Daring Young Mom

I love the line from Elf where Will Ferrell accuses the department store Santa of not being the real deal because he doesn’t smell like Santa, he smells like beef and cheese.

Well I’m not the real Santa either because I definitely smell like beef and cheese…beef, cheese and chlorine (we are LOVING my parents’ pool). Yesterday was my high school reunion and I kid you not, the buffet consisted of mounds of cheese, a few hors d’oeuvres and a giant side of beef under a hot lamp. Now I was certainly not there for the food, but beef and cheese? Seriously.

Some other random side notes include the fact that our class officers hired the reunion planning out to a random company who put on the most generic reunion I could have imagined. Not one yearbook was handy, not a single high school logo or mascot was seen. We all got a T-shirt that said our high school name and “Class of ”˜96” in boring sans serif font. There wasn’t even a mustang on it. Now I bet 1/3 of the high schools in America have a mustang as their school mascot. How hard would it have been to download a picture of a horse and put it on the shirts? I guess it was much harder than putting the name of the reunion planning company in HUGE print across the back with their web address and phone number in GINORMOUS letters.

A policeman was on duty in case we got out of control. He also posed us for our reunion picture while the photographer stood mutely watching.

They played music videos of songs that were popular while we were in high school. An old-school Backstreet Boys video came on, a video in which they were still boys and they had just made their American debut after becoming wildly popular with girls across Asia.

It made me wonder again how long I’ll be able to go by the name Daring “Young” Mom. At what point do I become the Backstreet-Old-Married-Men-With-Kids-Who-Refuse-to-Change-the-Name-of-Their-Group of the blog world?

I somehow conned my two best high school girlfriends into flying to Houston for the weekend to go to a reunion we swore we’d never attend and we had a great time seeing each other again. There were very few other people there that I recognized and even fewer who recognized me.

There wasn’t a great turnout and it seemed that the group largely consisted of the “popular” kids who intimidated the cheese out of me when I was 17. When chatting it up with people, we tried to find some sort of connection and the conversation tended to turn towards extra curricular activities.

Graduate: What did you do in high school?
Me: Besides eat beef and cheese? Um… homework.
Graduate: No, I mean extra-curriculars. Were you on dance team?
Me: Um…no. You weren’t a member of the Business Professionals of America club, were you? NHS? Theatre?
Graduate (blank stare): Were you there all 4 years?
Me: Nope. I moved to Texas from Canada Junior year. I was the Canadian Girl.
Graduate: Yeeeeaaahh… (moving on)

Truth be told, I actually met several really nice people and reconnected with a few old friends. The best part of the evening, besides the beef and cheese and the fact that after paying $120 to get in the door I was asked to pay $3 for a coke, was realizing that I am no longer intimidated by these people. I’m actually hardly intimidated by anyone anymore. I look back now and see that we all made different choices in our lives and became who we are and I’m happy with the way things turned out for me. Some people aren’t happy but for the most part we all became some form of the person we envisioned being in high school.

Sadly, I did not get the chance to confront the girl who “complimented” me senior year on my “sense of style” and my “bravery” to wear jeans every day to school. She even went so far as to tell me I should design my own clothing line and call it Katie’s Canadian Comfy Wear. She thought it would be so nice not to be burdened by fashion and to be able to wear whatever felt comfortable the way I could. Yes she carried the burden of driving the hot car her daddy bought her and wearing a different designer pants-suit every day to school, while I remain haunted to this day by a career in denim design that may never come to pass. Alas, we all must bear these little hardships as best we can.

…I need to work on my flexibility. Seriously. Last night we went to Cirque de Soleil and there’s this part of me that thinks, “Hey, I should work on my backbends so I can do that someday.”

I mean, I could almost – sort of – do that when I was in elementary school, the contortionism. As for today, I am far from being an athlete. I’m suffering from the post-nursing extra poundage. When I stop nursing, it takes me a few months to get used to eating for one again so I put on weight.

It comes just in time for my high school reunion this weekend. Yippee! I was looking in the mirror a couple of days ago, sizing myself up for the big fun and I realized I look much the same as I did 10 years ago.

Talking to Jen last week, (She was nice enough to fly across the country and then walk 3 miles to meet me for fish and chips. We had a great time getting acquainted and her daughter J — what a cutie!) it struck me what the main difference in my appearance is. I look like someone stuck a small hose in my mouth and puffed me up a few inches bigger, like an over-inflated tire.

I’m comforted by the fact that people will likely be too concerned about the way THEY look to notice the increase in my PSI.

This morning I was awakened by Laylee. She crept down the hall to my room and slowly opened the door. Hoping she’d go back to bed, I pretended to be asleep. With much effort, she hoisted herself up to stand on the box spring so her little face was level with mine.

Then she did what I do every night after she falls asleep. She kissed me on the forehead and whispered in my ear very softly, “Mommy, I love you. Have a nice dream.”

She then climbed down, crept down the hall and flooded the bathroom.

Move over Donny T cause there are new real estate moguls in town and we don’t need no steenkeen apprentice. We’ve already got two of our own. We just need a robo-realtor (played by “Nadine”), a disco-dancing family of marshmallow-eating bird wranglers to stay with for the weekend (played by “Lynn” and “Steffon”), a brilliant inspirational mastermind (played by Heavenly Father) and an opera-professor-turned-mortgage-broker in a pear tree (played by “Henry”).

So it’s hard to blog about things like home buying and selling homes without giving away too much personal information. I will say this, we are blessed!

Just over two weeks ago we decided to start seriously looking for a new home. By Sunday we were really discouraged and felt that there was no way we could find something in our price range that was worth buying.

The next morning, the first property we went to was priced well below the others we had looked at and it instantly felt like the right one. It had been sitting on the market for a “while” (take that with a grain of salt in this crazy market) and so we were able to get it for below their asking price. Within minutes of their counter-offer, another full price offer was made which they were unable to take because they had already signed with us.

The inspection turned out very clean. The house has a lot of “potential” (meaning we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us) but is in really good condition and move-in ready. It has a big back yard, 4 bedrooms, a tiled eating area (No more scraping macaroni off the dining room rug? Be still my heart!), and a family/play room on the main floor besides the formal living room (To become the music room/office. Who needs a formal living room, I ask you?). It is exactly what we were looking for.

Then this rainy weekend we put our house on the market and left to stay with Lynn and Steffon, with whom we had a great vacation. They are so fun and great to take us in when we didn’t want to be anywhere near the realtors and potential buyers milling around our home. And “milling” they were, I’m told. Our realtor did a fabulous job.

Within two days we had multiple offers on the table with the price escalating well above our asking price. Not only did the winning bidder pay more for our condo than we did for our new place, but they had no “out clauses” attached, no neighborhood review, no inspection required, no financial contingency. A completely clean deal, with a large amount of earnest money down.

We moved back into our home to pack with no showings to do, no realtors to talk to, done, done duh done done done. They are willing to close whenever we want to so we will be able to use the proceeds from the sale to buy the new home.

I’m kind of in shock and so grateful. Things could not have worked out more perfectly. We will be moving in a few weeks and then I’ll be more able to tell you how much “potential” the new home really has and how much slave labor it requires.

What it means to me is that we now have a home big enough to raise a fairly large family (no, still not an announcement) and even if the prices continue to skyrocket to insanity, we will be able to stay in an area we love and with a job Dan really enjoys and not be forced out for financial reasons. Yippee! Now to work with us all. I plan to pay Laylee one penny for every rock she picks out of the grass in the back yard.

I’m not posting pictures because it would be too easy to identify it on the MLS but I will say, it has a red front door and a face that looks like an owl with massive slanting eyebrows.