Things are beginning to fall into place. Rather, I suppose I should say that things are falling toward their places, and I'm praying that everything will fit together in the end.

We just might have a house in Wisconsin. We looked at some this weekend, and I began to truly despair of finding anything I was both willing to buy and could afford to buy at all. Some of the homes in our price range were real doozies; one house, in particular, reminded me of one of those houses you explore in your dreams, where one room leads to another with no rhyme or reason as to how it all works together. At one point, many decades ago, the owners had built an actual grocery store onto the house, adding to the chaos.

When we finally saw the house on Saturday morning, it almost felt too good to be true. It wasn't a spectacular house, but it was quite nice. It was definitely livable, and quite suitable to our purposes. Three bedrooms, nice kitchen, decent amount of living area. It has a large enclosed front porch, a lovely deck, and, best of all, a good-sized fenced backyard, complete with a wooden playset. Sam had to be bodily removed from the yard at the end of our showing, while he screamed, "I live here! I live here!" at the top of his lungs.

We decided to take his word for it, and we made an offer. On Sunday, they accepted.

Now we're in the oh-so-fun inspection period, made even more entertaining by our being back in Ohio. The inspection agency we chose is supposed to email the results of Friday's inspection to us; hopefully, they won't find any issues. The only thing we ourselves noticed when we examined the house was some old, knob-and-tube wiring in the basement, and we made the removal and updating of that a condition of the sale, to which they agreed.

We dropped by the house again on Tuesday, and I took these short(ish) movies of the house to give you an idea of the place.

The front of the house, along with the street (2.3M)
The kitchen, entering from the driveway door (2M)
The living room and front porch (2M)
The dining room (2.6M)
Going up the stairs to the bathroom (2.8M)
The upstairs hall and the smallest bedroom (2.5M)
The medium-sized bedroom (2.3M)
The master bedroom (2.7M)
The basement, with the fourth "bedroom" (4.9M)
The backyard and deck, with gratuitous Sam (1.8M)

Sam keeps asking to go back there; specifically, he asks to go to "'Con-sin" and see "the boys" (the children of the seller, who happened to be there while we were there the second time). I keep assuring him that we'll be going back very soon, and that all his things will be there this time. For some reason, he's decided that he likes the smaller of the two bedrooms better. We'll have to see how his toys fit!

The trip itself had its ups and its (extreme) downs. Remember that "no-puke" streak I mentioned in the last entry? Broken, thanks to a very bumpy trip on a teensy little prop-engine airplane. Ugh! We took two planes there, stopping in Chicago and then landing in Milwaukee, and did the same on the way back. It was the first leg on the way back that did me in; due to heavy Chicago air traffic, we had to stay low, which the pilot warned would mean a rough flight. He wasn't kidding. Sam spent that entire leg of the trip screaming, "Down! Down! Not up!" while Eric held him and tried to calm him. Across the aisle, with my head in a paper bag, I wasn't much help.

Never again. I had not flown in recent memory, my sole airplane trips having happened when I was two years old, but I didn't know it could be that bad. I'll have to fly again in June (more on that later), but that will supposedly be on a much bigger, quieter, calmer airplane. I don't intend to set foot on one of these commuter planes willingly ever again.

While we were there, our realtor showed us parts of the town that I hadn't seen before. I begin to think we might just possibly be happy here. The west side of town, especially, seemed neat, with little shops and alternative-looking people. The food seemed good, too. Sam seemed to share that opinion; at one point during the trip, I asked him if he liked Wisconsin. "Yes!" he said. Better than Ohio? "Yes!" Why? "Fooooooood!"

We also availed ourselves of one of the local tourist spots: the Jelly-Belly factory tour! Sam couldn't decide which was better, the free jellybeans or the train we got to ride for the tour. It was quite the fun morning, though I definitely should have gotten a larger breakfast into all of us before we went. Sam was positively jittery from the sugar, and I didn't do much better, myself.

It will be nice to live near that much water. Lake Michigan abuts the town, and the view is gorgeous from many spots. One afternoon, Sam and I sat at the library, waiting for Eric to finish up with work, and I just gazed out the window of the Children's room for long minutes. Mental note: make friends with people who boat.

If all goes well, we'll be living there by the middle of next month. Is this possible? I sure hope so. I need to weed our stuff; if it's still in the basement, not having been used since we moved in here, we probably don't need to move it to Wisconsin with us.

Rita's in the hospital again. She's really short of breath, though two courses of two different antibiotics seem to be helping fight this bout of pneumonia, according to the doctors. I hope she recovers soon. They called in a pulmonologist to check her, but the details coming to me are sketchy. Eric's not good at giving me all the information he gets over the phone, though I can't blame him for not wanting to talk much about it. When Mom had her cancer several years ago, I remember being pretty quiet about it, too.

We're supposed to have a huge, both-family vacation this June, centered around Sam's birthday, in Myrtle Beach. I'm really looking forward to it (airplane trip aside), and I know Sam's going to have a blast. My brother's living there now, so it would be an enormous gathering: my whole family, Eric's parents, and his brother's family. Sam's head could explode, having everybody together in one spot like that.

Now, if only Rita recovers, we'll be set. This was her idea, so she has to get better, right? We're praying.