In the immortal words of Meatloaf, “two out of three ain’t bad.”

Since my last post, a lot has happened. I graduated, we found out I was pregnant, and we bought a house! Well, sort of…

To start, after a marathon summer of late nights with my epidemiology text and feeling stupid after just about every weekly quiz, I managed to not only pass epidemiology, but I missed an H by 2 points (H means A in the somewhat pretentious word of UNC grad school grading. It stands for honors pass. It’s dumb system. If I ever become dean, I’m doing away with it). I never looked close enough to see if there was a curve, and frankly, I prefer to believe that there wasn't. I like to think that I’m just that smart.  So now I'm officially Kelly Bragg, MPH, CHES. The plan was to actually go to graduation and celebrate, but given my current state of gestating, that might now work out... 

Oh, yeah. So about that whole gestating thing, 3 weeks before I took my final, I went from being able to run 5-6 miles to not being able to go more than 2 without the very real fear that I would actually pee in my pants.  Combined with some other fun symptoms that I won’t get into, I deduced that there might be a chance I was “in the family way”. With Terrance out of town, I took a test. It was positive! Confirmed an annoying amount of weeks later by the doctor’s office who won’t see people until a certain point, no matter how neurotic they are and how crazy they must be driving their husband with “do you think this is normal?” questions. Fingers crossed the 3-6 cups of coffee and countless sodas I was drinking to stay awake enough to complete epi haven’t done major damage to the little one. We found out last week that it’s a boy. We’re naming him Logan James – Logan has been Terrance’s choice for a boy since the beginning and James is after my father. I’m trying really hard to make myself believe that Logan isn't Terrance’s choice because it’s Wolverine’s name. Those of you who know him know that it probably is, but, you know, keep those fingers crossed.

Since the baby is coming, Terrance and I started throwing around the idea of buying a house. Terrance's financial health hasn't always been stellar, but he's been working hard on getting it in shape. Since our entire mortgage from the Gastonia house is in my name and I have a load of student loan debt now, I sent him to the bank to see what he would qualify for. His hard work paid off and he qualified for a mortgage on his own. He got his preapproval letter, contacted a real estate agent, and we were off! We looked at about 6 houses and found one that we both sort of fell in love with. It is a 2 story, 4 bedroom, 2 bath brown stucco built in 1901 with a yard for the dogs. It’s on a great street. It also needs a bit of work, but both of us saw this as having the potential to be our dream home. After a small amount of negotiation, we seemed good to go. Barring any sort of major problem that popped up on the inspection, the house was ours. We went to the store to pick out flooring. We decided what kind of fence we were going to put in. I had the baby’s nursery all decorated in my head. Heck, I had the entire house all decorated in my head. Friday, Terrance went to the bank to get the paperwork started and something was off. Because of some sort of issue with our tax return, he suddenly might not be able to get the loan. I don’t really understand it all, but basically even though we want the house, and we need the house, there might not be any way we’re ever going to own the house on Lincoln Ave.

Because I stupidly plastered the fact that we were buying a house all over social media, I now will have to deal with questions – When are you moving? How’d the inspection go? When do you close? - when I don’t really want to talk about it at all. But that’s my fault. I admit I over share. Lesson learned.

Terrance feels like this is his fault. It’s not, of course. I want to blame the accountant for whatever is wrong with our taxes or the guy at PNC for giving us a preapproval letter that he could never follow through with. But not Terrance, who's just as upset as I am about it and tried everything he can do to fix this. I'm actually really proud of how far he's come. The cookie just crumbles the wrong way sometimes. I’m trying really hard to hide my disappointment. When I can’t hide it anymore and I start to cry, he tells me it’s not over. He hates to see me upset. He’ll do whatever he can to fix this and get us our dream house. The unspoken truth in the room is that there might not be a damn thing we can do about it. I've tried to tell him that I just need to mourn it – the visions I had in my head of us bringing Logan home to THAT house, sitting out in THAT yard with the baby and the dogs on a sunny day and watching the clouds go by, fixing THAT awful bathroom upstairs...

I know eventually, this won’t seem so bad. Eventually, I won’t be battling pregnancy hormones and this won’t feel like such a crushing defeat of our dream.  I know these are first world problems. I understand that we’re lucky to have a place to live and jobs and food on the table and a healthy (albeit hungry and huge) baby on the way. It’s a no brainer that, if I was forced to choose, out of the 3 major things that I have experienced in the last 6 months – graduation, baby, house – the one I would give up if I had to give up something would be the house.

But I didn't really want to give it up.