This is Us...

This is us, Matt and me, waiting for the moving van to arrive last week. When Matt's Dad sent it last night, my first thought was that it was a sweet photo of us on the first day at our new house. My second thought was more smug, noting to myself how much better the front stairs look now, after only a week...the landlords have recemented the front steps and put beautiful big planters full of flowers on them. "Gosh," I thought to myself, "they really are working hard on this place! They are so invested in making this place into a nice home!" They've only owned it a year and a half, and with a newborn baby last summer I'm guessing they didn't get much done.

Then along comes today. A crappy day to begin with, I have to say. Usually a good work-out early in the morning leaves me invigorated and full of crazy energy to be with the kids, but for some reason today all I could do was flop onto the floor with them and sort of pretend to play trains. It was raining pretty hard all day, and so humid that my hair had a super-attractive halo of friz around it. The kids were crabby, to say the least. Baxter was like a sullen teenaged girl with PMS. I finally managed to get them outside for a rainy day walk, and Baxter was so cranky that I gave up on the outing and just walked them back home. Lyle is in a stage where he will ride in the stroller for about 2 minutes before screaming "Down!Down!Down!Down!" until his voice is hoarse. I don't object to a slow walk around the block with a toddler if he actually would go somewhere. But no, he chooses a random space (such as squished up against a newspaper box, knee-deep in mud) and does not budge. And if he gets the faintest notion that I want him to budge, that's the end of it, he'll be there all day, laughing at my attempts to move him along. It's ugly. In desperation, I searched for my cell phone so that I could at least send an SOS text message to one of my friends in San Francisco, knowing that I'd get a hilariously sarcastic response, only to discover that I'd left my cell phone in the car overnight and didn't have it. It was that kind of a day.

So it should have been no surprise when I finally got the boys back to the house and discovered the note from the landlords in the mailbox. "Just a heads up. We are thinking about putting the house on the market. There will be a walk-through with a realtor tomorrow at 2pm." I looked around at the newly-cemented steps and the patio resplendant with new flowers. I thought about the power wash they did on the house on Saturday and the touch-up painting they did on Sunday. Thinking about it? Looks like they're doing more than thinking about it.

As many of you know, we just left this situation. Our San Francisco landlords just sold our building when we left, and we would've been evicted with 60 days notice if we hadn't elected to move first, which is what we had predicted. So now here we are again. If they do indeed put this house on the market, chances are very good that we will have to move next year on June 30 when our lease is up. House showings. Again. Oh. My. God.

I find this incredibly depressing. After spending a ludicrous amount of money to move across the country, and then putting money into new things we needed for this house, it is unfathomable that we would have to go through this again next year. Not that the move would be so big, but it's still exhausting, stressful, and expensive.

As Matt pointed out, though, our main objective was to get the kids into a good public school, which we have done. At least if we have to move in a year, we can make the move to a cheaper place, since we'd no longer be bound by the school zone. I know this is true. And I'm trying to think positively: maybe the new owners will keep us.