Blame it on the dra, dra, dra, dra, dra, drywall

What happened to mid-March through mid-April? I tell ya, I think the time was stolen because it's all kind of a blur to me. So much has happened. We moved out of our house, visited with our Finnish family, became Finnish citizens, entered the last year of my twenties, and Emma, well don't even get me started on how much she's changed. In less than a week she'll be TWO, and in a month and a half we'll be the parents of TWO (I suppose technically we already are).

Last time I blogged I was on a roll, confident that I would continue my consistent writing and picture uploading. That was over a month ago. I remember writing my last post and thinking, "Tomorrow I'll put up super cute pictures of Emma's acting debut." So many tomorrows have turned into yesterdays since then.


I blame the Chinese drywall.

About a month ago, our awesome neighbor, who knows all the ins and outs of the neighborhood, told us that some houses in the neighborhood had Chinese drywall and we better get ours checked out. Since we've only been in our house a year and all this about the drywall came out before we moved into it, I wasn't too concerned. I mean, what builder was still using tainted Chinese drywall in 2008?

Um, ours was.

Matt was even less concerned than me, but I figured we would get it checked just in case.
I was told that the inspection should take about an hour, and that the inspector couldn't come out for about a week. Not the best sign. He was obviously very busy checking lots of tainted houses. When he did come, it took him all of 30 seconds to determine that we did, in fact, have the dang drywall.

Awesome!

The builder would supposedly move us out and "make it right" but not until June. It's one thing to unknowingly live in a toxic environment. It's quite another knowing we were exposing our little girl and unborn child to it. We stayed in the house one night- and then decided to get the heck outta there, whether they would pay for us to get out or not.

Thankfully, Matt's parents opened up their home to us once again. And we got our start date moved forward thanks to the power of pregnancy and connections. Supposedly, we'll be back in our house by the end of June. We'll see.

There have definitely been casualties along the way.

For instance, our Mac.
The one that we paid over $700 to have fixed.
The one that was only 2 years old.
Will we be reimbursed for that?
Nope.

My laptop.
I haven't blogged in the last month partially due to the fact that this beast is so dang slow now, and it seems like it's going to crash at any second.
I was blaming the poor craftsmanship of Dell.
Now I think the real villain is my walls.
Or the Chinese.
Or our builder.

Our brand new video camera that we just bought at Christmas.
Also dead.
We were just starting to use it more often and getting really great videos of Em.
I guess that means they also owe us all those lost memories.

Except all these electronics died in vain because if we wanted to get our house fixed, we had to sign a form releasing our builder from the responsibility of paying for these items. But really, what choice did we have? We could join one of the lawsuits...and do what in the meantime? Just let our house sit and maybe someday get fixed? Maybe someday get paid for it, maybe not? There just wasn't a whole lot of options for a family with two small children.

Today when I saw our builder advertising signs for a "secret sale" I contemplated standing next to the guy with my own sign saying that the secret was that their houses were constructed with Chinese drywall. But I didn't. Today at least. But I'm definitely keeping my options open...