Happy Halloween! (And worries...)

So, I'm about an hour late... Linda & I went with her mom to Columbia to visit Linda's sister, Bridgett (who is also due a couple days before us) and our niece, Olivia. For Halloween, Olivia was going as Ariel from "The Little Mermaid". What blows my mind, is the next Halloween we are gonna celebrate, we'll have an about 6 month old in tow...dressed as a pumpkin, bumble bee or something along those lines. However, with us living in the city, I don't foresee us making rounds for trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. Linda's brother and his family still live in our hometown (about a 45 minute drive for us), and in fact bought a house a few years ago, in the same neighborhood I grew up in. I told Linda that maybe we can take Nugg trick-or-treating there with our nephew, Brayden, next year. Plus, it would be kinda cool to stop by my old house. The same house I spent from age 2 months to 22 years in, and the same house my parents lived in for 31 years until they sold it in 2004. I miss that house.

Linda and I have been in our condo for 3 ½ years. We bought it at the start of the housing market crisis, but no one ever thought it would have gotten this bad. We probably could not sell this place for what we bought it for, and both of us are losing our minds here. It suited our needs as a newlywed couple, but now we've got a growing family to think about, and noisy neighbors and constant police sirens are not going to benefit us once Nugg arrives. Case in point, the recent college grad-frat boy that is renting the unit above us. All units were converted from apartments to condos, and the buildings themselves were built in the 1920s, one of the reasons we loved it when we bought it...lots of character. Well, all the units have the original wood flooring. You cannot take more than 2 steps before the floorboards creak and squeak. Our original neighbor upstairs when we moved in was a very very quiet guy...we NEVER heard him move. He had that unit on the market for a good year, then decided to rent it out. The guy that just moved in, threw some kind of kegger for Halloween and I was about to go insane from the noise.

I just wonder how that's gonna go when we have a newborn that is trying to sleep? Hence the reason why we'd really really like to move. Move to the 'burbs. I'm tired of the city-life. But how can you sell a condo in this market? Linda & I have fretted over this for months, even before we found out we were gonna have a baby. We liked the city-life, but it's grown stale. We're ready for a real house, with a real yard and a real garage.

Linda & I have had the thinking that we need to get the condo up to speed with some minor home improvements and get it listed. We figured have a good 4 or 5 years before we really need to be somewhere else, when Nugg hits school age. This thought has ravaged my mind tonight. So much so that I googled what I could find about the school district we are in. Kansas City is known for it's magnet schooling, which is less than stellar...and the designated public elementary school for where we live is John T. Hartman Elementary Magnet School...so I guess this is where Nugg would go if we are living here then. Which completely freaks me out. Looking at some of the test scores for this school has got my mind swimming. I really am not familiar with how to read the scores, so I don't know if I'm looking at them correctly. Then I looked at the public high school Nugg would go to...Westport High, which is just a few blocks from us. That school's state scores are even scarier! I then researched private schools near us, the closest is just a few blocks away - Notre Dame de Sion. While this seems like a fit for what I want for Nugg - I can't believe the tuition!! My God, I have no idea what to do.

I really don't want to raise Nugg in the inner city. The inner city is no place for a child. My head is swimming. I need to go to bed...