Making lemonade

I'm home this morning with Amelia, who is sick with a sore throat and fever (but her test for strep came back negative, thank goodness). I was planning to be off today anyway, but not for this reason...

Darryl and I have had our house up for sale for almost a year now. This past Sunday, a couple looked at the house, seemed to fall in love with it, and made an offer. They arranged to come by Wednesday to sign a contract on it. I took off today so that Darryl and I could look at houses with a realtor while Amelia was at daycare.

Yesterday, around noon, the daycare called to tell me that Amelia had a fever. I called Darryl to see if he could pick her up, and we agreed that we'd just have to take Amelia with us to look at houses. Then about 30 minutes later, Darryl emailed to say the couple backed out of buying the house. Huge bummer.

We had already told ourselves a million times that the couple could back out, but we were still excited about the possibility of moving to a new house. It was impossible not to be.

Even though we are really bummed out about it, though, I realize this is all for the best. I remember that when we first moved to Atlanta, before I had found a job, we would ride around different neighborhoods, scoping out places we'd want to live once we were a two-income family again. We fell absolutely in love with a particular subdivision, and the lots were selling like hotcakes. I prayed earnestly that I would get a job in time to for us to buy our own lot there, but it didn't happen. After I got a job several months later and we found our current house, we went back to look at that subdivision. More and more houses were popping up there as people were building, and we realized just how crowded that neighborhood was. The houses were practically on top of one another. Some of the houses built first were already showing some signs of wear. We were really grateful that we ended up not buying a house there.

So we're keeping that experience in mind. As we looked at houses in the MLS listings, we didn't find anything that we were absolutely in love with, nothing that we feel like we're really missing out on.

In the meantime, I think I'll just make some lemonade out of my lemons and enjoy my day at home with Amelia. It beats teaching The Sc@rlet Letter any day. :)

(And cross your fingers Amelia is well enough to go to her Halloween party tomorrow at daycare. Because what is cuter than little kids in their Halloween costumes? Um, nothing.)