It’s so hard to make any plans when you’re infertile. Partly because infertility alone is something you never planned and you can’t know how it will be resolved. And partly because one of the lessons of infertility is that we don’t have as much control over our lives as we might think or desire. So what’s the use in planning anyway?

So, it’s been a while since my last update. We checked out apartments, but we just couldn’t see ourselves going from a house to an apartment again. The dogs like having a yard, and we like that they have a yard. We started looking for a house we could rent. No luck on that front. At least not yet. We’ve gone out a few times to drive around the various neighborhoods near downtown. The Heights gets a lot of hype, but I’m not sure I get the appeal. I mean, you still can’t really walk anywhere, and Houston’s public transit system is lousy, so it’s not like when we lived in Arlington, VA, and only had to pull the car out of the garage once or twice a week.

I loved one little part of town; it’s called Montrose. It’s eclectic and really cute, and it actually seems pretty walkable; there are restaurants and coffee/tea houses dotted throughout, a couple of nice parks, and the zoned elementary school is actually a magnet Montessori school. Montrose is also slightly less expensive than the Heights, though I don’t really understand why.

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As an aside: We’ve learned some interesting things about Houston Independent School District, though we have more to learn if we end up moving into downtown and having children. But the key takeaway so far is that HISD has a really robust magnet program that includes the aforementioned Montessori elementary school, an elementary school with a dual language program, an elementary school that is 100 percent gifted students, middle schools with various magnets for gifted programs and arts and other things, a high school that is specifically geared for kids who want to go into a medical profession, a high school that offers an international baccalaureate (not yet clear on what that is), a fine arts high school, and a number of other things depending on what a child might be interested in. I’m really kind of fascinated by all these programs and curious about how they work, but it explains a bit about how housing prices can be super high in areas zoned to mediocre to poor elementary schools. Where you’re zoned seems to have little effect on where your children actually attend classes.

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Really, we’ve been going back and forth. We keep checking out the Houston real estate website (har.com), to see what houses are available. We’ve talked about buying a little bungalow–similar in size to what we would have expected to live in if we’d stayed in DC, though the DC houses all had basements at least. These houses are about 1000 sq. ft. less than what we currently have–but I guess we have more space than we really need for two. Most were built between 1920 and 1940 and have been remodeled inside. They are on decent sized lots that a developer would stick two townhouses on if it were sold for lot value. If we bought one of these bungalows, then, maybe in a few years, when we can afford it, we could add on to the house or even tear it down and build new. Which would mean that we could wait until we had a better understanding of our future financial situation. Part of the issue is that we don’t know how much DH is likely to be earning in the near future, especially since it seems his industry is really bonus-oriented.

So, everything is up in the air. We contacted our Realtor to see how much he’d have us sell our house for if we sold it now. And we did go to an open house last weekend in the Heights. But, we’re hesitating. Maybe we will wait and try to sell our house next summer, after we’ve had some time to adjust to DH’s new schedule, and after we’ve had a chance to see if infertility treatments work for us or not.

Then again, maybe we’ll go look at some houses tomorrow when DH gets off his last night shift and decide we don’t want to wait.

I just wish we could decide and stick with it. Also, I wish the houses where we are looking weren’t so expensive. Or that we had the capital to buy a lot and just sit on it until we could afford to build. But that is definitely not to be.

But what if it’s just greener grass because it’s not what we have now? A temporary antidote to general dissatisfaction?

And why does it have to be so difficult to make any plans?

In the two-weeks since I last wrote, something unexpected happened. I’ll post on that next, as this is already long enough.