Sebastian's Quiver

After over a month of back and forth and waiting and edge of your seat anticipation, we have FINALLY sold our house in Decatur, Georgia.  I’ll certainly miss it – I was there for over 7 years – and selling it in a down housing market certainly sucks, but overall I’m glad to be rid of it.  It was on the market for 8 months even though the Decatur market wasn’t that bad.  Problem was the house is a two bedroom, and apparently in the current market, they are a lot harder to sell.  But now we are free and clear of it and we don’t have two house payments.  I don’t know if I’m going to know how to live in Portland and not pinch pennies.

One of the most exciting things is that we can now start looking at houses here in Portland.  True, our lease isn’t up until April, but we already paid last months rent, and first month’s mortgage is free, so if we buy a house in February, the month of March is totally free for us.  We’ll probably start looking in earnest in December, if we can last that long.

Taking a hit on the house in Decatur certainly sucks big time, but the housing market in Portland, which has been totally ridiculous for the past several years, is finally coming back down to earth.  Any money that we didn’t make on the house in Decatur should be made up by the housing drop here. (That is what we call the silver-lining-analysis.)

For your patience with the blog, I’m throwing in some extra photos for your enjoyment.  I dug deep into the photo archive to come up with some special photos that have yet to see the light of day.  These are photos from Sebastian’s six month birthday.  I was supposed to have a separate, exclusive post for these, but that never happened, so I’m tacking them onto the end of this post.  Here, in all their glory, are the photos of Sebastian’s first meal of solid food (rice cereal).  You’ll see that he wasn’t too enamored with the flavor, which he has since come to enjoy (those photos will be posted at a later date).

Sorry there hasn’t been any post lately.  I was in London on business for a week and hadn’t gotten around to posting anything.

A quick update, then.  Sebastian is as cute as ever.  We started him on solid (though mushy) foods a couple of weeks ago.  So far his favorites seem to be rice cereal and fresh peaches (cooked into a peachy mushy sauce).  He still isn’t crawling (forward), but he’s going backwards as fast as ever.  He’s still a horrible sleeper, though he seems to be getting slightly better.  He’s still teething, though he still doesn’t have any teeth.  We’re still reading War and Peace and we’re up to Chapter 10.  He loves dancing; it cracks him up.

If anyone is interested, I took some photos while I was in London.  They are here.

Without further ado, here are more Sebastian photos (the full set is on the photo blog):

Well, I’m in London.  On business.  Without Juliann and Sebastian.

One thing we did to keep in contact with the eight hour time difference is to use Skype.  it allows you to do pretty high quality video chat on the computer for free.  It also allows calls to phones for super cheap, even internationally.  We used the video chat so Sebastian could watch me stick my tongue out at him.  It’s one of his favorite games.  He also learned (sort of) to wave back when you wave to him.

One other things that came out of the trip is my tumble blog.  What, you ask, is a tumble log?  It’s kind of a quick hit blog.  A link here, a photo there, a short blurb of something somewhere else.  Nothing elaborate.  It’s somewhere between blogging like this and microblogging like Twitter.  So, if you have time, take a look at the tumble blog at http://shawnb.tumblr.com.  Lots of London photos and stuff up there right now.  Get it while it’s hot!

Just a quick update while Sebastian is sitting and flailing about on the floor.  We have made it to page 50 of War and Peace and we are on Chapter 6.  Not bad!  Only 1400+ pages to go.  I’m looking at finishing it up sometime when Sebastian is in junior high school.