Moving`

The story of this move actually begins last summer. For years Mike had worked from one contract to another, a really bad time would be when it took three weeks to get a new job. Then all of the sudden the economy crashed and he was out of work six months. When he was offered a job in Decatur we couldn't really pass it up. We were tired of moving and went there intending to fully embrace the town. I even started looking for jobs my parents could do there hoping they'd move near us. The only flaw was, we really didn't like it there.
Meanwhile, Michael was trying to work things out with Kelly (Bryan's mom). At first she was fine with modifying visitation, since we were now five hours away and every other weekend wasn't going to work. But then she changed her mind. Barring lots of money (and I mean LOTS) and a friendly judge there really was no forcing her. SO Michael want to his boss and after a few weeks of negotiations got approval to telecommute from the STL area. We had already taken a vacation from both jobs during the second week of May, my parents were also off as we were supposed to visit them. So we went house hunting and found something we liked right away. We packed up, booked a uhaul, and sent my parents a train ticket. Instead of visiting them they would come to us and vacation in STL.
The only problem was... the owner of the house kept postponing meeting to sign a lease. So we came back to look at some other houses on Sat (move in is booked for Monday) and found something, amazingly. Its right near the kid's friends and down the street from a park. Of course the first house was at the bottom of our affordable range and this is at the very top but... we will make it. On Monday afternoon we hit the first glitch, our old landlord who has always been pretty nice decides that he wants to replace all the carpet so he's keeping all of our deposit. Further evidence that while an honest landlord isn't non-existent its rare. But at least hes not trying to get more money out of us so we let it go.
The house hasn't passed inspection so we stay the night with my MIL. All eight of us. We pass two nights which she is asking for payment for (to pay for extra gas and electricity) and in other ways making everyone uncomfortable. So we spend the third night at a hotel (and this is when the uhaul starts racking up fees) We tried doing activities with the kids but even that wasn't that much fun because the car was stuffed with luggage and people and everyone was stressed about how much money we spent. Finally we got to unload the truck on Friday. Saturday we drove my parents back to Kansas City. Sunday, we started cleaning. The last tenants left the place pretty trashed. That's what took so long to get moved in. We are finally getting settled in but, we have gone through all of our savings and we need another vacation!