Dear Family and Friends,
I hope you’ll excuse the tardiness of our holiday letter; we were waiting on being able to share some wonderful news. We are pregnant! Our baby is due on the Summer Solstice, June 21, 2022.
Normally I’d prefer to recount the year’s events in order, but as this is our most exciting (and fun to read about) news, I won’t bury the lead any further. We learned we were pregnant in September and have been quietly and anxiously awaiting the results of every test offered to come back clean and healthy. Yesterday was our 20-week anatomy scan, and lil’ babe passed with flying colors, even measuring a week ahead. We have the cutest photo of our little one sucking their thumb.
So far Matt has been a stellar dad-to-be; he’s been reading his assigned baby books, learning about baby care (how to stuff cloth diapers!) and doing an amazing job taking care of me. I, luckily, never had any morning sickness, but I was very tired in my first trimester. Lately, I’ve been struggling with sciatic pain and broken sleep. I feel like the broken sleep might not be so much a symptom as it is preparation. Either way though, it’s not fun.
We’ve got the crib all set up in our room and have started an impressive collection of gender-neutral ocean-themed baby clothes. To honor Matt’s scuba diving hobby, which he hasn’t been able to do much as of late, we picked an under the sea theme for babe; fishies and sharks and whales and turtles galore! The cats don’t appreciate being told not to jump into the crib. They are learning.
Speaking of cats, that’s another big important change to our family recently. In October we adopted a third cat! Her name is Pippa and she is only a few months younger than Whisper. He’s desperately needed a playmate ever since his brothers were adopted out, and it was always our intention to find him one.
Pippa is a little trouble maker and she is still learning her manners, but she is fitting in nicely enough. We picked her from the animal shelter because she was the most high-energy cat they had. Sadly, she’d already been there six months and was starting to get cabin fever. She was getting mean and would bite anyone who tried to pick her up. What caught our attention though, was when she was let loose with the other cats, she was trying to play (usually play-fight) with all the other cats. None of them wanted anything to do with her though as she played too rough. We figured she probably wasn’t going to get adopted by anyone else anytime soon and we could give her the chance she needed. We were VERY worried that she’d bully our old cat, Kirie, though.
We brought her home and kept her quarantined in a bathroom for a few days, then started letting Whisper investigate the other side of the door. Soon they were batting at each other under the door. We kept Kirie well away from Pippa for two or three weeks while we got those two acclimated to each other. Eventually we got to the point where they could both be in the same room. Whisper has always been a terrified little ‘fraidy cat, so this took quite a bit of doing, but we were committed. Once they were comfortable with each other, we opened up the rest of the house to them and with so much new territory to explore; Pippa basically didn’t even notice that Kirie existed.
One good thing about Pippa’s extended shelter stay is that she learned quite well what a hissy cat is saying. Whisper never learned that so when Kirie gives a warning, he doesn’t back off. Pippa is teaching him that. She is starting to be bolder and chase Kirie, but for the most part Pippa spends her time running around and wrestling with Whisper. She still bites more than we like and is jumping up on counters and tables, but we are working on her.
Since it looks like I’m going reverse chronological for this letter, the next big exciting thing we did was our wedding at Starved Rock. Due to Covid, we had to limit our in person guests to just our immediate family, but we live streamed it all. If you missed it, or would like to watch it again, or see photos from our day, they are all available here on our website, www.Rhyzley.com It was a lovely day, and the photos are great. If it wasn’t made clear, we were married a year and a day earlier, on June 24, 2020. We eloped. The live streamed ceremony was the second part of an old hand-fasting tradition where the couple has a year and a day to figure out if married life is truly for them. As you can’t ‘sorta’ get married these days, we chose to be married first in a private ceremony, and then celebrate publically with our family (as is tradition) a year and a day later.
We also had three lovely wedding shower/receptions. The first was in May in Ohio for April’s family and friends, the next was in July in Minnesota for April’s mom’s side of the family, and the last was in August here in Orland Park for Matt’s entire extended family.
The last bit of exciting newsworthy event was we purchased a townhouse in May! This is our first (not forever) house. We picked it because it was one of the few townhouse communities that would allow Matt’s branded work truck to be parked in the driveway. Highbrow HOAs are a pain. It’s in a south suburb of Chicago, and has easy access to the highway so Matt is on his way to wherever work is that day within minutes. The house itself was a complete nightmare though. The only reason we were able to purchase it in the height of the housing market frenzy was that it was a short sale and the place was trashed from an abusive domestic relationship. The house had holes in the drywall, all the kitchen cabinet doors were kicked in, the sliding patio door had been shattered and the house was left open to the elements for over a year.
Due to the damage and trash, the house was un-loanable, so only cash buyers could purchase it, which excluded the majority of interested home buyers. I saw the potential, and worked with our lender to find out the exact letter of their law to figure out how to get the house loan-able. It needed to be ‘habitable’, which to them meant that the house needed to be secure (new sliding door), the holes in the drywall needed to be repaired, patched, sanded, and for some ridiculous reason PRIMED, and the kitchen cabinet doors needed to be repaired (I guess they never heard of open shelving?). Oh, and ALL THE TRASH needed to be removed or tidied. As the owner of the house had no intentions of ever setting foot back in her house again, we had to do this work BEFORE we could buy the house. That’s right. We did reno on a house we didn’t own, months before we knew it *could* be ours. Matt and I spent two or three weekends repairing and cleaning. My parents came to help with a lot of it, and Matt’s dad helped with the drywall repair.
We didn’t have much saved up for a down payment, but between mortgage rates being crazy low, the short-sale, and the condition of the house, we scored a heck of a deal. We paid $185k for our 3 bedroom 2.5 bath 1600 sq ft with additional full (but not finished) basement and attached 2 car garage. At the time we purchased it, some of the other units in the community were going for $225k. Today, an identical model to ours is under contract at $260k. While we expect by the time we are finished with repairs to our house and are ready for our next one, the housing market will likely have calmed down, it’s not wrong to think that we will be in a very good position for our next house.
If you’d like to see the nightmare we willingly got ourselves into, our ‘before’ photos are here: https://bit.ly/PineLakeHousePhotos To see what the house looked like while it was ‘on the market’ (talk about catfishing!), their photos are still viewable on Redfin.
Since March (we closed on April 30th), we’ve been busy with cleaning, renos and moving. The house is so much better now, but still has a long way to go. We have about half of the rooms painted; they were smokers too, so we need to prime and paint everything, even the ceilings! The carpet was unsalvageable according to Stanley Steamer (they still charged me to come out and say so, even though I TOLD them how bad it was on the phone and they swore it could be cleaned). We did have them clean the air ducts through. So much dog and cat hair and who knows what else, gross.
I’ve been spending the majority of my time working on the house, working in my small business, and prepping for baby (or napping for baby). Matt has been superman, working on big house projects on the weekends and still doing exceptionally well at work. He recently kicked butt at a high-profile customer’s house (the fact that it was a HOME was huge, his company only services commercial properties, but this customer was hugely important to one of their commercial accounts and requested it special). After doing amazing at it, Matt’s boss publically recognized him to their team and also gifted him a $100 gift card to a restaurant of Matt’s choice. Matt was nearly going to ask for one of our favorite (yet affordable) date night places when I reminded him that he had a fancy and pricy place on his wish list. He asked for that one instead, and we went out for his birthday just last week. It was all he was hoping for and more.
Staying safe, secluded, and fully vaxed,
Love, Matthew & April Faye (and baby!) Rhyzley
Kirie, Whisper, and Pippa