Book Sharing Monday

Merry-Go-Round
A Book About Nouns
by Ruth Heller

Unbelievably, Ben likes me to read this book to him. My MIL bought it for the pictures, it's about nouns. I say unbelievably because it's just kind of boring! It's about nouns!

"Nouns are highly effective. The last kind of NOUN is COLLECTIVE. A tumble of feathers, a clamor of birds and a riot of colors abound."

"Wives is the PLURAL of wife... but just add an S to giraffe."






Pretty exciting huh... lol


But the pictures are interesting and different from what you find in other children's books.

Leslie Science Center is really awesome

Kelly has been visiting for a couple days. I want her to stay for the week, but my mom will (hopefully) need her support after Tuesday's court session...

So today we went over to the Leslie Science Center.

It's free, there's great trails to walk, they have rescued birds that you can see in cages. There wasn't any one else there, it was great weather, and a great day.

The owls are so cool. Ben calls them the HOo hoos.





Ben had a lot of fun walking the trails. He would cover up his eyes when we would go through weeds that covered the trails. It was really cute.


Here he is having a little rest on a bench.



We saw a couple butterflies that was really exciting. It was better than being at the zoo!






They must do some sort of a garden project for kids. It looks really fun. They have all different gardens, medicinal herb garden, a "pizza" garden, and then just individual gardens that kids grew themselves. Must be some sort of a community garden project to teach kids? I want to join, it looks so fun. I LOVED the 'Peter Rabbit' garden.

It even had Peter Rabbit's jacket and shoes that he left behind!


I got a lot of great ideas for my new yard :)

Just Another Weekend

Ben has started to "pull" me, when he wants me to go do something with him. He pulls my arm and does this growling like he's pulling reeeeallly hard. It's pretty funny.



Saturday we went to the Heritage Festival. It was cooler weather, it was actually nice to enjoy the day and not be sweating to death. We got to wear long sleeved shirts! I can't believe I'm not complaining about it, it seems like we had about a week of summer, but I really love fall.


It was just my mom, my sister, Ben and I. They had a toddler area with toys, and a petting zoo area. Ben really enjoyed the day. He was a really good boy. We heard lots of music, and before we left we got to sit and have a beer while Ben danced! It was fun. I always enjoy good people watching, and Ypsi is full of interesting characters to stare at.



There was another sad camel to ride. $5. This seems to be a new trend with fairs and festivals. I don't remember seeing a lot of camels when I was a kid. They seem really sad.


Yesterday I skipped out on a family dinner over at James' parents house. His parents are actually out of town, but his sister had her parents in town (gotta love complicated family situations) and they invited us over. James and Ben dropped me off at Dawn Treader downtown, I spent an hour in there, picked up 2 new books, then walked home. It only took me 35 minutes to walk home, I even stopped for a bottle of water. After I got home I took a bath and relaxed. I really enjoyed my day!

Lets see that picture again

I'm pretty proud of this one.

Found my plug

We went to the Hudson Mills "Metropark" last week, in Dexter, it's really close to the new house. It's beautiful! We only checked out a small area, I packed a dinner-picnic, James had to use charcoal, which he hates.. but whatever... and we played on the swings, played with some dinosaurs and trucks we brought, and took a walk down to check out the river. It's a really nice place.





Here's Ben playing guitar with a giant stick.







It's so strange to see our place "For Rent".


This picture might be a little too small to see, but can you see Charlie's little head poking up? He can be cute. Sometimes.

Lost camera cord

So I have stated to pack.... a little... and of course now I can't find my camera plug! What a pain!

I'll search for it today,




The only other update I have is that our mortgage application is up and rolling along, but our mortgage broker says that it's going to be September 15 or later that we close. Ben has surgery Ben 14, so hopefully we can have all this settled before !!

House update

Well we have a done deal. The seller is going to install the radon mitigation system, using a company that we picked. They lowered the cost of the house $300 (wow. big deal, $300 over 30 years is so helpful...) and they are buying us the home warranty ($400), so in the end we didn't get the cash that I was hoping for to fix everything, but James' parents said they would help us out, we'll pay them back of course.

SO the appraisal has been ordered, after that the mortgage process can officially begin hopefully pretty soon we will have an idea when we can CLOSE!!


Look at this awesome picture: This is what we look like when we wake up from a long nap :)



We got some big boy underwear. It's pretty exciting


Look at Ben's afro! He needs a trim I'd say. Hopefully this weekend.

I am getting beyond nervous with the whole house buying process at this point. We had to negotiate back and forth 6 times, at the end over $400 before we agreed. Then we had out inspection ($425) ( ARGH. Why can't the inspection results be available before we are agreeing on a price. It's an awful game.) So then we get the inspection results (56 pages long). There are a million little things that need to be fixed, some of which are pretty important.
1. Gas leaks found all along the piping coming off the furnace. They were actually labeled and tagged by the seller. Of course he knew about all of these problems, he had his own inspection. Why wouldn't he just fix what NEEDS to be done?!

2. Corroded pipes coming off of the water heater. New(ew) water heater, bad pipes. Explain that.

3. High radon levels. Yay. (at least $800 to install radon mitigation system)

4. The toilet isn't installed correctly and physically moves back and forth.

5. The bathtub backs up

6. All the plugs and switches are new in the kitchen but aren't GFI. Why install something new and not do it right??

7. One plug in the 3rd bedroom needs to be grounded.

8. The railing and stairs off the back need to be updated. Not up to code.

9. New windows a must.

10. Some wiring exposed in the upstairs closets/eaves. (Eaves? Is that the right term or did I just make that up?)

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

So we made an addendum to our agreement asking for a $2,500 credit at closing to fix all of the items that NEED to be fixed. So keep in mind the seller knew all of these things existed when we were agreeing on our first offer, which he only came down from $4,100. And he isn't paying for a home warranty so we have to buy our own ($400). We just did a rough estimate hoping he would agree to it and give us our house! I told our landlord what our status is, our lease is up Aug 31. (21 days and counting). He said we could stay through September if he doesn't rent it, but he's already listed it on facebook and is going to start showing it. We will be homeless! If worse comes to worse we can move our stuff somewhere and stay with parents or whatever. But I REALLLLLLLY don't want that to happen! Moving twice?! Moving in with parents?! NOOOOooOOOO!!!

So we've been waiting since last Wed/Thurs to hear back from them and hoping he'll just agree, or lower it down a little ($2,000 maybe?).

We still haven't heard. So James called our agent, who spoke to the seller's agent last week. The Seller's agent is in the U.P. The seller is "out of the country", but is thinking that he wants to "do the work himself". Um no.

No.
No.
No.

He hasn't done anything right yet. The toilet isn't secured down for god's sake, we have to cut the linoleum and redo the toilet! He's worthless, and being too cheap. He doesn't care about the quality of the work, of course not, but if any of this isn't done correctly then we are screwed. We don't have money to fix all of this, and it all needs to be done right away!

The radon system is a big one, there are different options of how it can be done, and some of them will greaty change the utility bills!

This is just awful. I can't take much more stress. I'm trying to just stay calm and relaxed, I've started to pack, started to weed through things and start the moving process. I figure we should be ready to go by the end of the month no matter what. I'm going to call to schedule the appraisal today.

AAAHHHH!!!


I just have to keep this in mind : :-D

A little of what we've been up to

We've been so busy lately. We're buying a house, we just had a surprise 60th birthday party for my MIL, on top of all kinds of other crap that's going on. We've been trying to stay focused on staying happy and making sure to take time out to do fun things just the three of us.

We went to a friend's wedding last week, was it last week? My sister babysat Ben, his first time being without one of us at bed time. They did great. My camera died as soon as we got to the wedding, so the only pictures I got were of us before we left.



My MIL's party was such a pain to plan, but it turned out great.



My mom, sister, Ben and I all went out to lunch on Saturday and went to the toy store after. Ben got a new monkey set and fell asleep with a tight grip on it on the ride home. I took this picture driving down the highway. Danger is my middle name.



After we got home I cleaned out my car and Ben was having fun pretending to drive.
He's such a boy. :)


We checked out the playground at Eberwhite elementary school the other day. It has an awesome wooden play structure. James and I had fun running around in there too! It got a little claustrophobic at times though. It's definitely made for little people.