle of her eyelid.

What happened was that my husband was attempting to cut the watermelon on top of a Corelle platter, and it couldn't take the pressure and literally exploded. Shards sprayed everywhere. She was a blink away from getting it right in the eye. A blink.

I could write a whole paragraph on how our Corelle dinnerware has a curse on it, but I'll save that for another time.

I'm sure I have about thirty new gray hairs now.

And a Good Time was Had by All

When I went to pick up the kids at preschool, I went to Cel's room first. I watched her do circle time and their goodbye song, and she participated but was mostly watching everyone closely. She looked tired.

So when I went in, and picked her up, she sort of looked glazed over and a little sad, and I wondered if I was going to get an unloading of pent up tension from her first morning away, but she just leaned into me and said, "I wish I could come back here ... " in a wistful tone. When I assured her she could come back, she said, "Oh! Dat's GREAT!"

All day yesterday, she carried around her little school bag, saying, "I'm goin' ta gul!" (That's exactly how she pronounces "school," and it's so cute to me I have to use that exact phonetic rendering.)

Today, she was the same. One of her teachers was raving about how well she was adapting, no problems, how well she talks, etc. When we got home, and I took her out of the carseat, I asked, "So, did you have fun today?"

She sighed and said, "Yeah, but sometime, I was a yittle bit yonely."

So we talked about things she could do when she was feeling lonely: go find Annika, go look at their "All About Me" books, or tell a teacher. And remember, of course, that I'd be there again soon to pick her up.

I just could not be more pleased, really. I hope this bodes well for fall.

No need to ask how Ani's adjusting. This is her 7th semester, and she is, as her teacher has dubbed her, "The queen of the playground." The girls didn't play together the whole time, but they did quite a bit, and Ani actually got upset when they split up for snacks inside their respective classrooms. She was worried, she says, "Some of the kids in Celyn's class are bigger, like three, and I'm afraid they might hurt her."

And I'm happy, because two acquaintances of mine are bringing their kids there this summer, and now I get to see them and chat and get to know them better without having to make any extraordinary effort. Not because I'm lazy, entirely, but because my schedule is kind of full lately. One of them proposed coffee while the kids are in school sometime and I'm All Over That.

In other news, I finished Day 2, Week 2 of Ct5K and my effing foot HURTS. Mostly, my left foot between the ankle and heel. Of course, that doesn't seem to be a common place to hurt that is referenced in ANY of my books or anything, so I don't really know what to do about it. I'm not sure if I should switch to my running shoes for a while, or what. It seems awfully early in the game to "take a break," when I'm hardly doing anything at all, you know? It started hurting on Sunday, and I've been icing and stretching and it's only gotten worse. What is it with me and my body balking at running? Cardiovascularly, it's so much easier this time!

I'm going to try a stretch for the petroneus muscles and see if that helps. Otherwise, I got nothin'.

Thirty Minutes and Counting

My childfree time: I have thirty minutes left, approximately, before I go back to pick them up. It was heartwarming and heartstring-tugging, all at the same time. I got them both signed in, got their nametags, found their cubbies, and got them outside to the playground.

Cel took right off with Ani; I don't think she realized I wasn't going to be staying. I hadn't spent much time belaboring that point beforehand. So I waited around, then said goodbye, but that I would watch for a while from outside, and then I'd be back to pick them up at lunch. She seemed cautious, but okay. I watched them tear around together, and separately, for a while. Every so often Cel would glance at me and smile, and go off again. Since she didn't seem tearful or terribly worried, I decided to go while the going was good, go get myself a frappuccino and do some blogging. (I never get fraps anymore, not only because of the dairy but because of the, "I want some! No, I want some! I want more! Can I have it? Give it to me!" that transpires whenever I get something good. My stomach is already aching, but man, it was worth it.

This is the only picture I managed to get before my camera horked and shut down without even retracting the lens.

Weekly Recap

Like I really need a recap, right; I've written every day! Well, I'm hoping it'll build my momentum.

First, a fitness recap:

Karate: I did five classes this week, two on Mon, two on Tues, and one last night. Though, that one is usually 75-90 minutes long and like a double in itself. Monday was all partner work on basics, Tuesday was a lot of self-defense, and yesterday was the conditioning class. On Tuesday, I got to do circle of self-defense for the first time. It was intimidating, but way more fun than I expected. (That's where you have a group of people (we had 8) in a circle, taking turns having one in the middle getting randomly attacked from all sides. Fun! No, really!

Bikram: Only one this week, on Monday. The only other time during the week they have a 6am is Wednesday, and I skipped it, because ...

Running: I finished Week 1 of Couch to 5K this morning. I had intended to do Day 2 on Tuesday, but was wiped that morning, so I did it Wednesday instead of Bikram. No problems; my ankles and feet are a little sore, muscle-wise. My toes feel like they are coming to life. I find myself wiggling them and stretching them an awful lot lately, as well as gripping things with them. Monkey toes.

I've been counting calories on SparkPeople, but am completely confused. It gave me a range of 1200-1550 to use as my target, and I've been trying to stay within that, but then, it's chiding me on my fitness tracker page that, "*You've gone over your weekly calories burned goal by a significant amount. This will not change your calories eaten goal automatically. If you'd like, you can change your fitness settings here." But, doing that still doesn't tell me how many calories I should be eating, and I don't trust their estimation of my calories burned anyway. I haven't had a scale in the house for weeks, so I'm getting no feedback there. I should pick one up, but I kind of worry if I get one, and see no change, it'll dampen my enthusiasm. And I've got a good momentum going at the moment.

In other news, I'm tired of it being chilly and rainy. It was supposed to do this in April and be done. My plants aren't doing great, and bunnies are eating all my stuff because the repellent keeps washing away. If only I knew how to skin and dress a rabbit ...

Now, I'm off to shower and start doing laundry (that I won't be able to hang out, mumble mumble curse mumble,) and cook up some of my CSA pickup for lunch. This week we got a bunch of turnips with greens, mustard greens, kale, two heads of lettuce, a pound of spinach, and 1.5 pints of strawberries. Mmmm. Strawberries. Also have to figure out what to do this weekend.

What are you doing this weekend?

The Zoo

I really dislike the zoo. The kids love it, so I try to go a few times a year. It's amazing just how expensive it is, and everything inside it that you might want to do besides just gawping at the animals costs extra, and yet, they still have ALL these tiny inadequate enclosures for most of the animals.

The kids are also at an age where they don't like to look at anything for very long, so we zip around the zoo like monkeys on crack. The children's zoo may as well have been closed, since all of the animals were hidden inside their little sheds, and the Lorikeet Landing was closed. Bitches.

And for all of that, I blew $30.

Still, it had its moments. The kids loved the mandrills; I don't think they realized they probably wanted to crack our heads together. They sat just feet away from us, behind the plexiglass viewing area; the male kept baring his considerable teeth at us, and a female wandered down to the glass, picking around on the ground, and suddenly leapt at Celyn, smacking both her hands on the glass in front of poor Cel's face. She took it well, though.

The macaques were much more playful and friendly. One of the tiny juveniles came down to the glass and went nose to nose with Celyn for a little while.

I really need a new camera.

After I had decided to go to the zoo, I found out a local mommy board to which I belong was also going to go, and I debated trying to meet up and find them, and decided it was probably going to be more hassle than it was worth. I don't mind tailing the girls as they go hither and thither as the mood strikes, but trying to herd them in a particular direction with a group is a pain in the ass. It's a lot like this, actually:



And I don't have a horse.

I worked for EDS when that commercial came out, coincidentally.

I always think it's more fun to go places with kids and just drop any expectations about what we'll do or see and just let them lead. I try not to care if they only want to stare at the grizzly for 15 seconds, and dash away right before he does something spectacularly interesting, like licking his toes. If they'd rather go on the carousel or dig in the fake dinosaur pit and chase seagulls than look at the animals, or leave after thirty minutes, whatever. I don't let them do EVERYTHING they want to do -- my god, I am not paying $2 to ride a tiny train in a circle -- though I did drop $3 to take one ride on the carousel. I refuse to eat there. The food is exorbitantly priced and is terrible. Well, what do you expect from a Beastro? (No, I'm not making that up.)

I guess I feel it's more worthwhile to spend the money and just Let Them Be than try to force them to get The Experience but be unhappy about it, you know? Which is part of the reason I don't like to go places like the museum or the zoo in groups with other moms and kids. What is the fun of being nagged around even a terrifically interesting location? Well, it keeps my stress level down, anyway. If I go en masse, I feel pressured to talk to the other mothers, and it's very hard to do that and participate with your kids at the same time. It is for ME, anyway, because I'm sort of defective.

Now we get to go to karate, pick up our CSA share, and then tomorrow is Friday! Wheeee!

More Random Blathering

It's another cold and drizzly day here in fabulous Western NY. I had just gotten used to the heat and was actively enjoying it and ... zip, it's off. I just bought a load of tank tops on sale! That is what brought the cold front in, I tell you.

I got up before the rest of the family to do the second day of the first week of Couch to 5K in the drizzle. It was fine, though I was reminded of another fabulous reason to run in Vibrams instead of really barefoot: I stepped in dog poo. I think it's time we, as a society, started to toilet train our dogs. This crapping in the grass stuff is So Very Last Week. Don't give me any of this, "it's natural" garbage. If large wolfpacks ever roamed freely in towns and left huge piles of carnivorous dung within our midst, I'd lend some credence to that argument.

We've been picking up a CSA share for the past two weeks, and tomorrow will be our third pick up. I'd have blogged about it, but you know, without pictures, it just seems stupid. Same with the paneer. I made a perfectly passable batch of paneer yesterday, and I thought, "This'd be fun to blog about," but alas. Our camera is like a chain gang prisoner; it has prematurely aged due to the harsh lifestyle and is staggering along with very little functionality left. It will take one picture before it horks and chokes and turns itself off. Until we replace it, it doesn't even seem worthwhile to bother with.

Anyway, I still have some giant stalks of asparagus and a load of beets leftover from last week's pickup. I'm going to use the asparagus tonight in a pasta/shrimp combo, and maybe cram the beets into a salad or something. No one here is a fan of beets, but I'll give it my best shot. Last week I made a leek and goat cheese galette, to use up our leeks, and no one liked it but me. (And I didn't want to like it, given the fat content of galette pastry.) This is back when it was actually hot and leek soup seemed like an intolerable choice, considering.

I'm feeling way uninspired in other areas of housekeeping. I'm so tired of picking up the same messes and losing and finding the same things and the endless cycle of food prep and food cleanup. It's hard for me to get motivated to do anything special, particularly knowing I will be interrupted about 698 times during the course of any project. But! Next week, the girls start summer preschool. So for at least six hours a week, I might be able to do things unhindered. Woah, dude. I was also thinking of digging out my bike, so I can run simple errands without bothering with the whole Car Trading Fandango. I haven't ridden my bike in, oh, eons. Though I'll probably break the law and ride on the sidewalk, because I don't trust all the Hummers and Escalades and Navigators that speed through the village. I know their drivers can't park for shit, so why would I trust them in motion?

This weekend is going to be my 8th wedding anniversary! And I've not really given it any thought and we've made no plans! Whoopeee!

On the Mood SeeSaw

I'm a little bit bummed this morning. Partially because it's suddenly cold and gray -- bah -- but also because of some weird interpersonal stuff I can't really get into, not in the least because I don't understand it whatsoever.

Yesterday was fun. I went to Bikram in the morning. In the later morning, the girls and I walked all over the village. Well, they rode in the stroller, mostly, and I pushed them. We went to the park for a while, stopped by the corner store, and they frolicked on the bike path. I walked barefoot on the path for a while, just for fun. Once we got home, we had two separate hailstorms with some ping pong ball sized hail. I'm kind of tired of this freakish weather we're having. It's nice, it's hot, it's cold, it's blistering, it's raining ice. Don't like what it's doing? Wait ten minutes.

Anyway, then I did back to back karate classes last night, and it was a hoot. We did a lot of partner work and we were totally klutzy and laughing and being total doofs. (That is, my fellow green belt and I were doofs, not the rest of the class of proficient purples, browns and blacks.)

Well, now that I've cheered myself up, I'm off to see if I can make some paneer from scratch.

Does anyone read this thing?

I'm a Bore on These Subjects

Evolution. I adore it. I find it totally fascinating and I must be an incredible bore in my dogged investigation of it. Because whatever the question of the day is, I'm always wondering about it from an evolutionary standpoint.

So running has been the topic on my mind lately and so I dug, and here's just one of the write ups I found on where running fits into human evolution, from Discover mag. It's even more timely, because I am reading Children of the Ice Age: How a Global Catastrophe Allowed Humans to Evolve, and while that's not about running per se, one of its major points is that being forced out of the trees by climate change made us adapt to life on the ground, resulting in major changes to our normal locomotion.

It's all very fascinating, because I'm a dork. And I always think, if we evolved for a certain activity, then it's likely to be loaded with benefits for us, so why not Just Do It, as the ubiquitous shoe purveyor says?

Another prong of that evolutionary theory is that being out of the trees kept our arms free, which allowed us to have and care for much more helpless offspring, who then had the option of growing bigger brains and heads than they could on the inside. He says somewhere in the book that, essentially, humans are born purposely premature compared to other primates (and nearly every other animal.) And that made me wonder about the current and somewhat unexplained rise in real prematurity. If we have some mechanism (that almost always works, I might add) that triggers us to give birth before heads get too large, I wonder if our current diets, which are comparatively really high in calories and fat compared to anything our ancestors would have evolved with, added in with a much more sedentary lifestyle, is growing bigger babies and maybe, trying to get them out too early to compensate. It's just a half formed thought. (As you can tell by the terribly clumsy, convoluted sentence!) It obviously doesn't have to do directly with head size, but maybe a whole range of factors.

Our bodies are wicked clever and complex; I think we've only scratched the surface of understanding what we can do, how, and why. I don't believe things like AMOR-IPAT are ever going to work better than a healthy human body, because they are never going to have all the information, each individual process is never going to offer full transparency, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The FiveFingers Experiment

Well, it's been a few weeks, but I finally managed to get started. I did Day One, of Week One, of Couch to 5K on Saturday morning, wearing my fancy new FiveFingers.

I loved it! My form was -- as it had to be -- entirely different than it was in running shoes. And something about that was a lot of fun. Even walking in those forces you to concentrate to avoid using a heel strike, because hey, your heels don't have padding. So, especially when running, I had to change my posture a lot, leaning forward, and treading lightly on the balls of my feet. That just felt so much more fun than the way I have always run before, it felt light and lilting and gazelle-esque.

And I did a lot of running in the grass, across the park and in the medians between the sidewalk and the road, and that was fun, because my feet got wet with cool dew, and I got clover blossoms stuck in between my toes.

I am sore in strange places today. My lower calves, some muscles around my ankles and feet I didn't know existed, and my inner thighs. It really is different, running nearly barefoot. I admit, I felt very silly at first, wondering if everyone was going to be looking at my "naked" blue feet. I did see a lot of my neighbors, and I just waved and smiled and pretended like I was a perfectly normal person. Ha! I'm not very convincing.

I'm excited, and looking forward to adding this in to my exercise routine, well, routinely. If I was really brave, I'd just go barefoot, but I'm not there yet. And oddly, it's more because of the "being seen as a freak" thing, not the "I might step on something owie" thing. Which is kind of the same as the reason I don't enjoy sparring. It's not because I'm afraid I'll get hurt, it's because I hate looking So Damn Stupid and Clumsy and losing all the time. Petty, ain't it?

A girlfriend and I agreed to try to do a 5K together in September, and that gives me plenty of time to get through Ct5K, presuming no injuries. Wish me luck.

Out of Synch

This is what happens when I start reading and browsing more than writing. I seem to be capable of doing either one or the other, but not both.

It's been kind of a tough week. For one, Cel has been a tiny terrorist. I suspect them thar toofers. Wednesday, she had a half hour tantrum when I refused the following request:

"Mama, I can has just a small glass of beer?"

She said this while gesturing with her fingers, "just this much?" It may have been my disrespectful laughter that brought on the rage, but I'm not really sure. Either that or she's become a raging alcoholic at the ripe old age of 2 without my noticing.

Secondly, this house, this house ... oh my god, this friggin' house. I pushed out the window. I cannot believe I didn't blog this, but it's not there, so I suppose I didn't. (ETA: I guess I did blog it, but didn't hit refresh, and wasn't sure I'd published it. Oh well.) This was on Wednesday, Super Tantrum Day. I opened my bedroom blinds, and decided to move my sun catcher. When I pushed the suction cup holder onto the opposite window, the entire pane of glass just broke under my hand and fell onto the front lawn.

Five minutes the exterminator arrived, to start treating for carpenter ants. I had to write him an enormous(ly painful) check to get him to start work. While he started drilling holes in our walls, our handyman arrived to put in our new storm door and fix the window I'd just broken.

He fixed the window quickly, but worked on the door for hours, and finally had to leave to go to another job. However, during that span of time, he'd left the glass on the lawn. The sun and the glass burned a giant rectangle into our lawn ... the lawn we've been spending money on to have organically fancied up. Yeah, that lawn.

Shortly after that came the tantrum, and in the middle of the tantrum, the Scientologists called me. And let me be the first to say that the Scientologists have The Stupidest Tele-Seller-Evangelists in The Whole Wide World. But that is, itself, a topic for another day. If they continue to call after that conversation, I think I'd be well within my rights to sue them for harassment.

The following day, back at MoneyPit Manor, Handyman came again, worked on the door for ages, and then gave up on it. He said the frame was too crappy, uneven, misaligned, rotted -- you name it, and it would take him way too long to fix and was out of his scope. So my husband put in the rest of the door, but it does gap around the edges and it's not level and all that rot. The handyman said he was going to pester our landlord about our crappy windows, which he patched up but seemed unhappy about. He's supposed to come back next week to do some other work, trying to fix our skylight which has a moisture problem.

The thing is, if we owned this house, even though fixing these things would be costly and a pain in the ass, they'd have been fixed Last Year. We might still be paying for those fixes, but we wouldn't be living with rotting windows and dampness and carpenter ants. You know what I'm saying? And I feel like we're spending too much money on rent to justify this shit.

And our hot water heater is now leaking.

I am starting to sink into a cycle of crossness. I made three appointments next week with window contractors for estimates, because my landlord claims that it's been impossible for her to get people out to give estimates, they're all so busy this time of year. That's not been my experience at all, as I got three appointments in less than 24 hours, but then, I'm just so loaded with Charm and Charisma.

*snerk*

Aaaagggggh!

It's not even 9am.

I'm expecting exterminators at nine o' clock for the carpenter ant invasion. I'm expecting the handyman ~*..sometime..*~ to put in the front screen door that was ordered over a month ago. And this morning ...

I open the shades in our room. I take my sun catcher off the window pane to move it to the opposite window. As I press the suction cup against the window, THE WHOLE FUCKING WINDOWPANE POPS OUT AND FALLS TO THE GROUND BELOW, breaking on the way out.

This is just fucking genius.

Did I mention we already have a broken window downstairs that has yet to be fixed?

I'd just like to say for the record that, were this MY HOUSE, the damn window would have been replaced last winter.

Grumpy a little today? YES I AM.

Murphy's Law Strikes Again

Hey! It's a magical formula for making a handyman who has been absent for a month appear before your very eyes!

1) Assume that he'll call first, as he always does, and assume that call will be an, "I'm not coming, I'll come tomorrow," as it always is.

2) Put on something somewhat skimpy that you'd never wear out of the house, for the sole purpose of getting some sun obtaining the maximum amount of Vitamin D.

3) Go play in the backyard with your naked kids.

And voila! Within a half hour, a handyman will be at your back fence gate going, "HI!"

*facepalm*

Sudden Infectious Death Syndrome?

"Two bacteria in the latter group -- Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli -- were found to be more common than expected in babies whose deaths could not be explained."

Not sure what to make of this one. They go on to say:

"Sixteen percent of samples from infants whose deaths remained unexplained after autopsy contained the staph bacteria, compared with 9% of infants whose deaths were explained but not related to infection. And 6% of samples from the former group contained E. coli, compared with just 1% of samples from the latter."

So, there were significantly more occurrences of the bacteria amongst unexplained infant deaths than unexplained. Still, looked at another way, that's an awful lot of unexplained deaths without either of those bacteria ... I'm not sure what that means.

They mention the relation to sleeping position, in that face down sleeping may encourage the bacterial growth in the nose. What they don't mention is where breastfeeding fits in. Breastfeeding is supposed to reduce the risk of SIDS; if bacterial infection is a component, then it makes sense that breastfed babies would be at less risk because of the immunological properties of breastmilk.

I don't know what it really means, but I'll be following this with interest.

Movin' on Up

So, the best part of the weekend, which I am just now getting around to writing about, was my green belt test! Hurray! It feels like I've been looking forward to this for eons.

It was about an hour and a half long, going through all of the previous material, and three two-minute rounds of sparring. I feel like I did okay with the sparring, doing fairly well against a fellow green-tester and managing to score at least a little with a purple (testing for brown) and a second degree brown (testing for third). Sparring is, for me, the most cardiovascularly challenging thing we do in karate. Which is why I really need to go weekly. Now that my class schedule has changed, I think it'll be easier to get that in without excuses.

It was a tough, long test, but at no point did I feel like I was suffering or exhausted, and I really enjoyed it.

Last night was my first class as a green belt and I started learning a few of the new self-defense techniques for this level, and they were fun: defense against a hook punch, half nelson, and side headlock. Two of those involved throwing your attacker to the ground, which was a riot.

I'm having so much fun.

Vitamin D Study Fishy

"Children and teens need 10 times more than the recommended dose of vitamin D, a clinical trial suggests."

Why does this seem fishy? Because as they say farther down in the article, the study was funded by Nestle and Merck. It doesn't take a giant leap of logic to see that they would benefit financially from such a finding, does it?

I'm not saying the science is therefore wrong. I've long heard the RDAs for Vitamin D are too low, and it makes perfect sense to me. But wouldn't it be more credible if the study weren't funded by vitamin peddlers?

Blog it, Dump it, Let it Go

Feeling a bit frustrated, and of course that's going to come out before any of the good news of the weekend gets written up in detail.

Sometimes I feel like we're cursed in the housing department. I like the house we're renting okay, but we're renting, the owner doesn't want to sell, and I'm not sure I'd want to buy it. I'm sick of waiting for work to be done, sick of paying more for rent than a mortgage would be on a comparable house, blah blah blah.

But, I don't think we can buy. Our savings are shot and I can't imagine when we'd ever have enough for a quality down payment. I called a mortgage broker last week, just to get a sense of where we are and what we'd need to work toward, and she never called me back. I filled out her online form, and she never responded. Nice.

I guess I need to work on acceptance. We have shelter, we have a yard, our neighborhood is safe. The kids will go to a fantastic school. We have a park and a good walkable area. So we have to rent. Suck. It. Up.

We went to an open house today, mainly out of academic curiosity. The house is old, and they don't even know for certain when it was built. The realtor said, "Um, pre-1948. Maybe 1920s?" If I had to guess, I'd guess more like, 1800s. But it IS really hard to tell because it's been cobbled onto, and the styles might be good mimicry. Who knows? It was really cool and strange and Winchesteresque.

It was the kind of house I'd like to have -- the kind of house, though probably not that one. As cool as it was, it was also kind of creepy. And as much potential as it had, I'd need to have wads to blow on updating it because the last time that happened was apparently about 1968. I'd only be able to move in if I didn't have to live with the creepy wallpaper and shag rugs and burnt sienna kitchen appliances. And the red glass chandelier that was in one bathroom. */shudder/*

Also, the basement was scary. Most of it was a typical "old" basement, all rough and stony and cobwebby, but there was this finished room in the dead center, with a fireplace and a chandelier and windows ... that looked out onto the rest of the basement. Uh? It brought up immediately thinks about the Amityville Horror or secret rites or ... just a creepy guy sitting in his "fancy" basement room and ... enjoying it. */shudder/*

It had a pool, which to most people sounds like a good thing, but seeing as the entire yard was fenced, and the pool was inground and not fenced, the kids would always be playing next to the Pool of Death. Thanks, but no thanks.

It'd be a WAY cool place to renovate, with its four fireplaces and nooks and crannies and a bar with batwings and second floor laundry and exposed timbers ... but anyway. We're just not in a position for ... any of it.

So, yeah. Acceptance. I can work on that.