Fat Chick Fed Up

Hey everyone! I’m BAAAACK!

 

Yes, I did enjoy a little bloggy break for which I am incredibly grateful to you, my awesome readers, for sticking with me through all of my crazy, chaotic life situations right now. You all are such a blessing to me!

 

This will be a totally random post that has nothing to do with weight-loss. Consider yourself forewarned. Yes, I know I am a weight-loss blogger, but this is my blog so I will write what I want to.

 

Nanny, nanny boo-boo. <— Yes, I’m mature like that.

 

Really, I just feel like I’ve gotten to know some of you so well that I consider you my friends. And I don’t just talk about weight-loss with my friends. I share life with my friends.

 

Some of my most favorite bloggers are those who share their lives with their readers. From the mundane what-I-had-for-breakfast, to the serious-life-circumstances posts, I appreciate when bloggers open up to their readers and I hope to cultivate that kind of relationship here on this blog.

 

Some of my newer readers may not be aware of our current circumstances and may be curious about why I don’t live with my husband. I suppose that could strike you a bit odd if you happened to stumble across my blog one day and I hadn’t talked about it for a while.

 

The short story is that my husband lost his oh-so-secure (so we thought) government job in July of 2011. Through a strange and unexpected turn of events he ended up landing a job 1100 miles from home. It was not our ideal situation but let’s just say they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.

 

If you want to read a bit more about our situation I talked about it in more detail in this post.

 

The rest of the story is that my husband moved to Florida. Without me and without our four kids. Sniff. The children had some things to finish up with their activities here at home and I was to be getting our house ready to sell and the plan at the time was that we were to move down to Florida with my husband around Christmastime.

 

Obviously, things did not work out as planned as we are still, 7 months later, living separated. We have been through hard things in our marriage before, really, truly devastating circumstances, but this one takes the cake. I try to put on a happy face for the most part and pretend to be strong for my kids but it has been so, so hard.

 

My husband and I have a very good marriage and he is an awesome husband and super-involved daddy. To say things have been rough for both of us and for the kids would be a huge understatement. Honestly? It completely sucks.

 

I am so thankful that he was able to find employment quickly and, because we are debt-free, that we were able to weather the storm of having no income without it being too terribly painful. God has provided in amazing, abundant and surprising ways for our family and I never cease to be amazed at the way He intervenes on our behalf. But, yeah, it still sucks.

 

We have had our house on the market for almost 6 months and we have had exactly ONE showing. Discouragement is the name of the game at this point. We have tried to work every angle financially and have done everything within our power to come up with a solution to get us reunited again.

 

We have only been able to see Daddy a handful of times since he has been gone and this time was the hardest. He had a good, long stay with us (though never long enough) and I think that is what has made this time especially tough. We just miss him so, so much.

 

On Wednesday, the day we were to take him back to the airport, I woke up crying and cried pretty much the whole day. My baby was screaming as we drove away from the airport. I hear multiple times a day, “I miss Daddy.”, “I wish Daddy was here.”, “I want to move with Daddy.”, “Do we get to move today?” Some days are just so heart-wrenching.

 

I probably sound completely co-dependent, but honestly? I could care less. We ARE dependent on my husband. Our family is not whole and complete without him and with everything we do we always feel the absence of his presence in a very real way. Nothing is the same without Daddy.

 

And I’m just so tired. Tired of seeing my kids’ hearts break. Tired of sleeping alone. Tired of being a single parent. Tired of Skype (yet, SO thankful for it). Tired of my happy face.

 

Back in November, we were able to make the trek to Florida. And when I say we, I mean me. And my four kids. In a mini-van. With no air conditioning. For two days. And that was just the trip there! Good times were had by all. No. really.

 

Anyway, while we were there we decided to get all of our ducks in a row and met with a lender and a realtor in the event that we should need their services in the near future. After speaking with the lender we received a pre-approval for a home mortgage loan contingent upon selling our home. At least that was what was communicated to us at the time.

 

We started looking for houses online to get a feel for the market in the area. We saw some we loved and I decided that I needed to stop looking because I was getting so discouraged. I knew we couldn’t move on anything until we sold our house and I didn’t want to fall in love with something only to see it sell and be disappointed by it.

 

So, we stopped looking.

 

And in the meantime we returned home to do whatever we could to get ready to move. I got rid of about half my house, packed another 25% into storage and decided to live on bare bones clothes and dishes and a few toys and books. I packed everything away that wasn’t in season, I left only one set of silverware out, a couple of cups and plates and packed almost all of my dishes and utensils away.

 

If you’ve ben reading this blog for long you know that I LOVE to cook. Besides this blog it is my lone creative outlet. So packing all of that away was really tough. Of course, at the time I thought it was only going to be for a month as the plan was to find a place to rent in Florida.

 

And then things fell through. And the move date got pushed back. And then it was pushed back again. And again. Until we finally threw our hands up in the air and just stopped trying to plan anything. We decided we had no choice but to just wait for our house to sell.

 

That was a hard day when we came to that depressing conclusion. Things are VERY bad in our area and our situation seemed pretty hopeless. There was no reason to think our house was going to sell any time soon and our separation felt endless. We knew we didn’t want to short sale or foreclose, but the separation was really taking its toll on everyone and we were quickly running out of options.

 

(Just as an aside, my husband is currently living in a condo owned by my aunt and uncle in a 55+ community which is why we can’t live with him where he currently is and why we’ve been able to make it financially this long since he isn’t paying rent).

 

(Just as another aside, yes I stored all of my kids’ summer clothes. Yes, I had to buy completely new wardrobes for all four kids. Yes, paper plates keep me sane. Don’t judge me.)

The reason why we were not able to move at this time is because all of the places we could afford to rent in Florida were two-bedroom places. Apparently, a family of our size is not allowed to rent in such places so we were turned down everywhere we went. We were completely at our wit’s end and had just resigned ourselves to the  fact that we would be separated until our home sold and that didn’t (doesn’t) look to be happening anytime in the near future.

 

Then, last week, an idea hit me like a ton of bricks. When we received our original mortgage approval back in November it was for much more than what we needed. I thought maybe we could petition the bank to see if we could qualify for a loan about half that amount while still carrying the mortgage on our current home. I wasn’t too optimistic about it as I knew banks were being more conservative these days, but I was also hoping that being debt-free would work in our favor.

 

We knew from our research of some of the homes in the area that we could get a 3-bedroom home for a pretty decent price and with interest rates being what they are the payments would be less than it would be to rent a tiny 2-bedroom apartment. We figured once we sold this home here we could keep the home down there as a rental property and look for something more suitable to our needs and family size. Rental properties in Florida can be a very lucrative endeavor so it could really help us in the long run.

 

So I had The Chick Magnet call our lender and ask him if we could possibly qualify for a second mortgage. We waited on pins and needles for his return call. This could very well be the possible solution we were looking for and set us up for an even better financial position for the future.

 

Would you believe that when our lender called back he told Rick that the ORIGINAL pre-approval (yes, the one from back in November that was way more than our needs) WAS for a second mortgage scenario.

 

Wait. What?

 

Yes, that’s right. The original amount we got, because we are debt-free, was for a second mortgage approval. So basically we have been siting on the pre-approval this whole time doing NOTHING with it.

 

OHMYWORD.

 

I am trying really hard not to just be livid at this point. I know there is nothing I can do about it and I can’t go back and change what has happened. But I also can’t get back that lost time with my husband and the time my children have lost with their daddy.

 

When I heard the news I went from total excitement and elation to fighting mad. I have no idea why it was not communicated to us originally that we could go ahead and start looking, that the pre-approval was not dependant on the sale of our home. Ugh, it just burns me up.

 

But I also know there is nothing that can be done about it now and there is no sense in wasting my mental energy by fixating on this oversight on the part of our lender. Instead, I am using that energy to focus on house-hunting which is super fun.

 

So yay for us! We are FINALLY moving forward. We are hoping to have an accepted offer in on something within a month and then be able to move by the end of the summer. Woot woot! We couldn’t be more thrilled!

 

I am going to do my best to keep blogging consistently but I will probably be cutting back my posts to 3-4 a week just to free up some time to house hunt, pack, organize and get ready for the big move. I will also be travelingflying to Florida once The Chick Magnet and our realtor have it narrowed down to a few houses so there will be a bit of travel required in the near future.

 

Speaking of blogging less: do you wanna guest post for me? C’mon, you know you wanna! 

 

So how was YOUR week? Share something in the comments non-weight-loss related!