Last night we basically crashed! By the time we got through eating dinner and watching America's Next Top Model (Big-up Danielle!), it was a wrap.
This afternoon we attended a home-buying seminar and discovered that in the scheme of things we are in pretty decent shape. Two things I gathered from the seminar:
1. We definitely can't move forward with the purchase of our home until after the baby has been born. Specifically, we'll need to wait until about a month after Napi has returned to work, which puts us somewhere around November, depending on a best-case scenario of three months maternity leave. A number of factors contributing to this actually, the most important being the monthly payment. The average price of a house around here is about $450,000 and that's probably where we'll end up. Best case scenario we'll be looking at a $2300+ mortgage payment. I could swing that, but it would be a beast! Together, we can do it and be able to feed Peanut at the same time. Peanut wins that battle any day.
2. Buyers have the upper hand around here right now. That's not to say the market is stagnant and we can walk in and demand a seller reduce his price by $100k. Prices across the board have risen in the area in 2006, up roughly 1-7% depending on where you are looking. But inventory has shot up, including an almost 300% increase in time on the market. Buyers win in that scenario.
All together the seminar was very informative, and unlike the rest of the attendees, and one woman who asked some rather interesting questions, I was dropping questions on them all night. Let it not be said I went down a road without being properly prepared!
A quick note on Peanut: He is all over the place lately, and this seems to run counter to all the info we've read that seemed to suggest his antics would die down significantly at this point in time. No no no! He has done the complete opposite and is now actively punching and kicking on an almost continuous basis. I told Napi that at this rate he may end up losing some weight in there. Which might not be a bad thing. We were watching that program about the mid-wife spot down in Florida and they mentioned an old-wives tale about determining the weight of a baby by checking the mother's shoe size. I think Napi is hovering around a size 9 or 10 right now...
Watch Him Grow!
