maybe a vacation from my vacation will do the trick

We're back from our vacation, and everyone had a good time. My in laws rented a house for the week, and except for some typical frustrations when you are sharing a house with 6 other people, we had a fantastic time. The weather was (shockingly) great, all the kids got along famously, and it was lovely to spend quality time with family. Add into that mix lots of fried fish and ice cream, and it was almost heaven. We even made a one day trip out to Nantucket, and I promptly fell in love with the island. Wow. Talk about charming! I was ready to sell our house to the lowest bidders and move to a shack on the edge of town.

We were staying in Harwichport, a cute town with a cute town center, in a great location in the middle of Cape Cod. We were able to easily visit several of the other towns, like Chatham, Wellfleet, Provincetown, and Hyannis. A few years ago, Josh and I stayed in Chatham in January, and seeing it during the summer was obviously dramatically different. The Cape in the winter is beautiful, but it is clearly in its prime in August. The crowds! The sun! The yummy food! Sigh. I wish we were back already.

We've only been back for a couple of days and I'm already reacquiring the stress from this whole house-selling situation. I don't want to seem ungrateful, because clearly we are incredibly fortunate to even be considering a move to a larger house and obviously no one is forcing us to move and I should probably keep my trap shut about my complaints, so let's get all of those statements out of the way. That being said, selling a house is HARD. Selling a house with two kids less than two years apart who have a lot of shit is hard. Selling a house with two kids and two dogs is also very hard. Keeping the house spotless all the time because people ask for showings on almost no notice is ridiculously hard. Having people CONSTANTLY ask for showings in the middle of naptime is enough to make you want to tear out your hair.

As we were getting ready to leave for the beach, I literally had to wait until 7pm on Friday night to start packing because we had showings scheduled until 5:30 on Friday evening. The only thing I could do was make a pile of clothing that I shoved into a garbage bag and then shoved that bag into the attic since I didn't want to make a mess in the house, and I also didn't want to advertise that we were going out of town (for obvious reasons). Then the house had to be left in perfect condition since we had open houses and showings all week.

I haven't even fully unpacked the car since I can't just unload everything into the house until I can actually put it away, lest I make a mess and have someone ask for a showing. Suffice to say, the process is EXHAUSTING. Add a business trip for Josh into the mix, and I am ready to raise the white flag of surrender.

Again, I'm totally grateful and I know this is exciting, and we are so fortunate, but seriously, I am tired. I'm almost ready to take the house off the market and deal with a small house for another year. Only the prospect of doing this again a year from now when I have TWO mobile children keeps me from pulling the plug. The thought almost makes me want to cry. So we'll stick it out for a little longer and hope someone comes in with an offer we like. We've had 3 more offers so far, each lower than the last one. One of the offers seemed promising, and we negotiated back and forth for quite a while, but they finally refused to come up and they refused to come down, plus they kept throwing in silly demands, and we finally rejected the whole thing. It kills us to do that, but if we have to lose a ton of money, it just isn't worth it for us to sell right now.

And... wow. Look at that. 5 minutes in and I've already depressed myself. On to happier topics!

The kiddos are totally awesome, by the way. They were amazing during the vacation and slept in their stroller or the car when we needed them to, they even shared a room in the Cape house (which they'd never done before) and except for some minor hiccups, it was great. Gabe is fearless and funny and sweet and says the craziest things. He gave me a whole play by play about what would happen to a crab on the beach if he tried to touch it. It would bite him, he would cry, the crab would go in time-out because the mommy crab would get angry because the baby crab wasn't listening to her. Hmm, sounds familiar, can't imagine why.

He still eats everything (still surprising to me) and I mean everything- brussels sprouts, salmon, couscous, soups, meat, you name it, he'll eat it. Although the two year old thing is kicking my ass, I still find him to be relatively reasonable on most things. He doesn't throw many tantrums, and our major complaint is the lack of listening. I'm wondering if two year olds suffer from some kind of hearing deficiency or something.

Josie is desperately trying to crawl, up on all fours, rocking and scooting backward. She is also making a decent attempt at talking. She will look right at me, and if I say "mama" to her, she will repeat "mama" right back. But does that count as saying a word? I feel like it doesn't, but Josh thinks it does because she will also scream "MAMA MAMA MAMA" when I put her down in her crib and she wants out. Gabe's first word was this very deliberate, looking right at me when I walked into the room, arms up, "mama". This seems more random, but who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?

She is also delicious adorable, and frantically tries to make eye contact with people and then grins and bats her little eyelashes and shakes her head from side to side as if she were saying no. I think she is imitating people who walk up to her and shake their heads saying, "Oh, aren't you a cute little thing?" and now she thinks that is how you communicate with people. It is pretty funny.

I took approximately 89,372 photos on the trip, and I will upload shortly and share. And that's all the news for now. Oh! I also finished a quilt for Josie while on vacation! Well, a quilt top. I will take the quilt top to be quilted to the quilt bottom this week and then it will be a real quilt. I'll take pictures of that too.

How is summer going for you?