What's next, a MINIVAN?

So, last night we decided to go look at a house for sale. We've been threatening to move for years, but now that we have the kid and another one down the road it's become a necessity rather than a maybe. The problem is that we live a block and a half into the city limits, where options are either a crappy public school or private school and I'm not so keen on private school for several reasons. Anyway, I found this house a few months ago while I was fake house shopping online. We normally look in a few neighborhoods around here, both of which are close to Jeff's work and tend to have houses that are older and interesting. Unfortunately, old and interesting is expensive in this area so we would have to either downsize (um, no) or settle for something like one bathroom or off street parking, neither of which are appealing to me. Our house now isn't big but it is for the city and we have two full bathrooms which is rare in these parts. There wasn't anything new on the market in these areas so I decided to check around other areas just for giggles. I ended up finding this one house near Liz and became obsessed. I've watched it for months now and the price had dropped a few times and we finally decided to go see it, just to get it out of our system.

Here's the kicker. This house is located about 1/8 of a mile from the house I lived in when we first moved to the suburbs from the city when I was 3. We moved about 4 miles away when I was 7 and I lived in the general vicinity for the next 13 years. I moved once more to my sister's house for a couple years, which is even further out until I settled back in the city when I was 23. That was 12 years ago and I vowed I would never move back there ever again. This is when I tell you to never say never. No one can believe I'm looking at a house in the suburbs, especially in BALLWIN! (If you aren't from here, it's a pretty basic John Hughes-style suburb) The thing is, we love this house. It's a kinda mid-century modern-ish, low slung ranch. It's different from the other houses in the neighborhood and I remember as a kid recognizing that they were cooler looking than our boring 2-story. The other thing about this place that has us mesmerized is the square footage. This mother is freaking HUGE (to us)! The main floor has 4 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms, plus a huge kitchen, dining room, living room and family room. The downstairs is just as big and totally finished. It's basically like 4 of our houses now if you count the basement.

The downside is that it's in the suburbs (HA!) and that it hasn't seen many updates since the first Bush was in office. I'm going to try and just deal with that knowing that eventually we will be able to transform it like we did this house. The location, I can't help but here's the deal. We are lame. LAME. We didn't go out a tremendous amount before Max came along and we go out even less now. Yes, it's nice to be near the zoo and Forest Park and stuff but it isn't like I can't drive there if I want to go, right? RIGHT? Listen to me. I'm justifying this to people of the internets. Regardless, nothing is done and we just looked and we still have to sell our house in addition to about 10 million other things we need to do before we could move so this is all probably just my senseless ramblings. Who knows what'll happen. I might move into my car. You just never know.