Ch-ch-ch-changes

Changes are afoot over here.

One thing was expected, the other, not so much. But both are good.

The expected - an FET cycle. CD1 showed up on Monday, which is about a month after I stopped nursing Miss A. I had decided not to rush things and just give it a few months to see if it was going to show up on its own. A lot of women warned me that this first period would be excruciatingly painful, but I have to say that thankfully, so far that hasn't been the case at all. There's been lots of bleeding, but not much in the way of pain.

So when I saw the definitive sign that it was CD1, I called the clinic to schedule a 1-day work up. They couldn't get me in next week, so they're putting me on BCPs and scheduled the work up for mid-May. After that, the plan is to go immediately into an FET cycle.

However, it's possible that the plan may have to be postponed for a month or two.

That's because of the unexpected - it appears we may have bought another house over the weekend.

I say "appears" and "may have" because the sellers have accepted our offer, but it's a short sale, so we still have to wait for the bank's response, which could take 45-60 days. And it's possible the bank could reject it, even though we offered more than list price.

If the deal goes through, we'll be downsizing by about 20 percent. It's still a good-sized house - just over 3,000 square feet. It's a one-story as opposed to our current two-story, so it would be easier for my mom and our 15-year-old dog, and we wouldn't have to worry about Miss A around the stairs as much. It's also 4 houses down from a "tot lot" play area and a large, grassy greenbelt, 1/2 a mile to a top-notch elementary school and a park with a playground and tennis courts (R played in high school), just a few miles from my aunt, and exactly the same distance to my in-laws, down to the 10th of a mile, just in a different direction. So I really, really hope it works out.

I have discovered that an unexpected side effect of parenthood is bravery, at least in my case. I've wanted to downsize for a few years now, but I could never work up the courage to push the issue with my mom and R, because I knew they would hate the idea. But now Miss A is here, and I know we don't get do-overs on any of these moments we have with her, and somehow that knowledge makes me more brave.

The plan (don't I always have a plan? :-) ) is to rent out our current house for 3-4 years with the hope that it will increase in value to the point where we could sell it and get out of it the cash that we put down for it when we bought it. If we're able to do that, we will be able to turn around and pay off the house we are buying, which will give us the option of me being able to stay home without us having to bite our fingernails and squeak by every month. I grew up in a household where there were often questions about where the money was going to come from to pay that month's mortgage payment. Even as a little kid, I was aware of the stress, and I don't want that for Miss A. But I want to have options.

Let's hope things go a lot more "according to plan" for this house plan than they did for all of my IF plans...