Oh, what a busy day to have after only 4 hours of sleep! Let’s start at the beginning. After receiving 2 offers on our home in Ann Arbor last night, we had a hard time getting to sleep. So did Gabriel. When we finally got to sleep, it was only a couple of hours before he was awake again and expecting to eat. We decided that since he is having a harder and harder time staying asleep at night and eating more and more frequently, he needed to cry it out this one time and get himself back to sleep. Besides, there was no reason he should have been hungry yet. After one long hour of crying, he went back to sleep. M dozed a little during that time, and P played games on the computer and tried not to pull her hair out. Of course, about 5 minutes after he got to sleep, the alarm went off and we hit snooze a couple of times before Patty accidentally turned it off. We got some sleep then, but someone was very late for work.
P couldn’t sleep in past 10:00 though, because we had to get our paperwork in to Chris, our family friend who is acting as our listing agent. Besides, Matt would be back soon to bring us the car for playgroup at church. We got the paperwork in and accepted the offer from the bidders who were exactly who we’d hoped for. These are people who’d bid on a house down the street last week and lost. When they saw our house and learned that they could afford it, the woman actually cried. They are in love with the house and are eager to move in and start their family. They wrote us a beautiful letter with their bid and told us about themselves and why they want the house. He is a carpenter who works for a company that does renovations on historical houses, so they are excited to do a lot of beautification to our house.
Theirs was actually the lower offer of the two (Chris actually had to turn away other prospective buyers because these offers were to expire before they’d get a chance to bid), but other aspects of the offer were far more attractive to us. The other bidders were the next door neighbors, who wanted to buy the house just so they could have the driveway and garage to themselves because they like to own things and don’t have much consideration for the Old West Side community and the family values that are prevalent there. They’d planned to rent out the house, which would have broken our hearts. Anyway, this lower offer was much more than we’d expected, and it was certainly enough for us to have a very large profit and use the money to get ourselves off to the great start we hadn’t had before. Besides, it was only $3k less than the other offer.
Like we said, this is going to be a really great start for us. We’d married and had Gabriel while we were mired in debt, and with Patty staying at home, we really had no way to save any money, or even to stay afloat. With the profit from this house, we will have something we haven’t had before: options.
So this house stuff isn’t the only thing we had on our minds today. It was a busy day for the Angle men: Gabriel had playgroup, and Matthew had a softball game. Playgroup was really fun, and Gabriel got to play with his friend Patrick, who was dressed surprisingly like him. They had a lot of fun playing with plastic cups in the midst of a lot of great toys.
The softball game didn’t go quite so well. Matt was 1-for-2 with a walk (not counted as a hit or an at-bat), a single, and an RBI. He also had 2 put-outs at first. The Intimidators lost to Reheat (a remake of the old Heat team) with a score of 10-3.
Gabriel and Patty got presents today. Dad A and Gail sent Gabriel a new high chair, which you can see in the photos by itself and in use, and they sent Patty a beautiful book called 100 Promises to My Baby by Mallika Chopra. It’s they way that this woman (Deepak’s daughter) found to sort out the things she wanted to teach her baby and the way she wanted to parent. This is something that we talk about all the time – how we want to approach future problems, how we want to act in this or that situation, how we want to encourage Gabriel to approach life… we enjoy talking about these things now, because not only will we be prepared later, but we also like to imagine what he’s going to be like in the future.
We had a great homemade dinner of chicken curry and salads, we got Gabriel off to sleep earlier than usual, and we’re going to be in bed by midnight. Although it was a very busy day, it was a good one.
