Changes

The past few months have been a little miserable.  I don't even really want to write about them, but Jack asked me to.  Maybe one day we'll want to remember I guess.

When we were moving to Miami I really wanted to find a house with a yard near the beach, in a safe neighborhood with a good school, and stay within a limited budget.  We scoured Zillow.com for months before the move.  We rarely saw anything that fit my requirements.  Finally it was getting down to the wire and we needed a place to live.  We found a Realtor who showed us a few houses via face-time, since we were in Spokane and couldn't pick up and fly out to see things as they came on the market.  Real estate in Miami moves lightening fast, so it wouldn't have really worked for me to plan a few days to come out and look at things.  As rentals come available, they are gone almost the next day.  Finally a duplex became available in a nice neighborhood near the beach.  It had an enclosed yard and fed to a great school.  We decided to go for it, sight unseen.

When we finally moved in we were a little disappointed with the place.  First of all it was smaller than we'd thought it would be.  We were told it had 3 bedrooms but one of them was really a "den" - a tiny makeshift room that should have been part of the kitchen and had no closet.  In fact the entire house had only 2 closets.  No pantry, no linen closet, nothing.  There was literally only one cupboard and one drawer in the entire kitchen.  The kitchen was so small that only one person could fit in at a time.  If someone tried to come in while I was cooking I felt like I was going to lose my mind.  I did lose my temper more than once.  When the dishwasher was open it took up the whole room so I had to lean across to put the dishes and glasses on the shelves.

The floor in the bedrooms and bathrooms was unfinished and so it was constantly dirty/dusty.  I felt like I was sweeping/mopping all the time and it was still gross.  In the living/dining/kitchen area there was only one window and there were NO lights.  It was so dark all the time!  Finally right before we moved the landlord had the kitchen light fixed and installed a light on the ceiling fan in the dining area.  The laundry room was outside in a little storage room that also had no lights.  It was very moldy/nasty in there and I was unable to do any laundry at night because it was pitch black and I was also afraid of whatever bugs/rodents were living in there.

We had nowhere to store anything.  We bought a couple of closets from Ikea, but it wasn't enough to hold everything.  We also put our bed on risers and shoved as much as we could underneath.  The closets were a mess and I dreaded putting away laundry since there wasn't room for it all.

Our neighbors in the duplex were from Brazil and were very dirty.  Their house smelled horrible and they had several dogs running around.  They would leave dog food everywhere, which I am sure was attracting the ants and the rats.  They completely trashed their side of the duplex and their yard.  Their teenage son, Jean, walked around in his underwear everywhere he went.  I am quite certain he was selling drugs out of the house as I witnessed very nice cars pull in and out of our driveway throughout the night, never staying for more than a minute or two. I reported him to the police several times, but never saw anything come of it.  And yet the police had time to come visit me when Hannah missed 5 days of school for a family vacation and they wanted to know why she had so many absences...

It turned out the backyard wasn't all we hoped it would be.  My parents did buy the kids a trampoline and during the winter months they actually used and enjoyed it quite a bit.  Jackson especially liked playing with the hose.  But during the summer it was just too hot to go out there and the mosquitoes ate us alive.  We spent far more time at our friends' pools than in the yard.  It didn't have a patio or a level surface of any kind, and didn't' have any shade, so we couldn't eat out there or anything like that.  The grass was full of giant divots so you couldn't run around or you might break your ankles.

The air conditioner couldn't keep up with the heat during the summer, so our house stayed around 81 degrees during the day in the hot months.

It also had a major ant problem.  I became a pro at killing ants.  I learned that not even the smallest crumb could be left on the floor or counters or you would wake up to an ant infestation.  I thoroughly swept and cleaned every night before bed, but I was constantly frustrated with the ants ruining our food before I had a chance to put it away.

But the ants weren't the worst of our problems.  At some point in October our hot water heater broke.  Some plumbers came to fix it but it was buried under the kitchen counter and they had to put a hole in the wall to fix it.  Apparently they didn't fix the hole well because roof rats started coming in through the hole.  We started to notice food spilled on the floor when we woke up in the morning!  At first we thought it was mice, but mice traps weren't working.  We threw away all the food in the house and also bought rat traps.  We would hear the traps go off in the night and go to inspect.  Almost always the rat would be injured by the trap but not dead, so Jack would go get a metal pole he found outside and beat the rat to death and then throw its body away.  Then he and I would clean up the blood and bleach the entire kitchen.  This always happened somewhere between 3 am - 5 am.  Almost every night!  We were so tired.  We complained to the landlord who sent exterminators to set more traps, but eventually the rats always came back.  I learned to store all food in airtight heavy duty plastic containers and also disinfect all surfaces before I started cooking.

But the rats got worse and worse, and they became more bold.  Before they would only come out at night, but soon they started coming out when we were awake with the lights on.  They would come out into the living room!  Once we went out of town for a week and came back to find that our couch had been eaten by rats.  Along with our infant car seat, my diaper bag and a backpack.  Sometimes we could hear them in our bedroom at night.  We couldn't figure out where they were, we could just hear them and therefore couldn't sleep.

The couch after being eaten by rats:

While this was going on, our van began having major problems.  We sunk thousands of dollars into fixing it and it seemed every week something new would go wrong.  At one point I was driving it and it stalled in the middle of the street.  I got out and found gas was leaking all over the road.  I had to drag my kids across traffic in the middle of a lightening storm and go inside a Wendy's while we waited for a tow truck.  Then I had to throw them all in a taxi with no seat belts to get them home in the middle of said storm.  Jack's car also had major problems and our mechanic said we'd be better off selling it for parts than trying to fix it.

Pictures of the old house:

As our lease was ending I started looking for places to move.  But like I said, real estate moves so quickly and I had a hard time making a quick decision about where we should go, especially since Jack didn't have time to go look at apartments with me or help me make the decision.   Rental prices had also skyrocketed and we were already struggling to pay our current rent.  Three bedroom apartments are hard to come by and are therefore very expensive, but no one would let us live in a two bedroom with three kids.  I was worried about having to switch Hannah schools too.   Normally I don't stress out too much about things and I am very used to doing things and making decisions without Jack, but for some reason this decision was giving me major anxiety and I just couldn't do it on my own.  I started waking up with hives all over my body and then I got a horrible cough that lasted for over 6 weeks.

Jack's work schedule had been horrendous and was only getting worse.  He was going to work at 5 am and not coming home until 9 at night at the earliest, often later.  Sometimes he had to stay overnight or work weekends too.  And when he got home he had to work on his Grand Rounds presentations or one of his various research projects.  The kids normally only saw him once a week, usually on Sunday unless he had to work Sunday too.  To make it all worse we lived rather far from his work, so he was spending over an hour in the car everyday and spending a ton of money in gas too.

Needless to say Jack and I both became depressed.  I began to resent that he was in residency and I told him that doing a fellowship would be out of the question.  He was hating residency as much I was!  He said he didn't want to go to bed at night because that meant he'd have to start over a new day the next morning.

Our parents encouraged us to borrow some money from them and improve our situation.  Our home was no longer a healthy or safe place for our family.  While we owned our cars outright, we had spent almost $700/month to drive my van around after all the repairs.  It just wasn't making sense anymore.  So we decided to follow their advice and move to a nice apartment that cost a little more and also lease some new cars - the payments on which would cost less than the amount we'd been paying for repairs.

We found a great place on Miami Beach. It cost a little more than we were spending on the duplex, but we get so much more for our money here.  The place is bigger and has huge windows that let in so much light.  Several people can be in the kitchen at the same time.  It is clean and has finished floors and 3 real bedrooms with closets (our room even has a walk in closet!).  I don't have to sweep and mop several times a day.  Since we are in a high rise we no longer have to worry about bugs or rats, ever.  The building does pest control and bugs don't usually make it to the 11th floor anyway.  There is plenty of storage and we even get a large storage room down the hall so we don't have to keep things under our beds.  We don't have a yard, but we do have a pool and a beach and several community centers with splash pads and pools and bowling alleys and ice skating rinks that are free for us to use and offer classes and lessons at cheap prices.  Hannah had to move schools, but will now attend one of the top 5 elementary schools in the state.  We also left our ward boundaries but we love our new little branch.

We traded in both of our old clunker cars and leased a couple of Honda's.  We won't have to worry about them breaking down on us every time we drive them!  We discovered that the van I had been driving had a rebuilt title when we had been told it was clean, so we didn't get much money on the trade in.  We are trying to recover some of that from the dealer who sold it to us and lied to us about it.

And the icing on the cake is that Jack is now a 3rd year resident which means that his schedule is infinitely better and he likes his job a lot more too.  He is usually home by 6 everyday and only has to take a few nights/weekends of call the whole year.  He continues to run his own clinic but now he gets to do his surgeries too and doesn't have to work in the ER anymore.  And his commute is now only 10-15 minutes. The drive is beautiful too, most of it takes him along a long causeway over the water and onto the mainland. I get texts from him almost every day telling me how much he loves his new commute.

We've left our depression and anxiety behind and I'm excited to live in Miami again.  I am so happy to open my shutters each day on my big windows and look out at the beautiful views and let the light into my clean house and know that no rats are going to eat the inevitable crumbs on the floor.  I can no longer complain about residency and think I might even be able to support Jack if he decides to do a fellowship.

Pictures of the new apartment:

Our new "back yard":