Sunday, January 29, 2012

The closing of a chapter

Tomorrow marks the closing of a chapter in mine and my families lives. We've known for almost a year this was coming and for the most part were all ok with it, the hubs and myself are even relieved it will finally be over. Tomorrow we sign the closing papers on our old house and it is officially another young woman's new home. Her first new home at that. I have to admit that makes me feel well kinda good. That house was our first home.

We bought it when I was about 7 months pregnant with my daughter who is about to be 10 in just a few short weeks. We planned our wedding surrounded by those walls, we cried over the loss of a pregnancy, we rejoiced over the conception and birth of our son, we fought, we loved, we had many family gatherings. It was a wonderful first home to us even if the bank wasn't so wonderful, the memories of that house will always be with us, cherished reminders of our first decade as a family.

Leaving it has been both easy and hard. Easy because we had plenty of time to get use to the idea, not to mention our new home is also mine and the husbands old home. We moved back to the house we lived in with my in-laws before we bought our own house. Only now the new house is remodeled to our standards and the in-laws have all moved on to different lives. But I think moving to a house we all know so well has made it easier. It's also been hard more for the kids but emotionally for us as well. This is the only home my babies ever knew, and as I said this was our first home. We picked every piece of carpet out, painted every wall, laid tile and marble ourselves. Not to mention I'm giving up some truly amazing neighbors, whom I will miss desperatly, hell I already do. Miss R from next door who moved in after her just as amazing grandmother passed away. You just don't find them like her, or Miss C from across the street with her beautiful backyard garden who always had an ear and a shoulder to offer. Or the great school moms that were within walking distance, and were always there for one another. I will miss all of them, thankfully I have Facebook to keep in touch, but we all know it'll never be quite the same.

The other really hard thing about this move will be the transferring of schools next school year. I refuse to pull my kids in the middle of the year, but next year I have no choice I just can't keep up the 20 minute drives one way 5x a week. That makes me as sad as it does my daughter. She's been there since kindergarten and next year would be her final year there. We've both invested a lot of time in that school, a new school is as scary a concept for me as it is to her. I love volunteering and being a part of the school, now just like the kids I have to meet new teachers, new staff and try to make new mom friends. Honestly I'm freaking out a little.


But tomorrow it's time to close this chapter in our lives. The home we've all known for so long will be someone else's. It will be her turn to make it hers, paint the walls, put in new carpet, re-tile floors, and begin making her own memories. I wish her all the luck in the world and I hope she finds much happiness there as we once did. May the closing of this chapter in our lives be the beginning of even better chapters for everyone involved.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Skylanders and the a-holes on ebay

For Christmas we got the lil man the Skylanders set up for the Wii. For those of you unaware of what this is, it's the newest generation of Spyro the dragon game. You get a disk, a portal, and 3 character figures. Then you must buy extra figures to help advance you further in the game. I bought him 2 extra packs of figures and figured he could buy more after Christmas with the money I knew he was getting from the grandmas.

He loves his game and of course wanted to get more figures as soon as he had money to do so. So like a good mommy I got his want list and off to the store I went. 6 stores later and I hadn't been able to lay my hands on 1 single Skylanders figure. Turns out this is one of the hottest sellers this season, and either A)the stores were all completely unprepared for this, B) the manufactures were and didn't have enough product made, or C) a little bit of both. Either way after several hours and much agonizing I came home empty handed. So I went to the internet and couldn't believe what I saw.

People on ebay have these figures all day long and are making and enormous profit from them. I now understand why the stores are out. Normal people didn't go out and buy these. Asshole ebay sellers did so they could sell them for double, triple sometimes even more than the actual price. I'm dumbfounded, whats worse is people are paying these prices. Listings read very rare, hard to find, blah,blah, blah. Yeah because people like this seller went and bought the local store out of every single piece on the shelf. Stores should really have some kinda of quantity rules when it comes to hot ticket items like that. I mean it's kind of obvious when someone is buying multiples of the exact same item they aren't for their own household. And people should really wise up and quit playing into the scam I've actually seen people bidding on 1 single figure for over $100 that I heard is coming back out in the next couple weeks for under $20.

Don't get me wrong I love ebay and will shop through them when I'm having trouble finding something or looking for a deal, but I hate when I see people twist it's purpose in this way. Although their not alone in this one, I went on Amazon this morning and saw similar price gouging going on there, just not to the extremes I witnessed it on ebay.

Where does the greed end? These are children's games and people are trying to make the biggest profit possible off some poor hard working parent whose just trying to give their kids the toys they want. I can even understand wanting to make a profit but this is just beyond ridiculous.

A couple of great things about the game itself is if your interested in purchasing the start up kit you can get it for almost any system (Wii, Nintendo 3ds, PC/MAC, XBox) and only the portal and disk are different for each system. The figues themselves are universal so if you find them they are good for any system. The game says 10 and up but my lil man is 5 and really has no trouble at all with it. Both my kids enjoy playing and to be honest the hubs and I don't mind getting suckered into playing with them. Draw back is obviously how hard it is to get the extra characters and it is only a 2 player game.





*Disclaimer legal thingie this post was in no way sponsored by anyone I bought the video game and all opinions are my own. However if Skylander, or anyone else would like to send my kids extra figures I won't say no. (you can't see it but I'm giving you a big cheesy smile and batting my eyes)