House buying and Peanut farming

Corey and I have affectionately dubbed the one yet-to-be-born "Peanut". I'm not sure why Peanut, especially since she looked freakishly like a gummy bear on all of our early ultrasounds, but Peanut it is.

The official date we will find out if Peanut has boy parts or girl parts is July 30th, which is both exciting and nerve wracking at the same time. I keep waiting for it to hit me that there is an actual, living being a few inches below my belly button, but still it is surreal. In fact, the only indication I have of her presence (besides the constant vomiting) is the fact that I ate a McDonalds cheeseburger a few days ago. No baby = no meat, but this little one is a carnivore just like her daddy, so I gave in to her demands. Thankfully, McDonalds' meat is very un-meat like and I was able to chew it while pretending it was a dry, bland mushroom.

Corey has been in ninja mode, rushing here and there almost so quickly that I can only make out a blur where I know him to have been. Between work and classes he has been trying extra hard to figure out a way to keep our real estate agent and the seller's agent from killing each other before we buy the house we want. The deal has been called off because of their antics several times, and the boy has had to make late night phone calls smoothing things over more than once. I never thought we would be mediating between two grown men, but a move-in ready house is a rare thing out here so we're doing whatever we can.

We've seen dozens of houses that have been trashed (quite literally) to levels anywhere between dirty and condemnable, and unfortunately the premium for buying one that has new carpet, paint, tile, and landscaping is around $30k. Normally I'd never shell out that kind of dough and we would buy a fixer-upper ourselves and HGTV it to our heart's content, but my expanding belly does little for my energy level or my propensity to inhale copious amounts of toxic paint fumes, so we're accepting our self-appointed titles as Mr. and Mrs. Sucker and springing for the huge markup on the bells and whistles. Apparently we are not the only schmucks in Surprise though, as every house we've put an offer in on has had several more by the end of the day. End result: outbidding the other lazy shoppers. Cha-ching. Let's all just cross our fingers that our overpriced abode holds value for three years so we can break even at the end of this ride the Air Force calls an assignment.