A hard nine months

I only thought my last pregnancy was longest nine months of my life. The stress that has held me hostage since last August has been torture. Sheer torture.

Since I haven't blogged at all about my husband's job and our search for a new home, perhaps I should start there ...

In August of last year, believing that hubby was about to receive a job offer from a police department 20 miles north of where we presently reside, we enlisted the help of a real estate agent and spent several Saturdays driving around Benton County looking for the perfect place to make our next home. Call me crazy, but I've always been enthralled with the idea of buying a "fixer-upper" and turning it into something quaint and charming.

Trouble is, most of the places that appeared on the internet to look like the perfect "project" looked in person like "the projects". Really. I can't count the times that I turned to our agent, Ron, and asked in amazement, "Did these people know that their house was being shown today???" We're talking junk piled so high on kitchen counters that I couldn't even tell whether it was granite or formica. We're talking about closets that looked like they'd been hit with explosives. One place had an uncovered kitty litter box so filled with cat feces, I had to cover my nose and mouth to keep from vomiting.

It was hard not to get discouraged at times.

We even looked for land on which to build a new house. We discovered very quickly, though, that unless you want to be in a subdivision (which we definitely do not ... we're a little tired of the Nazis POA and its Compliance Committee telling us we have to get permission for every improvement we want to make to our home) or unless you want to be half an hour from civilization (no thanks), land in Northwest Arkansas is scarce. And quite expensive ... we found several places where the asking price was $100,000 an acre.

And in the midst of this, after only being at his new department a little over seven months, another agency closer to home approached him with an offer to be their network administrator. It was a deal way too good to pass up. We finally realized the reason why we hadn't been able to find a house in Rogers ... God in His infinite knowlege, knew that we didn't need to move there and had blocked every attempt we'd made to buy a home there.

All this time, our house had been for sale with not a single offer in site. People had looked, but no one had been interested enough to call back, so the Chief and I breathed a collective sigh of relief as we simultaneously concluded that THIS is exactly where we are supposed to be. With that fresh revelation, that night after dinner, all five of us marched into the front yard and made a big production of taking down the "for sale" sign.

Decision made. Total relief.

Until two days later, when the phone rang, and a very nice middle-aged man asked to come see our house. We explained that we had just taken the sign out of the yard a couple of days before, but somehow a few minutes into the conversation, my husband agreed to let him and his wife come over the following afternoon.

And that's when the REAL adventure began ... which I promise to continue in tomorrow's blog.