Goodbye Sucktober

Not gonna lie, this has been one of the hardest months of my life.  The last few weeks have been dark and frustrating and overwhelming for me.  We have been hemorrhaging money, close to seven grand in just insurance deductibles -- between the robbery, the toilet flood, and Anneliese's hospitalization -- although the vast majority of that is medical and will come out of our healthcare savings account, which thankfully is well-funded.  But still, I've just been feeling like I can't get my head above water.  Simple things overwhelm me, and things that should only be minor irritants have been pushing me to tears.  The only real non-sucky thing to happen this month was Anneliese's turning one, but even that was a little bittersweet for me (and also, if you'll recall, happened amongst a flood of tears). 

So basically we've started referring to this past month as Sucktober, and we won't be sad to see it go.  But it's now the 30th, and things finally seem to be on the upswing:

Our home repairs are imminent. After a bajillion phone calls between us, insurance adjusters, and multiple sets of contractors and repairmen, the damage caused by our toilet flood is finally scheduled to happen this week, and by next weekend we should have more than one real bed in our house, and have access to more than one potty.  It's going to rock.

They got the bad guys who robbed our house.  Despite that, it looks like the stuff they stole won't be recovered.  But, again... it's just stuff. We're replacing it slowly but surely (thank you insurance), and the burglars are having their days in court.  I toyed around with going, but decided that looking the punks in the eye wouldn't help me stop picturing strange thugs rifling through my house and my stuff, or give me any closure.  So, we decided to let our written report stand as our victim testimony instead.  Even without the recovered property, I'm glad they got caught -- I hope it means they're less likely to try to steal from someone again.

Anneliese is healthy.  She's had a fussy few weeks, but whatever virus so severely dehydrated her seems to be gone.  And all the rest of that stuff is just trite details compared to having a healthy baby.

The BIG news: we made an offer on a new home yesterday!!  The new house is beautiful, on a whole acre of land (a whole acre! still close to Raleigh! this is a very big deal for me), and the layout is maybe even better for our family than what we have now (something I had been worried about having to compromise on).  It's a short-sale, which means the sellers have it listed for less than what they owe on it.  So the seller has accepted our offer, but we still need their bank to approve it, which could take a couple of months.  But we're cautiously optimistic that this could be THE house (hence, going blog public about it) and we're very very excited to get our hands on it, renovate the crap out of it, and make it our new home.

I'm going to be thirty in two days, and I'm going to celebrate it tonight!  My awesome-of-awesomest sister planned a birthday dinner and celebration for me in Charlotte, and a whole host of my favorite people will be there to help me ring out Sucktober and ring in a new decade.  Update 10/31: So, clearly I didn't finish this blog post yesterday.  But we celebrated!  And it was fun! 

No, really, my sister is awesomer than yours.

We managed to laugh, drink, sing, and set off a smoke alarm at my mom's house, see a terrible/amusing movie at the best theater I have ever been to (also a bar and a dance club!), get evacuated out of the epicentre due to what we think was a fire alarm (let the record show: Ashley chugged Mark's beer on the way out of the theater, and John had to stop and poop #classymatchmadeinheaven), and got to check out lots of inappropriate costumes while drinking mystery beers in downtown Charlotte.

Two of my favorite guys -- Mark (duh) and David

It wasn't nearly as insane as this paragraph makes it sound, but it was a great fun night with lots of laughing and general merriment.

So there, Sucktober.  Peace, out.