Quick update
After my distraught post from... last week? (God, was it only last week? Time is stretching and distorting itself in such strange ways) things have settled considerably. I left the next day to spend some time with my brother-in-law and his wife, which was lovely. I adore Annette and our girls had an insane amount of fun chasing each other around and visiting some of Fargo's many toddler-oriented places. There's a lot of them, and it was almost enough to make me wish we'd moved to Fargo instead of St. Cloud, except that it's ugly as hell there and basically an endless strip mall. With, uh, cows.
We looked for a place to rent but found our choices are pretty limited: tiny apartments where I'd have to fight the dogs and Isabel up flights of stairs to get them outside (where they need to go every few hours or else) or the godawful houses that a local slumlord showed us. We learned that the places that accept dogs? Accept them for a reason. Those houses were filthy and unsafe (steep staircases without railings, for example) and basically dives that college students rent and trash. We couldn't believe the gall of that man proudly showing us houses that were absolutely caked with filth -- one of the rooms had clearly been used as a giant catbox and OMG the reek of it.
So we've decided to stay here for the time being. I don't know how long it's going to work, but I'm going to do my very best to make it work for as long as possible. If we have to move I'm not sure what we're going to do, considering our wretched housing options and our dwindling bank accounts. (It turns out that fixing up a house to the point where it's sellable in this market costs a fortune.) (And that's sellable in theory. I'm afraid the reality is close to "finding a well-paying job" in this economy.)
Isabel starts her Early Intervention program tomorrow, then occupational and speech therapy later this week. I'm going to add music therapy if we can find a way to swing the payments (insurance doesn't cover "alternative" therapies for autism.) As for our girl, she's doing really well considering all the changes she's experienced. She loves having her grandparents around and her cousins nearby, just as we knew she would.
Overall, I'm liking it better here. The weather has been wonderful, and we've even had a few fabulous electrical storms. So awesome! You only have to drive a few miles to find yourself in the unspoiled countryside where there's plenty of trees and lakes everywhere. It's very different from Portland (more on that later) but I think we'll be happy here once we have our own place. That's really the key. Living with other people sucks, and I'm afraid this isn't going to work for as long as we need it to. I'd be fine with bouncing around between relatives if it wasn't for Isabel's services; she really needs a stable therapy program and a consistent schedule.
We looked for a place to rent but found our choices are pretty limited: tiny apartments where I'd have to fight the dogs and Isabel up flights of stairs to get them outside (where they need to go every few hours or else) or the godawful houses that a local slumlord showed us. We learned that the places that accept dogs? Accept them for a reason. Those houses were filthy and unsafe (steep staircases without railings, for example) and basically dives that college students rent and trash. We couldn't believe the gall of that man proudly showing us houses that were absolutely caked with filth -- one of the rooms had clearly been used as a giant catbox and OMG the reek of it.
So we've decided to stay here for the time being. I don't know how long it's going to work, but I'm going to do my very best to make it work for as long as possible. If we have to move I'm not sure what we're going to do, considering our wretched housing options and our dwindling bank accounts. (It turns out that fixing up a house to the point where it's sellable in this market costs a fortune.) (And that's sellable in theory. I'm afraid the reality is close to "finding a well-paying job" in this economy.)
Isabel starts her Early Intervention program tomorrow, then occupational and speech therapy later this week. I'm going to add music therapy if we can find a way to swing the payments (insurance doesn't cover "alternative" therapies for autism.) As for our girl, she's doing really well considering all the changes she's experienced. She loves having her grandparents around and her cousins nearby, just as we knew she would.
Overall, I'm liking it better here. The weather has been wonderful, and we've even had a few fabulous electrical storms. So awesome! You only have to drive a few miles to find yourself in the unspoiled countryside where there's plenty of trees and lakes everywhere. It's very different from Portland (more on that later) but I think we'll be happy here once we have our own place. That's really the key. Living with other people sucks, and I'm afraid this isn't going to work for as long as we need it to. I'd be fine with bouncing around between relatives if it wasn't for Isabel's services; she really needs a stable therapy program and a consistent schedule.