When the snow comes

I told my son, months ago, that the baby would come when there was snow on the ground.

Today we had our first snowfall - nothing more than a light dusting, but snow nonetheless.

I guess it's time for this baby to come.

Tomorrow is my "official" due date. My MIL arrives on Sunday evening - less than 48 hours to go! Once she's here, I can finally relax and start anticipating labour rather than willing it to hold off just a little while longer. So far, so good. I can feel my body starting to prepare for labour, but I feel like it will still be a few days before anything significant starts to happen. My current bet is Tuesday - but, of course, the baby will come when he or she is ready. They all come out eventually!

The boy and I had a surprisingly fun afternoon walking around the neighbourhood and nearby greenspace, admiring the snow and playing in the leaves. I admit I've kept us too cooped up in recent weeks, my energy waning in the late weeks of pregnancy. I always forget how enjoyable and even necessary it is for us to get outside. We both needed it badly. The boy blew off a great deal of pent up energy while I enjoyed the fresh air and the renewed energy from just getting up and walking outside for a while. When we got home, we thawed out under the blankets with mugs of hot cocoa and a movie. It was nice.

We have some hopeful news regarding our search for a new place to live. After three weeks of looking at rentals that were, to be concise, unacceptable, dotted with the occasional "maybe", we finally found a home that is exactly what we were hoping for - more, even. We submitted our rental application to the landlord today and are now praying and waiting for his decision.

This was particularly welcome after a crushing evening earlier this week. After a string of especially bad viewings, we finally found one that was acceptable. Feeling both desperate and relieved, we were nearly ready to take it on the spot - until the landlord adamently refused to allow our two cats. It felt like such a blow at the time. In hindsight, I am glad we were unable to take it. It certainly would have been acceptable, but it was nowhere near as perfect as the place we have found now. I should have known there was a plan in all this.

The place we have applied for couldn't be more ideal. The landlord was very polite and professional (a rarity, sadly enough). The home is beautiful and very well maintained, and the layout is nice as well. The location is perfect, only two blocks over from where we currently live. We live in a very nice quiet neighbourhood right next to a beautiful greenspace, large playground, library, and swimming pool. The rent is well within our price range and much lower than we are paying right now. The landlord offers a cash incentive after one year in order to encourage long term tenants, which is exactly what we are looking for, a place where we can stay for the duration of our time here. The landlord lives right upstairs. Pets are allowed. It's a nice size and has plenty of storage space. It has private laundry, a big one for me since I don't much like the idea of shared laundry when I have cloth diapers to wash on top of our regular laundry. And, as a very exciting plus, it doesn't have white walls!

I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much. If he turns us down, we have found another place that we would accept if it's still available. It's not near as ideal, but it's very nice and we would be happy there, I think.

Although our current lease does allow us to stay until April, our landlords have said they will let us out earlier - which is not surprising, as they would like to move back upstairs themselves (they had planned to move into the suite downstairs in the meantime, as the lease for those tenants was up at the end of December anyway). It was frustrating news, as they knew we wanted something long term and they assured us before we signed the lease that they wanted the same thing. Now we'll be moving into our fourth house this year. At first we were just looking casually, but thinking about it further, we realized that, sadly enough, this was the most convenient time for us to move. My husband is off school for Christmas break, my in-laws are here and happy to help, and it wouldn't be any easier to move with a four month old than it would to move with a newborn. It'll be harder for me, physically, but I've been assured that I'm not to do much at all. If we waited until later in the new year, we'd be moving by ourselves, with a more alert and active baby, while my husband was in school with no breaks and exams approaching.

More than anything, though, we both found it difficult to live here with the knowledge that we had to move hanging over our heads for weeks and months on end. My motivation to keep a clean house plummeted immediately. It was hard to pass up "acceptable" houses in hopes of something better, but at the same time we didn't want to settle for something when we didn't have to move immediately. We couldn't help but keep an eye out for potential rentals, which was time consuming and distracting. It just felt better overall to decide we'd leave at the end of December and start looking for rentals accordingly. Do it, get it over with, and be able to go back to our normal lives.

But wow, did we ever see some bad places. Many of them needed a good scrub and a fresh coat of paint. One of them was missing a lid on the toilet. One landlord demanded to know why we didn't want to rent his place when we told him we weren't interested (oh, where to begin). Most of the houses had the laundry in very strange places - one had the laundry in the bedroom, another in the dining area, many had them outside, and one particularly bad one had the washer in the bathroom and the dryer in the kitchen. The majority had very odd layouts, clearly designed merely to earn extra income for the landlord, like having to walk through a bedroom to get between the kitchen and the rest of the house, having no living room at all, or having no doors on the bedrooms and ensuite bathroom. It was such a relief to see this place and find that it looked like a nice, normal house.

Now hopefully everything will fall into place with it. In the meantime, I have other pressing matters to attend to - like a baby sweater to finish knitting. It was put aside while I whipped up some washcloths to include with thank you gifts for the midwives. Time to finish off that sleeve and get it washed and blocked before its tiny owner arrives. Any day now...