Cheeseburgers in Paradise

It was a rainy day today in Atlanta. We spent the early afternoon working on bread, but then we went out to Your Dekalb Farmers Market and Whole Foods to get Gabriel food. At the farmers’ market, we got fruit and sweet potatoes for the Chipster and Thai chilis, Thai rice, and nuts and grains for bread for us. At Whole Foods, we got meat for Chip and a few things for ourselves, including a bottle of Chard-No-Way as a special treat, since it was on sale.

We drove around the city of Decatur to look at houses for sale, just to see what the prices were like. We found East Lake, an area that is being gentrified. It was an interesting mix of lower-income folks and lots of young families renovating big old houses. It looked like it could be a good place for a family and a place where the home values will probably skyrocket in the next few years, even though they’re pretty high right now. We’re thinking that we might rather go for a bigger house on a bigger piece of land a little removed from the city, but we’re going to consider all of our options.

Speaking of our home, it looks like our closing will be on the 13th of June. That means that we’ll be going back there somewhere around the 8th, in less than 3 weeks, to pack up. We’ll stay through the 19th, because Laura is having her graduation, and Katie and Billy are celebrating theirs.

For dinner, we had burgers and corn on the cob. Even Gabriel had a cheeseburger and corn. Well, we broke it into tiny pieces, but he would only eat one little taste and refused the rest. He wouldn’t even eat the corn after we snuck a piece of meat into it, and he normally eats it right up. Finally, we fed him a banana and a jar of veggies and pasta. We were so excited to try to feed him normal food, but it looks like it will be a little while before he is ready to eat anything new. We thought our dinner was good, anyway. We had homemade poppyseed buns on the burgers, and they were fantastic.

The offer we did for the free PSP deal was to join BMG – you know, buy 3 CDs and get 500 free. We chose it because we will only have to buy 1 CD and pay for shipping and handling on 11 otherwise free ones. Anyway, we got our first 7 free ones today. We got Johnny Cash, Live at Folsom Prison; Barenaked Ladies, Everything to Everyone; Ibrahim Ferrer, Buena Vista Social Club Presents; Franz Ferdinand, self-titled; Garden State soundtrack; Thelonius Monk, Mysterioso; and Miles Davis, Milestones (how clever is that?!). We realized that we already have Milestones, so we’re going to try to return it and get something else. We listened to all of them except Miles, and they are all great. The Cash CD is just one of the best things we have EVER heard. Everyone should have this recording. Even the liner notes are great.

Gabe's Ten Month Birthday!!

Today was Gabriel’s 10 month birthday. He spent it practicing for the day, very soon, when he will start walking. Patty was talking to Laura on the phone in the kitchen and heard Gabriel come up behind her and bang on the open dishwasher door. She didn’t think anything of it, because she for some reason thought he was in his walker. When she turned around, she realized that he was, in fact, standing there. He’d crawled over from the living room and pulled himself up. He is getting really good at sitting up and standing up on his own. Just today, we found him standing in the living room by his toybox, by his swing, moving between the two, holding on to the swinging chair of the swing and keeping his balance, the dishwasher, and the bookshelf – all without our help and most without our presence.

He has a way of reaching milestones on his birthday. Today, in addition to the advanced crawling and standing skills, he slept really well. He slept soundly through most of the morning, went down for naps relatively well (still not as well as he could, but good for him), and fell asleep pretty quickly at night. He was a lot of fun today.

When Patty got back from tutoring, she found Gabriel in his highchair in the kitchen watching his daddy make brownies for his birthday. We have found lately that he is happy sitting in his stroller or high chair when he is near us. He seems to be happiest just hanging out near us and likes to talk and play with us, as opposed to when he’s able to crawl around and play on his own. It’s nice to be able to put him in the stroller a few minutes before we actually walk out the door while we finish gathering diaper bag, phone, camera, and keys; use the bathroom; put on our shoes; etc.

He still has a runny nose and we think that everything we own now has a nice coating of his nose goo. It doesn’t seem to be getting better. At least he isn’t really complaining (except when he tries to pick his nose and we won’t let him) and he doesn’t have any other symptoms.

Patty got a message from her sliced turkey today. It said, "Love."

We are beginning to plan what to do with our house money. We are going to pay off some credit cards for sure, but we think that we are also going to buy a car. Ours is ridiculous for a family, it’s all slashed up inside and out from break-ins, and the lease runs out soon, anyway. We have to actually put Gabriel in standing up on the floor, climb in after him, and put him in the car seat. We do that all in reverse to get him out. And forget about parking on the street, because then we have to climb out while holding him from the passenger side, which is nearly impossible because we have to squeeze between the car seat and the passenger seat while trying not to bump his head on the door frame. Sometimes we actually succeed. Anyway, we welcome suggestions. We’re thinking that we want an SUV of some sort with 4-wheel drive, a good-sized engine, automatic (need that other hand for discipline!), and either white or silver. No more blue; 2 blue cars in a row is enough for us for a while. No black, either – we’d have to actually wash it. Anyhow, there’s no point in really planning until we actually have the money.

Two breads in the works – rustic and challah.

Take a Deep Breath...

This is a long one! We obviously don't subscribe to the "shorter is better" philosophy of blogging. This has become sort of a journal for us and a place for us to document everything. We'll try harder to put in some short ones once in a while to give everyone a break, but we do like to talk!!!

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.

Available: Good Home to Good Folks

It looks like we have buyers for our home. The "for sale" sign was barely in the ground yesterday before people were inquiring about it. Anyway, the offers were in today, and we are going to accept one first thing in the morning. Because it isn't technically a done deal, we won't say any more about it right now. Suffice it to say that though it seems impossible, this is going to be a situation in which everyone (except maybe the losing bidders) is going to be very happy.

That consumed most of our time, energy, and thought today, but Gabriel, having no understanding of the importance of this subject, continued to do his own thing. That "own thing" involved spreading books over as much of the floor of our apartment as he could until he ran out of books, wiping what little of the floor remained uncovered with his belly, sticking to his mommy like white on rice for much of the day despite her efforts to get him to take a nap, and getting up and walking around on his walker all by himself.

After living extremely frugally these past few weeks, we decided to celebrate our house decision by going to Starbucks for a treat. We went over all of the paperwork for the offers, while Gabriel flirted with the co-eds at the next table. The attention inspired him to be very vocal in the cafë, and we loved hearing the happy talk and laughter.

Dad A called and said that Gabriel's high chair should be arriving tomorrow, so we are very excited about that. It's the one that we picked out at Ikea but was out of stock. He and Gail found it last week and have sent it to us. It will be very nice to be able to sit up straight while we feed him. We have been sitting on the floor with him in his walker, and when we do sit in a seat, we have to bend over and get a backache. We are also excited to put his little velour cover on the seat for le petit prince.

A Nice Night for a Walk

The most notable thing that we did today was to go for a nice long walk through Midtown. We walked up to Piedmont Park and through it, and went through the neighborhood between there and our apartment, as opposed to going down the main streets. It was probably about 3 miles total. The weather was beautiful - probably about 65°F.

The house was listed today, although we don't have the heart to look it up on realtor.com. We know that we are doing the right thing, but it's still difficult. On the bright side, as soon as we sell the house, we can find a new one down here, and we think that will be really fun.

Gabriel actually crawled into his toy box today, and he nearly crawled out of his bed. Fortunately, we were right there to rescue him both times. We have started an exhausting nighttime routine where we put him in bed lying down, he stands up, we lay him back down, he stands up, we lay him back down... you get the idea. Oh, the ways he learns to push our endurance! So far, we're staying patient and remembering that he needs lots of repetition to learn anything, but he's seriously cutting into our nightcap time!