As of tomorrow we will have had 18 private showings of our house. Today alone we had 4 showings. Now all we need is one person to make an offer…

Today we have someone coming to look at our house, tomorrow another someone is coming to look at our house and on Sunday we are having an open house. It’s officially official, our house is for sale.

We are in the process of selling our house. I’m pretty excited to be getting a new house, we’ve been looking at a few and found one we really like but we have to get our house ready to put on the market before we can make any offers. And getting a house ready to sell is a total pain. We’ve cleared out several loads to Goodwill, packed up all the clutter (clutter defined as pictures of us, Lexi, knick-knacks, half of Lexi’s toys, photo albums and pretty much anything else that makes the house feel lived in) We’ve been cleaning everything - scrubbing woodwork and floors, organizing cupboards, vacuuming cobwebs out of the basement, washing windows, dusting - and realizing that the house was a lot dirty than we thought it was.

We’ve also been making some minor and major improvements to the house. Minor ones include replacing the ceiling fan in the kitchen, the light in the dining room, and buying a new rug for the front hall. Major improvements include replacing the roof.

So if you know of anyone who wants to buy a house in St. Paul, send them our way.

Kevin and I own a house (which means we have a morgage), I have one of those 9-5 jobs (well, it’s really 7:30-3:30), I have a seven month-old daughter, drive a minivan, and have a dish set that matches. All of this type of stuff is what may make a person feel like a grown-up. But it didn’t have too much of an impact on me.

Last weekend, however, we went to my parents’ house to celebrate the September birthdays. (Emily, Mike and I were all born in September.) My parents got me a set of luggage. That is a serious grown-up gift. But what really makes me feel like a grown-up is not the fact that I got luggage, but I got luggage because when my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I told her that I wanted luggage. That’s what make me feel like a grown-up.

Last night we decided to rearrange the living room for the 3rd or 4th time. We realized we have this need to move the furniture around every 6 months or so. This time we took the huge entertainment center out of the living room and put it on the porch. The porch is now officially tacky (and if you see us storing old matresses out there, please feel free to step in and tell us that the porch is starting to look like a junkyard). We also brought another small bookshelf down to the living room and the old t.v. stand up from the basement. Everything seems to fit a little better and we don’t have any towering bookshelves in the living room - which I really like. I’m just glad that the beast of an entertainment center is out of the room. I really hated that thing.

Today it was beautiful outside. About 70 degrees, sunny, and a nice cool breeze. I wanted to spend most of the day outside but we also had a ton of stuff to get done, so we comprised, we spent the day outside doing yard work. Kevin weed wacked the edge of our yard (our mower doesn’t get close enough so you have to mow the edge with the weed wacker) and cut back the lilac bushes, again. I went to a nursery and asked a really nice lady named Joann a zillion questions about peranials and plants that like full sun.

Okay, wait….let me back up….a couple weeks ago,
Kevin noticed that the grass in front of our house

wasn’t growing in as nicely as the grass in our backyard

(okay, the backyard looks pretty good, except for the hole Speak has been working on for a year now.)

So anyway, we decided to tear up the front lawn and replace it with ground cover, cool looking plants that don’t need mowing. We only did a small section of the lawn (we did the little patch on the right side of the stairs. It took a while to rip up the grass, Kevin did 95% of the work. He took a garden hoe to it and just hacked away until the grass was gone. We bought really cool looking plants at the nursery. They have names like “dragon scales.” So right now the hill is looking a little sad because everything has to fill in, but once it’s all in, most of the plants are supposed to have bright colored flowers on them and stuff and then they are supposed to turn cool colors in the fall. Hopefully, that works.

One thing I thought about today, was how everyone has this need to have a perfect lawn in front of their house (and I’ll admit I am one of those people. I would love to have a thick green lawn, or beautiful gardens - unfortunately, I am just about the worst gardener on the planet, so it’s not going to happen.) Our nextdoor neighbor politely mentioned to us one day that we have a lot of creeping charlie in our yard and he worked really hard to make sure he didn’t have any in his yard. Basically, he was saying, “don’t you dare let it creep into my yard.” However, when I was at the nursery, one of the plants the nice lady recommend was a plant called “Creeping Jenny.” It’s a very cute clover like plant with little yellow flowers. When I got home, I looked at my yard, I have tons of the stuff growing all over. Our neighbor was pointing it out to us at one point, telling me of some chemical that would get rid of the “weed.” Now, how come when it is running rampant in my yard it’s a weed, but when it’s $9.99 for 2 plants at the nursery, it’s “ground cover”? Some weeds are ugly, I’ll agree. I don’t particularly like going barefoot and stepping on a pricker bush, but when I looked around my yard today, I noticed that the clover had little white flowers, the creeping charlie had purple blooms, and there is this cool fern thing growing in the middle of my garden that i am pretty sure is a weed, but I like it so it gets to stay. I like the way that the weeds put some color into an otherwise manicured lawn. I wonder who got to decide one day that part of God’s creation was a weed and needed to be pulled, and why did people listen? I decided today while I was planting my “ground cover” that I wasn’t going to worry about the weeds in my yard anymore. Sure, I’ll pull the pricker bushes so I don’t have to pull thorns from Speak’s paws, but the Creeping Charlie stays. So does the clover. I like planting flowers because I like the bright color and how they attract butterflies and rabbits to my yard, so why would i go through the work of destroying weeds that have bright flowers and look pretty cool? Maybe I’ll just start transplanting the weeds to my front yard, so I can have more color out there, too.

Today we did yard work all afternoon and evening. It started with Kevin deciding to mow the lawn. He decided it was about time when we started losing Speak in the grass. Anyway, the plan was to get the lawn mowed and then do other things. Well, our neighbor saw Kevin outside and made a comment about the creeping charlie in our yard. (For those of you that don’t know, creeping charlie is a weed that grows in the grass and in the garden and winds itself around everything and is impossible to get rid of. However, it does have really cute little purple flowers which Kevin and I both thought looked kind of cool so we never did anything about the weeds) Basically, our neighbor told us that he had had a problem with the weed and noticed we were having the problem. I think it was his polite way of saying that he didn’t want our creeping charlie to creep it’s way back into his yard. So after Kevin and Bob had their talk, we decided we should also pull weeds. Then we decided that we should try and regrow grass in the patchy spots in the yard. This meant a trip to Ace Hardware. I had a coupon for free flowers at Ace so while we were there we decided to get a whole flat of flowers to plant in the spots we had weeded. So we planted Lupines and a few others. Then I decided the garden needed a new edge so I went back to Ace to get stuff to edge the garden with. Meanwhile, Kevin mowed, raked out all the dead leaves and bagged everything up. An hour of mowing the lawn turned into an all afternoon project. Now I am sore and have blisters but I am really excited about everything we accomplished today. I can’t wait to see the flowers bloom. They are supposed to be really colorful and bright. Hopefully, they will look as cool as the pictures on the pots.

I let Speak outside this afternoon and about 10 minutes later our neighbor lady came to the back door with Speak at her heals. She told me that she and her granddaughter were playing outside and when she looked up, Speak had joined them. Doh. This means he has found yet another small hole to escape through. Our backyard is fenced in by all the neighbor fences touching each other and surrounding our backyard so there are small holes between fence posts that the dog can fit through. When we first got him, we walked around the yard and put chicken wire in front of the holes and it kept him well contained. Then, about a month ago, he realized that he could fit under the gate that goes across our drive way. So we fixed that problem by laying a big board in front of the gate. Now he’s found a new spot to squeeze through. Tomorrow, Kevin is off to Home Depot to look for a solution.