Once more unto the real estate listings, dear friends...

So, we're... um... buying a house. And selling our current our house. And moving.

At least, it looks that way. Hopefully. Maybe.

Here's how it went down:

On Friday, I came home from work to find Secondborn sprinting (naked, I might add) back and forth between the kitchen and the door to his room. This took him down a stretch of hallway which Firstborn, inexplicably, had designated as his work area for a lego project. As I watched, Firstborn put out his leg, and Secondborn promptly tripped over it. Despite the lack of screaming or injuries, I deemed this unacceptable. As punishment, Firstborn had his legos taken away until the next morning.

This caused Firstborn to dissolve into full-scale Meltdown Mode, which got him banished to his room until he could calm down. In the course of this, from inside his room, Firstborn called out: "No, you go to your room, Daddy!"

At which point I called back, "Daddy doesn't get a room, Firstborn. Daddy would love to have a room of his own to go to. A walk-in closet would do it..."

The Beautiful Woman ventured, "You know, I saw a house for sale. Three bedrooms, two living areas..."

I just looked at her for a minute. "What the hell," said I. "Call [The Bank]. We can at least see if we could get a loan for this."

So, half an hour later, we were pre-approved and [The Bank] was arranging real-estate people to help us find a new house and sell our existing house.

It's not a done deal - not by any means. The particular house that caught the Beautiful Woman's eye appears to be spoken for already, and it's not like we'd even had a chance to tour it yet. Still, we are now definitely looking, and we are very definitely starting to clean out our house and get it ready to sell.

...This is how a lot of our decision-making seems to work, by the way. We'll be plodding sensibly along, making do, until all of a sudden we're just like, "Bah! Enough of this! RELEASE THE KRAKEN!"