Well, the secret is out and the Seed is now four months into its journey towards real-babyhood. Leah is eating two to three lunches per day and falling asleep around 9:30, and the nesting instinct is coming on strong. We have decided to forgo the typical "Let's paint and decorate everything with bunnies!" impulse by going straight to a hunt for a new house.

House hunting is probably sort of like regular hunting: tons of wasted time followed by short bursts of furious activity and stress. Last weekend we saw 15 houses in a variety of towns, some of which we will never be able to afford houses in. From what we can tell, the house search goes like this:
- Find realtor and describe desired house and spending limit.
- See house that meets spending limit. Step over dead body in hallway, remark on noise from overhead flight path. (An aside: The realtor said, "Wow - look at this cute house in Bedford. And it's in your price range! Let's go see it!" Leah re-read the listing. "What's 'avigatin eaemet'," said Leah. The realtor looked again. "That's supposed to say, 'aviation easement,'"she said.)
- Realtor says, "So, you guys are more into...well, you don't want a big project, right?"
- See houses just outside of price range. Walk through 7-11 parking lot to get to front door. "This is good, because 7-11 plows this for you in the winter," says realtor.
- See four more houses, some with water damage, some with highways for back yards, some with collapsing basement walls.
- Pass point of exhaustion (house seven of the day). See more clunkers.
- See great house. Stand on porch while realtor calls listing broker to get you inside. Have phrase "under agreement" defined for you.
- See second great house. Attempt to do monthly payment calculations in head on house $40,000 out of expanded, revised price range.
- Go home, rev up for next weekend.

We have learned that we still don't like ranch houses, that a garrison Colonial is really nothing like a Colonial, and that every house that isn't a Tudor or a Richard Neutra original is called a Cape around here. We have also learned that it is not considered impolite to leave an open house immediately if there is a great view of a cemetery from the living room or if the entire upstairs is finished with reddish linoleum in place of, say, drywall. (Luckily, these features were both confined to one awful, awful house.)

Currently, we have somewhere between two and four realtors working on this project, if you count the guy who we broke up with after he spent two entire open houses smoking in the back yard while all the other couples got cozy with their brokers and talked about the virtues of natural gas over oil heat. Both of them have a clear advantage over jet fuel.