And So It Begins

C & I never fight.  I'm not bragging, I'm just being honest.  We occasionally "have discussions" and there are times we get mad at each other but we have never engaged in any screaming matches, no one has ever slept on the couch, etc.  C & I are always careful to quickly talk about things so it never escalates. 

That's not to say it will always be like that but it's nice to think it could be.

You can probably imagine that with my mom's condition, I'm a little more on edge lately.  It definitely affects other parts of my life.  I always try to leave that to the side when I'm at home with my family.  I try not to be short with Addy and to remember that she's 2, and getting into messes and testing boundaries are what 2-year-olds do.

Now that we've added in the stress of finding a house, it's getting harder to keep myself in check.  There are times when I just want to scrap the whole plan and just BE for a while, you know?  Moving across the country, planning a wedding, buying a house, having another child - that's been our life/plan for the last 2 years and sometimes it's exhausting.

C & I have been having some "differences of opinion" about house hunting and we haven't even seen a single dang house yet!  We sat down the other night to write out what we want in a house and addressed all the aspects of the house like how many bedrooms and bathrooms, square footage, etc.  But we haven't yet figured out WHERE this dang house is going to be.

C seems to be pretty focused on one or two cities while I'm looking along a major highway which encompasses 6 cities.  At this point, both of us are feeling like the other is ignoring what we want even though his 2 cities are in my 6 cities.  I feel like he won't branch out and he feels like I'm deliberately ignoring his choices.

He said yesterday that in the end, he knows we have to get what's best for our family but he doesn't want to "lose" and that worries me.  We can't look at buying a house as winning or losing, that's not the way it works.  We both win when we finally find the house that not only works for us right now, but accommodates our family (what we think our family will be) 10 years from now.

But he's thinking parks and running paths and I'm thinking school districts and commutes.  He's thinking about being able to walk to things and I'm thinking that I don't care if we drive as long as we love the house.  He's thinking about gardening and I'm thinking about master suites.  

We decided last night that we'd come up with everything we both want on a list and rank those things according to true importance and then rate each house.  Hopefully that will make it less subjective and more objective.