Planning a Move May Be Easy, Finding a Home – Difficult
When you are looking to or have to move from one place to another as a single person or even a couple, it’s a whole lot easier than when you have children in a particular school district. I have known I have had to move for quite some time now and have been looking daily at online places that share rental homes as well as buying local newspapers and picking up those free weekly ad newspapers too.
I came up dead.
Each place I called had a different sort of response. One person played phone tag with me for weeks until finally we were able to talk just to find out he had contracted the place and had other rentals but not in my kid’s school district. So that was a fail. Next, I spoke with this person who was renting half of their home out, sort of like a duplex scenario and while on the phone with him, he increased rent by like $100. If he is doing that over the phone and will be living above me as I rent from him, well what else is going to “change” after I move in. Last but not least there was this other place available, perfect location, awesome land, just my dream place. I felt lucky to find this rental, went back and forth in emails was told to set up a viewing time and then told that they had decided to list their property rather than rent it.
Sigh.
I got frustrated but I kept on looking and now here it is about 8 weeks out before I need to have a place lined up and I am just running dry. Thankfully I know I now have other options but it’s just the point that no matter how hard I tried nothing was falling into place. Not to mention coming up with close to $2400 to move into a rental would be about ridiculous while I am trying to pay back oil costs from the Winter. That is a lot of money to come up with for a place that you are renting, not buying. Rentals are not cheap for a big family, maybe if you need a 2 bedroom you can find decent price but umm I have three kids, not one.
Times are difficult for all but I am thankful that just recently my situation looked up and things will probably be a bit rough until settled but I am good with that. If there is one thing I can handle, it’s a little bit of bumpy road that leads to the best destination ever.
I do my best. I stay positive. And in turn things always look up. Always.
Image courtesy of Evgeni Dinev / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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My Rules for a Kid Sleep Over
My rules for the kids having a sleep over is pretty much; there are no rules. Well okay so they can’t go running around wild without any supervision from an adult, but for the most part there are no rules. In my opinion a sleep over is something that is meant to be a fun time for all. Between popcorn and movies while staying up later than you normally are allowed and then to sleep in the next day because there is no school is quite simply part of enjoying childhood.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big kid at heart so sleep overs are a fun thing that I let my kids do, my younger boys have yet to have a sleep over but there day will come. For now the sleep overs really only apply to my social queen daughter who has had plenty of sleep overs. Being that my daughter is gone every other weekend and twice a week makes it hard sometimes to schedule sleep overs and her to have special fun time with friends or family alone, I try my hardest to give her some extra time with friends after school on occasion.
This week is the perfect example, tonight my daughter will have a friend over after school. Before my daughter left on Monday to go to school and spend two nights at her Dads she requested that I please try to setup for a friend or two to come over on Thursday after school upon her return home. I wasn’t able to get two friends but I did reach the Mom via text of her friend who comes over often and set up for that friend to come over after school.
For me, having friends over for play time and sleep overs really just helps establish that socializing outside the structure of school is important for children to grow. Children need not only grow in an educational way but in a social way as well. With sleep overs my child learns that she is to let the guest have first choice of activities, movies, etc and in turn she learns to let go of her leadership control skills. A sleep over and play time after school are great ways to encourage a bit of freedom and trust with kids while still monitoring them to ensure things don’t get too out of hand.
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The Kids Will Forever Come First
I am not one to be afraid to walk away from anything if it means that my kids and I will most benefit from a situation. You see, I am a huge promoter of always being at your best. I live my life to find my happiest place and to really know what I need to remain happy.
This is not to say I am not sad sometimes, that I don’t go through various forms of depression when things get extremely challenging. I am human. I am not perfect.
With that being said, I am queen of ensuring that no matter how hard something is to decide or to follow through with after a decision has been made, that I will stick with it and follow through. This may take a long time, sometimes years, but I do it.
In turn, my kids see that I always put their happiness {and mine as well as ours as a family} first. This is why my kids and I are so close knit, positive and outgoing. We just have this amazing dynamic and I will never, ever let anything come in between that to break it.
Think about the Mama Bear seeing you happen upon her cub, she will fight tooth and nail to keep that baby safe, even if you meant no harm. That is how I fight – to remind myself that others in our world may not mean harm to us, but as a means to continue to live in this happy rhythm I have worked so hard to create for my family, I will fight at all costs to ensure the balance of kids, family and adult time remains.
There is something about having that balance in your parental and personal life that really helps make things work well together. I love that my life simply flows naturally, and that the kids are happy kids because of how hard I work to remain positive, happy and healthy!
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Why Did I turn on the News?
Oh my gawd, it’s been a very long time since I have turned the news on and now I know why. While I enjoyed catching up on some local news that I had no clue about as well as seeing what the weather shall be ahead of time, there was nothing but sad, bad and negative coverage. What has our world come to?
We don’t want to test our own missiles because we don’t want to intimidate Korea? We don’t want to flex our muscles anymore, so basically the United States has sadly become a joke. While I am blessed and thankful to live in the “land of the free”, I cannot sit and watch the news because it seems we have lost our willpower to be that super power country. We the people need to stand up and demand that we become that once strongly united country. We can do this.
I fear the world my children will live in as adults is going to be that of a socialist country. One in that the government controls if you can sneeze and takes so much of my kids hard earned income that they barely can survive. We do not need to be dependent upon the government for common sense things. There are many ways to resolve problems in this world.
Here is what I think; I think that we the people need to come together, help each other. It takes a community to raise a child. What happened to neighbors having barbeque’s together, friendly laughter with kids running around outside? We have become lazy, electronically dependent and sadly some children don’t even know what it’s like to go outside and use their imagination to play outside.
The news made me very sad and all wound up at the same time. I realized I was getting all wound up about our country that I had to shut off the news. I couldn’t sit there and listen any longer. I want us to be that country of the people, the strong, the proud but it takes “we the people” to get it that way. I think that regardless of our political views and stance that we can all come together as a nation, a community of humans who care about the future generations to try to resolve issues, help each other and clean out the government in a way that makes them answer to us. After all, the government is suppose to answer to us, so let’s come together and stand strong.
It’s not about what you believe to be right versus wrong. It’s not about your personal views on the various political issues; it’s simply about a wonderful, free nation of people coming together to ensure that each of our views are heard and debated the way they should be in government. Not just favored by who has the most money invested.
I know we can do this, just nervous that it may take a civil war type situation to get things resolved. I don’t want war on our soil. I don’t want war to resolve things. We the People are better than that….use efficient communication alongside standing firm on what we feel is the right government. I don’t feel like we live in the world our fore fathers fought for, it’s sliding slowly into a socialist world and that scares the crap out of me.
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A Family Doesn’t Mean Blood Bond, It’s More than That
Think about a child you know who has a person they call Mom or Dad who isn’t their blood related Mom or Dad. How about that person you call Grampa but isn’t your blood relative? That’s me. Well the Grampa part. The person I call Grampa on my mom’s side of the family is the person I grew up to call Grampa he was and still is Grampa in every sense of the word, but he was my Gram’s second husband and since I was about 14 years old or so, her ex husband. My Grampa is still a huge part of my life, sadly he gives me crap about not stopping in to visit as often as I should, he only lives down the road really. When my Gram and Grampa went through divorce, something I obviously don’t remember as I was young and that’s adult stuff that kids don’t need to deal with, I ended up still continuing a relationship with my Grampa. From trips to Maine when he lived there to trips to his house he rented here in the town I live in. I loved spending time with my Grampa and even consider all those who are his blood family to be my relatives too, they are truly a part of my family.
When people who are not blood related to you fall apart due to a divorce, creating a situation where they are not longer a legal extension of your blood family yet they still stand by your side and consider you family, love you with all of their hearts and are there for you, that means the world more than anything else. Knowing that I am loved and have an extensive family, full of loving people who are both blood and non-blood related just makes me smile. My Grampa has four children, they have children and my Grampa has siblings too; all of which I refer to as my aunts, uncles, cousins and great aunts and great uncles, what have you. I never say “well used to be cousin”, who does that? Once people have been accepted into your life as your true family, that is simply how it stays. A true bond that cannot be broken unless something extraordinary happens that breaks that bond. In my case, the bond is still going strong.
It is always evident how strong that bond is during my daughter’s various extra curricular activities and I run into my Great Aunt who has a grand daughter about the age of my daughter. The girls always seem to end up in something together through out the year, even though they go to different schools. It’s so much fun to know that not only is my Great Aunt there to witness her own granddaughter, but that she also gets to see how big my daughter is now. It saddens me that I don’t make enough time for some of my family, both blood and non blood related but with Winter being over and the boys getting older, I plan to make a change to start visiting them more often and truly making my complete family more important.
After all, the bonds I have are such that I hope to allow my children to experience too, in their own way.
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