Dream home

There is still plenty of stuff to pack, but for the moment I have run out of boxes. Hopefully, more will be acquired tomorrow, but until then...

Tomorrow, we will be visiting Charming Bungalow for our final walkthrough before closing. I am perhaps feeling a bit anxious about this, as evidenced by a recent dream.

Now, Charming Bungalow is entirely vacant, and has been for some time. The seller, a realtor who purchases, updates, and resells homes as a nice side business, has never actually lived there. Occupancy after closing is immediate. However, in my dream, the seller had decided to move his entire extended family in a week before closing. And when we arrived for our final walkthrough, they were all there having a poker tournament.* Piles of clothing and furniture were everywhere, and no one seemed at all concerned about how they were going to move everything out in the three days that remained until closing.

On top of that, the house had rearranged itself, and the downstairs bedroom had increased in size by about thirty feet, and featured a sloped ceiling, stairs, and several layers of carpeting. Another bathroom, with a giant bathtub and a tiny, dishpan-sized hot tub, had appeared. There were some other differences, but I can't remember just what they were now.

I shared this dream with a few relatives and coworkers, and in return, I got to hear some interesting stories. A lot of people dream about houses, it turns out. One coworker, who has done the purchase-remodel-resell thing a time or two herself, said, "Well, when the kids were little, we never seemed to have enough space. I used to have these dreams where we'd suddenly discover a whole other wing, or sometimes just a room, that we'd somehow forgotten about." My mother said, "Remember the linen closet upstairs, at your grandmother's house? I used to dream that it was a bathroom instead."** I periodically dream that a door in my parents' attic opens to a library. Well, not exactly a library, just a nice carpeted room with the walls covered in bookshelves. Sometimes, this dream room is haunted; other times, it's just a bookshelf-lined room. Also, I used to have dreams that Dragon and I had just found a beautiful apartment, with all sorts of wonderful features, and once we moved in, we'd find out that something was drastically wrong with it. Maybe there were no locks on the doors. Or all the walls were glass, or it had been cleverly disguised and was actually located in the middle of the museum or a mall, so curious museum-goers or shoppers could peer in at us whenever they wished.

Anyway, houses are a big deal in many ways. No wonder we dream about them.

*Dragon likes to watch those televised poker tournaments. They have been on frequently lately. Scary that they're creeping into MY dreams now.

**This brings to mind an entirely different type of dream. I'll be running around a college campus, gym, museum, movie theater, or some other large building, walking in and out of bathrooms. Dozens of them. All of them filthy, or crowded, or otherwise unsuitable for use. Eventually, I'll wake up and realize that I need to use the bathroom. I discussed this once with a former coworker, and we both were (oh, no) relieved (sorry) to discover that we weren't the only ones to have dreams like that. As I recall, we practically fell out of our chairs laughing, saying, "And then you sort of start dreaming lucidly, and think, Why the hell do I keep dreaming about BATHROOMS, for crying out loud? Why can't I dream about something pleasant? Oh, wait. I better wake up now."

Boy howdy. If there's a graceful ending after that second footnote, I'm too tired to think of it. Have a nice evening, 'kay?

Homeward bound

Whoa. Just, whoa.

My household has gotten rather a lot accomplished in the past month.

1. I turned thirty.

2. So did Dragon.

3. Baby Boone is almost ridiculously beautiful. His post-bath hair is charmingly curly, and I just about melted with the cuteness when he smiled and squeaked in happiness after a bath earlier this week. He has also has been acquiring new skills at a furious rate; he WAVED at me in the grocery store today. I had been joking that he'd waved at me through the daycare window the other day, but really I thought that he'd just decided to take a good look at his hand, and any semblance of a wave was wishful thinking on my part. Now I'm wondering if he really was waving, because that sure was a wave in the checkout line today.

Also, from his daycare report sheet on Friday:

"Baby Boone had a little road trip today! I put him in the exersaucer and he really liked the steering wheel. He kept turning it. I don't know where he was going. :) "

Brilliant, that child.

4. Boy Wonder is rather brilliant also, having decided entirely on his own that wearing Big-Boy Underwear is the way to go. One Sunday morning, he asked to wear underwear, and I told him that if he stayed dry until it was time for grocery shopping, he could color with markers. (He loves markers, but his have been in hiding for some time, due to Excessive Coloring on Inappropriate Surfaces. Just because the markers are washable doesn't mean that you SHOULD use them on your breakfast plate and the coffee table.) He got to color with markers, and he has also remained dry since, except for a couple got-too-busy-playing-and-forgot-to-go accidents.


5. And, yeah. So. Remember that house hunt? All signs indicate that it is over. We found The House. (In correspondence with Hawkins, I've been referring to it as Charming Bungalow, and thus shall it be known here.) If all goes well, Charming Bungalow will be ours on Thursday. (Then, and only then, will I post the story of how we found Charming Bungalow. The whole thing reeks so strongly of of This Must Be Fate that I don't want to jinx it.) Hence the lack of blogging lately; I have been consumed with making an offer to purchase, waiting for the offer to be accepted, cheering upon the offer's acceptance, scheduling and attending a home inspection, securing financing, being nervous about whether or not we will really get financing, thinking about paint colors (we've been living in apartments for ten years; we REALLY want to paint a couple of rooms now), picking out paint colors, packing, calling the realtor and mortgage lender with last-minute questions, looking for packing boxes, packing some more, cleaning, packing, doing laundry, packing, trying not to lose any of the Important Paperwork, packing, wrangling Boy Wonder as he tries to help me pack, packing, shopping for appliances, and packing.

Speaking of packing...yeah, I've got some stuff to do.