The Cadillac of Minivans

I know some of you must be wondering why I have not mentioned anything about moving. That's because we aren't. At least not right now. Here's why not:

1. I have come to terms in my mind with sending my kids to Catholic school. So what if they don't have science until 4th grade? We have "Science Saturdays" at our house anyway. Yes, Charlie is a quirky kid. That's in addition to having migraines, and possibly epilepsy (it is not as bad as it sounds). He's going to be quirky in public school, too. And besides, they won't have to spend half of Sunday in Parish School of Religion.

2. Charlie's teacher is awesome. Really, really awesome. She's about 24, cute as a button, loves being a teacher and genuinely loves kids. It gives me hope that the principal has a open mind and can move in the right direction as far as staff.

3. Not to be shallow, but we love our house. We have renovated the whole house, hands on, ourselves. We had a beautiful new garage built, and worked on the yard and garden for 9 years.

We made an offer on the house I mention in my post Legos and All, though we had not yet sold ours. It was a very fair offer in this abysmal housing market. The man who owned the home flips homes for a living and needed to sell this one in order to start a new project. Although the thought of owning two homes was scary, Mark did the math (he always does) and we could pull it off for six months. Well, the owner counter-offered with something ridiculous, actually he wanted over asking price. We let the contract lapse.

A few weeks later we were at a benefit gala for a school in memory of a woman we knew who had died recently. We had friends there from church, school, soccer, t-ball. As we spoke to people I kept saying things to Mark like "We can still play t-ball here, right?" and "Of course we'll still go to church here, right?" The husband of the woman who died, who had been bugging us for months not to move, begged us one more time that night. Is was like God Himself shined a light down upon us, and angels sang. Mark and I both had the same thought.

A few days later I called our realtor, who is our friend, goes to our church, has kids in the school etc. and told her the news. We wanted to take the house off the market. It had absolutely nothing to do with her, but that we decided everything else fell into place, and if we needed more living space, heck, we could finish the basement. There was silence on the line. I waited for the disappointment, irritation, veiled anger. It didn't come.

"You don't need a bigger house, Cindy. With three boys what you need is a better car."